Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The New Yorker has a long, intermittently informative profile of the probably-soon-to-be-new owner of the Tribune Company. (Unfortunately, the subhed, “Where will Sam Zell take the Tribune Company?” isn’t really answered, except for the suggestion that David Geffen might buy the Los Angeles Times.) Much of it will be familiar to anyone who’s been following his story, but some of the details of the sale are fascinating....

Salegy, a pop style indigenous to Madagascar, is driven by a brisk 6/8 rhythm rooted in folk forms dating back to the 15th century. In the 60s the music was electrified and transformed into a hyperkinetic instrumental dance music; not until the 70s did it become a vocal idiom. Among the first to put words to its rippling flow was singer-bandleader Eusebe Jaojoby. His new release, Malagasy (World Village), makes it clear why he’s dominated the genre ever since....

Now 77, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz is one of the last living links to the bebop era. He began his career in the 40s as a distinguished acolyte of pianist Lennie Tristano; shortly thereafter he participated in the sessions that produced Miles Davis’s album Birth of the Cool. Since then the Chicago native has led his own groups, honing a lustrous, airy tone and a nonflashy, rhythmically moderate strain of improvisation that’s as rigorous and original as any in jazz history....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Man Says Tight Jeans Caused Aggravated Assault Charge” (USA Today, December): Sean Duvall, arrested for aiming a gun at a police officer in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, said he had a permit for the pistol and would have kept it concealed, as required by law, had it not been impossible to fit it comfortably in his pants. “Men Arrested for Dumping Dirt in a Forest” (Associated Press report filed from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, November): It’s illegal to unload anything on federal land, even what the alleged perpetrators described as “perfectly good dirt” removed from a garage (prior to pouring a new concrete floor) and spread under a fir tree in Coeur d’Alene National Forest....

The emotional intensity of Richard Strauss’s one-act opera, based on Oscar Wilde’s play about the increasingly deranged stepdaughter of Herod, never lets up, and dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt, doing her first fully staged performance as Salome, is incredible. Her acting is wonderful, and her sound is magnificent–gorgeous whether loud or soft and always above the orchestra. She’s absolutely riveting in the disturbing final scene, as she kisses and sings to the severed head of John the Baptist, here called Jochanaan....

The title of next week’s Northwestern University conference on black science fiction, “The Politics of the Paraliterary,” may say something about SF’s dubious rep in academe. Para? As in “paramilitary” or “paranormal?” It’s taken from the title for Samuel R. Delany’s 2000 collection of literary criticism, but his work has never really needed any qualifier. The 62-year-old Harlem-born novelist, essayist, and current English professor at SUNY Buffalo–himself qualified too often as the gay black SF writer–has for decades kept the genre honest with his probing presence....

“Did you ever notice that when people call you ‘exotic,’ they look at you like you’re some kind of experiment?” asks poet-performer Robert Karimi during a rare aside in this brisk hour-long autobiographical monologue based on the notion that personality is created through sampling and blending. Karimi’s candor in discussing his own Iranian-Guatemalan heritage is refreshing, but his easygoing manner belies a lingering discomfort. DJs D Double and Franco de Leon spin records and stand guard while Karimi recounts daily beatings at school during the Iran hostage crisis and his discovery of rap music–a lifeline–at the onset of puberty....

Last Saturday at Lula Cafe in Logan Square, Tim Herwig slipped his feet out of his new Gore-Tex cross trainers and peeled off two layers of socks. He did this under the table, discreetly. “I know it’s really bad,” he said, glancing around sheepishly as he rested his bare feet atop his shoes. But he had walked nine miles that morning, and his feet needed some air. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

You’d have to go back to Bernie Epton’s 1983 mayoral campaign to find a more graceless exit from a local political race than the stunt Tony Peraica pulled in the wee hours of Wednesday, November 8. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For several months Peraica and his backers had been predicting victory owing to support from liberals and independents (so-called Claypool Democrats) outraged at the way party bosses maneuvered Stroger onto the ballot....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not long ago a woman named Valerie Weihman-Rock wandered into the Blanchardville co-op where Linda volunteers on Wednesdays, looking to give away a surplus of green beans she’d grown. Linda immediately volunteered the mulefoots to take care of them, and the two women got talking. Valerie, an artist and welding instructor, and her husband Mike, a metal- and woodworker, live on 151 acres about ten miles south of Blanchardville in Argyle....

Michael Miner [Hot Type, June 24] quotes some details about the alleged abuses at Guantanamo and imagines that he’s proven that Dick Durbin’s comparison of the U.S. forces to Nazis, the gulag, Pol Pot, Khan Noonien Singh, etc is dead-on. In fact, all he’s proven is that he’s as big a historical ignoramus as our esteemed senator, unless he thinks that at Auschwitz or in the gulag they issued Talmuds to all the Jewish prisoners and the gestapo and OGPU routinely investigated and disciplined camp guards who didn’t respect their prisoners’ basic human rights....

The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy Special Extended DVD Edition My real problem with these scenes isn’t with Peter Jackson; it’s with J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the things that comes through most clearly from the extended version (along with its six extra discs of making-of hype and its, I swear, 46 full hours of audio commentary) is the fanatical reverence with which Jackson and his production team regarded their source....

Our selection initially gave Argelia Chavez pause–she’s into “tailored, clean lines” and most of our clothes were outside her comfort zone. But the 29-year-old fourth-grade teacher decided it was “good to challenge myself” and ended up putting together an ensemble she was surprisingly happy with: Abigail Glaum-Lathbury’s cropped linen pants with a pocket lining in a contrasting color, a pair of brown leather riding boots by Kathryn Kerrigan, and a gray faux-fur jacket with leather cuffs by Agga B over her own gray turtleneck from Old Navy....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jonathan Rosenbaum should be admired for his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema; it’s a shame that his critical perceptions and judgment(s) are frequently myopic, crabbed, and inept, not to mention torturously overwritten (even his minireviews sound tedious and long-winded). To wit, his review of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers [“Dream On,” February 20], which is not a movie review, but rather a bitter recrimination of those in Paris who got more action than he did in spring of ’68, which I would guess would be the vast majority of people, from the way it sounds....

The liquor stock at Delilah’s, a dark punk and country bar on North Lincoln Avenue, can make you think you’re seeing triple. Not only is there no room for more bottles behind the bar, there’s barely space for the bottles that are already there. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Miller’s been mulling this idea since Delilah’s tenth anniversary in 2003, which he celebrated by bottling and selling shots from a single barrel of decade-old wheat bourbon he’d sampled in Kentucky....

Moxie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are probably a lot of reasons for Chicago’s current small-plate craze, but as anyone who’s ever ordered off the appetizer menu can tell you, a lot of little portions often just make for a more interesting meal. Plus, if you don’t like what you’ve ordered you’re not stuck chewing through $25 of it. Prior to a recent renovation, MOXIE was already producing well-regarded small-plate fare; the place was low-key yet polished and upscale without being expensive, an oasis on a Wrigleyville strip dominated by burgers, fries, and tap beer....

thursday25 sunday28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » German free-jazz reedist Peter BrOtzmann, also a visual artist associated with the Fluxus movement, kicks off his latest stint in Chicago with an opening reception for an exhibit of his artwork. Paintings & Objects, which includes old and new pieces, will be up through the end of November; Brotzmann will return to the gallery tomorrow at 2 PM for a solo performance....

Missy Elliott “Me without Tim is like Jamaicans with no curry,” she rapped in 2002, and the two seemed so well matched that it was almost impossible to imagine them apart. Merging futurist beats that sounded like P-Funk as interpreted by Kraftwerk with a global vision of pop music broad enough to encompass bhangra and bluegrass, Timbaland redefined the rap landscape in the late 90s. He pioneered the age of the superstar hip-hop producer, helping to create a class of sonic architects who often seem more important than the rappers they work with....

Lead Story Cultural Diversity Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a Reuters dispatch from Nigeria–where graft continues to be a way of life despite a government campaign to fight it–an official of the national soccer association told a seminar audience in March that referees should feel free to accept bribes as long as they don’t actually favor anyone while officiating the match....

In Trista Baldwin’s Red Riding Hood-derived erotic allegory, Patty and her friend Becky grapple with their awakening sexuality while processing a peer’s murder in the woods. Baldwin’s snappy teen vernacular and winding poetic images allow Blackbird Productions’ expert cast–Lois Mathilda Atkins, Salena Hanrahan, and Wil Fleming as various manifestations of the wolf–to express the allure and danger of losing one’s innocence. In short, the wolf is everywhere–in Mormon stepfathers, in leering biology teachers, in first loves–and sometimes he’s welcome (suck on that, Brothers Grimm)....