Sean Carroll HH: OK so far. Entropy is a synonym for disorder. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SC: Left to their own devices, things tend to evolve toward increasing disorder. If you shuffle a deck of cards it’s very unlikely that they will end up precisely in numerical order. That’s just because there are many more ways to be disordered than to be ordered....

When Jesse Jackson Jr. brought his campaign against Mayor Daley to the far northwest side, Frank Coconate stood beside him. Speaking to a cheering crowd of almost 200 in a VFW hall at Canfield and Higgins in Park Ridge, the congressman did what he’s been doing for the last several weeks–he ripped into corruption at City Hall and lambasted the heavy-handed tactics used against city workers who dare to speak up....

Victory at Sea has been around for almost 12 years now, and the trio’s music is starting to grow up. While their earlier efforts sometimes seemed a little rushed and anemic, their fifth album, All Your Things Are Gone (Gern Blandsten), is sturdy and patient. As always, front woman Mona Elliot is the centerpiece. A scene fixture in the band’s hometown of Boston–she was also the singer for noise rockers Spore–Elliot can let loose like the banshee queen of the psych ward, then retreat into a prickly, smoky moan, like a less refined PJ Harvey....

Made at Fox on the heels of The Girl Can’t Help It, this inventive 1957 comedy by Frank Tashlin is his most avant-garde and probably his most political–and therefore one of his most misunderstood. Tashlin adapted a Broadway play by George Axelrod, discarding almost everything but the title, the advertising milieu, and actress Jayne Mansfield. Shot in glorious color and CinemaScope, the film stars Tony Randall as a Madison Avenue executive who recruits Mansfield to endorse his product, and it presents a thoughtful and multifaceted polemic against the success ethic (a key line: “Success will fit you like a shroud”)....

If you were in a supermarket checkout line this week you might have noticed that TV Guide features four separate covers of the Beatles in honor of their performance at Shea Stadium 40 years ago. I was born in the 60s and grew up with the Beatles, but if I see one more anniversary tribute to them with one more batch of never-before-seen photos I may puke. We have a new war and a new Nixon to deal with, and if the 60s counterculture taught us anything, it was the value of living in the here and now....

Pastoral Artisan Cheese, Bread & Wine 2945 N. Broadway 773-472-4781 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A picnic calamity of his own was the inspiration for Pastoral, which he co-owns with his life partner, Ken Miller. Two summers ago some of O’Neill’s friends enlisted him to put together a last-minute picnic for a trip to Ravinia. O’Neill, who lives in Lakeview, found himself scrambling around trying to cobble together a decent meal, finally giving up and grabbing a mishmash from the deli case of his local grocery store....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one disagreed. Before the week was out, congressmen Jesse Jackson Jr. and Luis Gutierrez had announced the end of their exploratory campaigns for mayor. While both cited the Democratic takeover in Congress as the reason they couldn’t leave their current jobs, observers widely assumed they had noted Stroger’s 69 percent victory in Chicago and decided they couldn’t come close to beating Daley come February....

This week the Film Center will screen all three parts of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, derived from the novels of Bibhutibhusan Banerjee. This second installment (1956), fully comprehensible on its own terms, suffers at times from its episodic plot, which follows Apu from the age of ten in the holy city of Benares (now Varanasi) to his early adulthood in Calcutta. But it’s my favorite of the three, and the reported favorite of Ray’s fellow Bengali directors Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are lots of reasons Stroger is characterized this way, including the fact that some of it is true. But when election season comes around, precision matters less than perception and polling numbers. As a result, 2008 is looking like the Year of the Anti-Toddler. It makes some sense that Tony Peraica would make a big deal out of his opposition to Stroger’s management and tax proposals....

I’ve been going out for years and sometimes you just want to do something different. My friend Jose likes to go to fish fries, and this one was the closest to his house. He asked me to go along. We walked in and there were all these old people eating fish in this huge banquet-hall-size room. They had a limited menu with seven or eight different kinds of fish–halibut and trout were two of them....

PEARLS AND BRASS make me think of a line from Leonard Cohen: “And we read from pleasant Bibles that are bound in blood and skin / That the wilderness is gathering all its children back again.” The Nazareth (Pennsylvania, that is) trio takes that splendid heresy and captures the kind of noise and feeling it evokes: imagine the Ents destroying Isengard with Cream playing on the sound track. Their second album, The Indian Tower (Drag City), is a step forward in crispness and clarity from their self-titled bronto-blues debut, yet it’s by far the hairier, freakier record, with its riffs coiled around eerie heathen tales of rebellion and mystic visions of doom....

Dear Liz Armstrong, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The only thing less fun than reading about a party is reading about a party that you’ve missed, and the only thing worse than that is reading about a party that you’ve made a concerted effort to avoid. In almost every column I’ve read, the last has been the case. I just don’t see the point....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Rise (2005) she experimented with electronic music and studio postproduction, and even did some genre-hopping, like adding a flourish of flamenco. It was a technically solid outing, but it wasn’t particularly interesting. Still, I had hope that someone who clearly had one foot in the fundamentals of Indian classical and the other in contemporary electronic sounds—she’d alreadyworked with the Indian duo Midival Punditz—might be able to find an interesting middle ground between the two....

Quirks, kitsch, tics, and tears combine in Julia Jordan’s comedy, now receiving its midwest premiere under Rick Snyder’s direction. The play revolves around three squabbling Irish-American siblings in rural Minnesota awaiting their mother’s death. But Jordan doesn’t so much create characters as indicate dialects–the Cummins clan speaks in a patois that’s equal parts Lucky Charms Irish and Fargo, and a Brooklyn-born Italian Jew who’s in love with eldest sister Rose could be an extra from The Sopranos....

In 1996 Sam Shepard rewrote his 1972 rock ‘n’ roll/cowboy/gangster/sci-fi fantasy The Tooth of Crime, stripping down the turgid, hallucinogenic battle between superstar blues rocker Hoss and upstart “Gypsy Killer” Crow, whose desperately sought-after hits may be pop songs, murders, or both. He also got T-Bone Burnett to rescore it. But this leaner, meaner fable about fame, identity, and spiritual decay is fat and flaccid under Nic Diamond’s inattentive direction. As Hoss and Crow, Carmine Grisolia and John Henry Roberts fidget, pace, and bellow as they try to achieve a rock-star swagger, and by the end of two and half hours their elliptical, lingo-heavy dialogue has degenerated into incomprehensibility....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the presence of Tadahito Iguchi on the visiting Philadelphia Phillies at Wrigley Field this week reminded Chicago fans that not everyone was so content, still the White Sox surprised with how little they actually did to break up and rebuild the 2005 World Championship team. Only weeks ago Mark Buehrle seemingly had his ticket stamped out of town, with Jermaine Dye and Jose Contreras soon to follow....

Though this romance about the dangers of romance–a comedy of manners revolving around a love quadrangle–includes meditations on class and hypocrisy, it’s as fluffy as George Bernard Shaw gets. Here war is a sort of game played by cretins–like dueling, or love. This production is powered by Timothy Edward Kane’s nuanced performance as Bluntschli, the soldier with a heart of chocolate cream who doesn’t believe in war. Performing with equal parts irony and genuine emotion, then adding a dollop of drollery for good measure, Kane sets the show’s pace and tone....

This festival of work by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 5, through Wednesday, August 31, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Following is the schedule for August 5 through 11; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zalika Souley, Niger’s first female movie star, is the focus of this 2004 documentary, a study of the rise and decline of the West African nation’s independent cinema....

The 24th Chicago International Children’s Film Festival ranges from collections of short films suitable for preschoolers (like the Swedish animation Aston’s Stones, screening as part of “Play Date”) to dramatic features for school-age kids. Among the latter are The Three Robbers, an animation about a trio of highwaymen adopted by an orphan girl (Sat 10/20, 10:30 AM, Davis); Crusade: March Through Time, a live-action drama in which a teenager time-travels back to the Middle Ages and gets sucked into the Children’s Crusade to free Jerusalem from the forces of Islam (Sat 10/20, 11:30 AM, Davis); Desmond and the Swamp Barbarian Tramp, an animation about forest animals who construct a trap for the monster who’s stealing their stuff (Sun 10/21, 10 AM, Davis); and Moondance Alexander, a live-action drama about a girl whose lonely life in a small town brightens after she finds a pinto horse (Sun 10/21, 11:30 AM, Davis)....

If you happened to be outside City Hall on the morning of May 27, you probably didn’t look twice at the two yellow-vested guys installing a new advertisement in the JC Decaux bus shelter at Randolph and LaSalle. Not many people did, including the cops who pulled up and idled nearby. But the poster the workers slid swiftly into place didn’t tout the merits of Verizon, Altoids, or the iPod. “Are Tourists More Important Than the Poor?...