For the past year or so 35th Ward alderman Vilma Colom and her challenger, Rey Colon, have been eyeing each other with unmasked contempt, and now Colon wants everyone to know that their race has implications that go way beyond personal dislike. “This campaign is very deep,” he says. “It’s about the future of independent politics all over the northwest side.” Gutierrez let it be known that he would support Colom so long as Mell and his organization didn’t work against any of Gutierrez’s allies....

Rock, Pop, Etc. DOC BAND Fri 5/16, 8 PM, Breadline Theatre, 1802 W. Bernice. 773-327-6096. MIKI GREENBERG’S SONGS OF TENDERNESS & LOVE with guest vocalists Amy Warren, Ned O’Reilly, Elizabeth Breen, Beau O’Reilly, Liam Kimball, Kate O’Reilly & others; on the same program, Jeff Dorchen’s play Life and Times of Jewboy Cain and films by Tom Palazzolo. Sat 5/24, 7:30 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. 773-728-6000....

Rock, Pop, etc. RALPH COVERT & FRIENDS Free admission. Fri 1/3, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. CHRIS KEFER Free concert. Thu 1/9, noon, Chicago Music Mart, DePaul Center, 333 S. State. 312-362-6700. JIM PETERIK performs and leads a workshop entitled “Songwriting for Dummies.” Sat 1/11, 2 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park. 708-386-6927. WITCHES, MASCOTS, EJERCITO SIN SON Fri 1/3, 7 PM, Autonomous Zone, 2129 N....

The kid Sinatra was back home in Chicago. Dakota Horvath has been doing Frank since he was five years old. Now 14 and a veteran of gigs in Vegas and Miami and at Brad Pitt’s wedding, he was preparing to take the stage at last month’s Heart of Italy Food and Wine Street Festival, at 24th and Oakley. “He just got signed to a record label, and he’ll be going to New York in about two weeks,” Lawrence said while Dakota got dressed....

Not long after the first frost, the Mexican food carts that sell spiced mangoes and agua fresca through the summer switch to tall stockpots of champurrado and steamed tamales for winter. Champurrado, a warm, rib-sticking drink made from chocolate, milk, cinnamon, and masa (a form of cornmeal), is usually sipped at breakfast and frequently paired with sweet Mexican bread or tamales. It doesn’t have the peppy, caffeinated kick of cafe con leche or cappuccino; the effect is more like being wrapped in a soft woolen blanket, which is why many carts selling the drink cluster near el stations to lure commuters before a chilly wait on the platform: the thick, sweet beverage is the liquid version of an extra ten minutes in bed....

BILL CHARLAP TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been a while since Blue Note Records has hyped a new signing as heavily as Bill Charlap–a consummately tasteful pianist who’s worked in Phil Woods’s quintet since 1995, where his colorful chords mediate between the horns and the rhythm section and his solos display a fine mixture of fire and control. As part of its promo campaign in advance of Charlap’s 2000 release Written in the Stars–his debut for Blue Note and fifth disc as a leader–the label distributed a big press kit anchored by a glowing profile from Whitney Balliett, which had originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1999....

Tap dancing often seems intrinsically retrospective, concerned with re-creating the long vanished (and largely unmourned) era of minstrelsy. Plus the form makes dance a competitive sport, a war between athleticism and elegance. For those like Fred Astaire, feet are the hardworking but discreet servants of the patrician body, while for others the feet seem to call the shots, directing the body’s motions as thoroughly as the Red Shoes. Both approaches are enjoyable, but either can pall....

Beyond the Easel This large, wide-ranging exhibit showcases decorative painting on screens, in friezes, and on wall, door, and ceiling panels–created primarily for private patrons. (And painting murals for residences certainly beats many current artists’ aesthetic exile in temp work.) Called the Nabis after a Hebrew word for prophet, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker Xavier Roussel painted work that ranged from bright, rough-textured pieces (prefiguring the shocking color disjunctions of the fauves) to pieces in the impressionist style to flat, bright art nouveau-style illustration....

Waking Life I must have come across this statement by Epstein, a French theorist and filmmaker (1897-1953), in the late 60s or early 70s, but I no longer remember where. I’ve scanned his writings on several occasions since, but I haven’t found the quote. Sometimes I wonder if I read or heard about it in a dream–making it one of the unrealities Epstein is referring to. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

ORSON WELLES: In the original script [of Citizen Kane] we had a scene based on a notorious thing Hearst had done, which I still cannot repeat for publication. And I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film and wasn’t in keeping with Kane’s character. If I’d kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn’t have dared admit it was him. Bogdanovich may see Welles as the inspiration for his film, but I have no idea where Peros got his facts....

For the past 17 years Dutch installation artist Mark Manders has built an intriguing body of work about blocked messages and emotion. His current project, “Isolated Rooms,” which continues the themes of an ongoing project called “Self-Portrait as a Building,” consists of 14 wryly austere pieces–8 at the Art Institute and 6 at the Renaissance Society–that use such sculpted objects as miniature smokestacks, leafless trees, eviscerated human torsos, and stuffed rats....

South In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton, veteran of two previous expeditions to the Antarctic, set out on a third–an ill-fated trip that would become a famous exemplar of heroism. Amundsen had reached the south pole in 1911, so Shackleton undertook “the first crossing of the Antarctic continent, from sea to sea via the Pole,” as he wrote in his prospectus for the trip. He left Britain on the Endurance, a ship “especially constructed for Polar work,” which was supposed to bring him to the continent’s coast; another ship was to meet his party on the other side....

A few weeks ago John Mattison was snapping photos on an el platform when a train conductor told him to stop. “The conductor told me it’s illegal to take pictures on CTA property,” says Mattison, a 31-year-old north-side resident. “I didn’t know that. I bet a lot of people don’t know that. I’m sure it’s going to be a big surprise to a lot of tourists. This is one of those incredibly ridiculous rules that exist for no good reason....

“Hot in Herre” is easily the most ubiquitous single of 2002, and it’s also arguably the best. Riding a liquid, deceptively simple Neptunes groove–the only remotely subtle thing about the song–Nelly’s hymn to dancing as foreplay is studded with such shamelessly salacious lines (“I got a friend with a pole in the basement”) that resistance is futile. I held out until I heard Belgian mashup bootleg masters 2 Many DJs glide into it from a Beastie Boys track; the packed dance floor I was on erupted, and I was the song’s bitch from that point on....

These days Americans tend to assume we invented the concept of “indie rock” in the 1980s, but the British arguably got there first: in the early and mid-70s Virgin was a hippie enterprise devoted to the freakiest of space rock, and as early as 1976 Stiff Records was cranking out unabashed neotrad pub rock alongside the latest in punk. Producer-singer-songwriter Nick Lowe cofounded Stiff, and he’s still in the trenches today–his latest, The Convincer, was released by the North Carolina-based indie Yep Roc....

On February 13, 2004, bassist Chris Saathoff and his bandmates in Chin Up Chin Up went to the Empty Bottle to see the Ponys and We Ragazzi. They were in the mood to celebrate: they’d just finished mixing a batch of demos with engineer Jeremy Lemos at Semaphore Recording, and it looked like they were finally ready to record a full-length follow-up to the EP they’d put out a year before....

From the music-box melodies of Aphex Twin to the dewy-eyed romanticism of laptopper Jake Mandell, armchair techno has often skirted the edge of twee. But Dirk Dresselhaus, aka Schneider TM, dives right in. The Berlin producer’s 2000 collaboration with KPT.michi.gan, the Binokular EP, featured “The Light 3000,” a remake of the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” arranged for cheap-sounding, ping-ponging electropercussion, laptop crackles, and Vocoder. The track flirts with cheek, but its synthetic sheen actually fits the melancholy lyrics–you could call it emotronica....

On election night reporters breathlessly relayed the astonishing news coming out of Logan Square: in the age of Daley, when the mayor’s aldermanic troops seemed unbeatable, Rey Colon, an independent, had managed to win. “If you’re a reporter who just shows up for election night, yes, you might be amazed,” says Kevin Lamm, a volunteer precinct coordinator for Colon’s campaign. “But we weren’t as surprised–we’d been working on this for eight years....

Already I can see him, David Wells, pitching for the White Sox. I can see that wide-bodied left-handed delivery, in which he seems to pour himself down the mound the way syrup pours over pancakes. And then the walk back to the dugout after he’s dismissed the other side’s batters, his shirttail loose but not entirely untucked, in the manner of a bowling uniform rather than a Hawaiian shirt. He pitched awhile for the New York Yankees, making it that much easier to imagine him now in Sox pinstripes, but then it’s never hard at this time of year to fire a baseball fan’s imagination....

JOHN CALE 4/20, NEVIN’S LIVE Until recently John Cale–no doubt the most interesting living alumnus of the Velvet Underground–was never one to live in the past, but personal history has proven fertile ground for him in the last few years. He’s written music for a ballet based on the life of his late collaborator Nico. He’s coauthored a funny and movingly self-lacerating autobiography, What’s Welsh for Zen?, in which we learn, among other things, that Aaron Copland put the moves on Cale when he was a student fresh off the boat and that both Cale and Tony Conrad were employees of La Monte Young’s bustling dope business....