Rich Hein/Sun-Times Media Chicagoans may have been hosed in the parking meter deal, but that doesn’t mean it’s illegal, a panel of appellate judges ruled. A panel of Illinois appellate judges won’t dispute that Chicago’s parking meter deal is a big loser for the city. It was the latest development in a lawsuit brought by attorney Clint Krislov on behalf of the IVI-IPO, a public-interest group. The suit was filed in 2009, just weeks after the city transferred control of the meter system to Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a consortium of investors, for 75 years....

At the risk of sounding like a real carbophobic, sometimes an entire doughnut is just too much . . . I don’t know, sugary dough. I’m probably presenting this premise to the wrong audience, because if the proliferation of doughnut joints is any indication, Chicagoans love a damn doughnut. I’m pretty sure everyone will love Beaver’s Donuts—they’ll just have to love more of them. Beaver’s, a food truck that also has a permanent location inside the Chicago French Market, specializes in fresh, hot, two-bite minidoughnuts coated in a variety of toppings, both regular (powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar, powdered cocoa) or gourmet (chocolate sauce and coconut, etc)....

5247 N. Western 773-334-1589 Runner-Up Cho Sun Ok

Kyle Scanlan kylescanlan.com @kylescanlan Runner-Up Sarah Sherman

What does it mean to “fix” something? If a bond—physical, social, psychological—is broken, can it ever truly be reconnected? If so, how can such a repair be achieved? Internationally acclaimed French-Algerian artist Kader Attia mines historical archives to understand complicated relationships between people: colonizer and colonized, master and slave, residents of the geopolitical north and south. He has pursued these inquiries primarily through the lens of colonial legacies, particularly in Africa, and their influence on European modernism....

With the merger of Ogden and Jenner elementary schools underway, Chicago Public Schools earlier this month removed the well-respected principal of the former from his post of three years. Dr. Michael Beyer, who’s worked for the district since 2003 and has earned accolades as a principal, was accused by the Chicago Board of Education’s inspector general of falsifying attendance records across Ogden’s three K-12 campuses comprising some 1,900 students. Now Beyer is suing the school district claiming he hasn’t been given a fair chance to defend himself....

Dances that offer important history lessons are rare, and these four shows, commissioned by Columbia College as part of its new Afro-Latino dance program, are doubly unique for illuminating a largely untold history. Even today in Latin America, the rich and complex roots of Afro-Latino dance, shaped by the massive influence of colonization and the slave trade on indigenous and traditional Latin American folk dances, remain less than fully acknowledged....

Fri 1/20-Sat 1/21: Take a night to forget about the banal monsters that push to eliminate the NEA, and chatter your teeth at ones with tentacles crafted with paper maché. B-Fest, the 24-hour B-movie marathon at Northwestern’s McCormick Auditorium (1999 Campus, Evanston), includes a midnight screening of Plan 9 From Outer Space and a sing-a-long version of The Wizard of Speed and Time. 6 PM John Cleese talks Monty Python and the Holy Grail on Sun 1/22....

For two years now I’ve been giving the producers of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival a hard time over whether they can legitimately call their curated event a fringe fest. Last week I even offered them an alternate term, “tribal convocation,” which I consider more accurate and even kind of sweet. Will they use it? They have my permission. Like the antibeauty character in Footnotes, Eileen Tull obsesses over body image and failed intimacy....

Foster Beach 5200 N. Lake Shore

Brown Elephant various locations

Weyes Blood Guys, the polar vortex is back. The last time it was here, pretty much every event across town got canceled. Hopefully that doesn’t happen again, because the first half of this week has a handful of excellent shows to catch. Weyes Blood has canceled. Ryley Walker, Circuit des Yeux, Mark Trecka, and Field Auxiliary are all still playing. “In recent years experimental music has produced quite a few hauntingly psychedelic chanteuses who deliver mesmerizing, spooky sounds and charged postfolk vocals that range from rustic crooning to borderline avant-garde caterwauling,” says Peter Margasak....

This story has been updated to include a response from the Chicago Police Department. The IACP did not respond to the Reader’s requests for comment. During the rally Holmes said she was tired of officers “killing our kids.” She said she continues on for her two daughters, but that some days are more difficult than others.

Sicario is the latest film by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners), and it follows an ambitious FBI agent (Emily Blunt) who joins a government security force led by a pair of mysterious operatives (Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro) as they search the borderland for a Mexican drug lord. Villeneuve emerged as a major filmmaker after the release of his 2009 crime thriller Polytechnique, and with each subsequent film, including the Oscar-nominated Incendies (2010) and the paranoid parable Enemy (2013), he’s matured significantly as an artist, crafting tense, self-contained character dramas that deal with themes of identity, revenge, and obsession....

[content-5] Last Friday after work, CTA vice president for service planning Mike Connelly broke the news to the bus advocates with an e-mail notifying them that the #31 service will be kiboshed as of Monday, September 3. “Despite our efforts to provide and promote the service, the anticipated ridership never occurred and no additional financial support was secured,” Connelly said. (The transit agency had reached out to IIT and Mercy Hospital about sponsoring the service, to no avail....

M. Spencer Green/AP Bruce Rauner secured an endorsement from the Sun-Times. When the Tribune published a we-can-barely-contain-our-lack-of-enthusiasm endorsement of Bruce Rauner for governor, I commented that it was now the turn of the Sun-Times to make “the equally feeble argument for the other guy. But then I remembered that the Sun-Times doesn’t do endorsements any longer.” But here’s some other language: Jim Kirk ran the story, but he took McKinney off the election beat for a few days while he looked into the charge of bias....

There’s an arresting dish served at Publican Anker, the latest offshoot of One Off Hospitality’s surging Publican brand, located in the Wicker Park crotch. It’s a Viking cauldron of swampy-looking green broth bobbing with perfectly cooked mussels, clams, and hake chunks, mounted atop a leather trivet. On the occasion I ordered it, it arrived with no bowls, no spoons, and no ladle, and until we wrangled our server, we were forced to contend with it caveman style, since the forks and small plates dealt out to handle almost everything else on the menu were useless....

It’s the season for year-end best-of lists, and one phenomenon that will likely provoke comment in many reviews of 2015’s music is the recent spate of instructional dance tracks. This year’s poster boy for making songs that encourage people to bust very specific moves is Atlanta’s Silento, who’s repackaged a handful of regional dance styles that have emerged in black communities over the past few years for a candy-coated pop-rap number called “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)....

Virtually everything that’s ever been written about post­apocalyptic Greek-American mourning diva Diamanda Galás focuses first and foremost on her voice—and rightly so, given that it’s a once-in-a-­generation instrument that’s only grown darker and wilder since her electrifying 1982 debut, The Litanies of Satan. There’s also a lot to say about her prowess as a composer (no one will ever write better ritualistic song cycles lamenting the AIDS epidemic or the Armenian genocide) and about her powers as an interpreter, by which she disassembles standards and puts them back together again (take for example her two new albums, All the Way and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem)....