There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 4/4: Tuesday Funk, the monthly reading series at Hopleaf (5148 N. Clark), features eclectic works by local writers. April’s lineup includes Felix Jung, Tracy Harford-Porter, Melissa Wiley, Kellye Howard, and Nestor Gomez. 7:30 PM Thu 4/6: Centennial Brooks, a weekend-long tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, kicks off at the DuSable Museum of African American History (740 E. 56th) with readings by poets Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, and Angela Jackson plus a reception featuring Brooks’s daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Media City officials say they’re mobilizing more cleanup crews as well as hiking fines to fight graffiti. Aldermen are poised to sign off Wednesday on a mayoral proposal that would increase the fines for those convicted of illegal graffiti—even though one of the measure’s chief sponsors says that such fines are rarely collected. But it’s not clear that the current law is being enforced. Alderman Michael Zalewski (23rd Ward), who’s cosponsoring the ordinance, said fines are so rarely collected that the notion of generating money from enforcement is “fictional....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

jasonknade.com Runner-Up Joe Swanberg

Chapel Hill-born food trucker Joe Scroggs changed the fried chicken game currently being waged across the city when he quietly moved into a Lakeview storefront earlier this year and began frying to order three varieties: herbal, spicy, and Nashville-style hot chicken. It’s the last that has Scroggs sitting squarely on top; thoroughly saturated with a Vulcan glow, it has a powerful heat mitigated by a lingering sweetness. The Roost doesn’t use lard in its spice paste, opting instead for olive oil, cayenne pepper, Louisiana hot sauce, and just a bit of sugar, applied after frying....

Alice’s Lounge 3556 W. Belmont

In 2007 a group of aldermen began talking about banning plastic bags, saying they were tired of getting nagged about bags flapping in trees and clogging sewer drains—not to mention ending up in the lake. Then Mayor Daley and retailers told them they were going to put stores out of business. Nobody likes being known as a jobs killer, so aldermen passed a weak law requiring that big stores offer bag recycling....

Jordan Freese’s documentary pays loving tribute to Chicagoans who pursue their artistic ambitions while holding down day jobs. Perceptive and humane, it inspires sympathy for the subjects (a musician who rehabs houses, a martial arts instructor who teaches high school math, a burlesque dancer who works as a secretary in the financial district, a painter who teaches night-school drawing classes) without resorting to sentimentality. The dominant tone is bittersweet, the theme of creative fulfillment offset by frank discussions of loneliness and disappointment....

I’m not an especially fervent advocate of blues harmonica, but I do love the greats—both the Sonny Boy Williamsons, Big Walter Horton, much of Charlie Musselwhite‘s innovative output. But for me no one compares to Little Walter (aka Louisiana native Marion Walter Jacobs), who arrived in Chicago as a teenager in 1945 and quickly immersed himself in the city’s bustling scene, helping to establish the sound of urban blues that would soon become one of the most important influences on rock ‘n’ roll....

There are plenty of show, films, and concerts playing in Chicago this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Thu 10/11: Caroline, or Change: The story of a black housekeeper for a white family in 1963 Louisiana, Caroline, or Change, “revels in tension, juxtaposing racial inequality with domestic unhappiness,” writes the Reader‘s Irene Hsiao. 7:30 PM, the Den Theater, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave, $45.

Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi must be one of the smartest people ever to make movies. A child prodigy, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a PhD in physics by the time he was in his mid-20s. While in school he also found time to teach himself filmmaking and produced more than a dozen shorts, several of which won prizes at amateur film festivals; on the strength of their success he was accepted into the world-renowned Lodz Film Academy, where he earned his third degree, in directing....

Charalambides: Tom and Christina Carter (Drawing Room) is the first album of new music in seven years by the Texas-based duo, and, like its title suggests, one of their most elemental. The Carters first played music under that name in 1991, and since then they’ve covered a lot of musical territory, including densely arranged psychedelic epics, straightforward folk songs, freely improvised feedback duels, and austere, wordless chorales. The new album, like its predecessor, Exile (Kranky), is a double LP, but the two releases couldn’t be more different....

In “Looking at the Present: Recent Works by Jim Dine,” at Richard Gray Gallery‘s newly opened warehouse space in West Town, Jim Dine presents a series of figurative paintings made within the last two years. Earlier in his career, Dine was famous for his depictions of objects such as robes, tools, and especially hearts, but before “Looking at the Present” he’d spent several years working in a purely abstract style. The more recent pieces present a subtle return to the body, undefined figures and faces ground into the surface with power tools and a thick application of sand-mixed acrylic and oil paint....

Mike Sula Nashville hot, the Roost Lately, amid the ongoing fried chicken wars, a special caliber of ordnance has been deployed by some of the newer combatants. I’m talking about Nashville hot chicken, a nuclear option if it’s prepared right. Its creator and best-known purveyor is Nashville’s Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, its recipe allegedly born when owner Andre Prince’s great-uncle Thornton’s jealous girlfriend exacted vengeance for his philandering by preparing him fried chicken dredged in a lethal hot-pepper paste....

Brian O’Mahoney/for Sun-Times Media Pipkins, in a game last month against Huntley in an Elgin tournament. The Bogan junior “has the heart of a lion,” his coach says. It looked like Luwane Pipkins and his Bogan teammates were in for a long evening Friday in the gym at Harlan, at 96th and Michigan. The Bogan Bengals, one of the city’s top high school basketball teams this season, rely on Pipkins, a skinny 17-year-old guard with a deadly outside jumper....

Before Gabe Klein resigned his position as commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation last November to reenter the private sector, he spent two and a half years overseeing a handful of projects that have nudged this city away from automobile centrism and toward a more progressive, inclusive transportation plan. The cycling enthusiast and former Washington, D.C., transportation chief helped bring to Chicago the bike-share program Divvy (which led to some claims that his past consulting work for the company behind Chicago’s program, Alta Bicycle Share, corrupted the bidding process), about 50 miles of protected bike lanes, on-street bike parking “corrals,” pedestrian plazas and “people spots,” and the first phase of Bloomingdale Trail construction....

Empty Bottle Presents 1035 N. Western Runner-Up Kristen Kaza

At the end of “Crown,” on G Herbo’s debut album, Humble Beast, the Chicago rap star ad-libs an anecdote about walking home from school one day as a child and becoming starstruck at the sight of Terrance Boykin, aka Bump J. In the 2000s, few local rappers cast as big a shadow as Bump, leading hip-hop mogul Lyor Cohen to track him down and offer him a $1 million deal with Atlantic....

Into Sixes I’ve covered Connections—the Columbus, Ohio, lo-fi five-piece—a bunch of times in the past and will likely never stop because I love them so damn much. The band’s third LP, Into Sixes, is on its way in August, and a couple of days ago they offered up a preview of it with today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Beat the Sky.” As expected, it’s a summery, incredibly catchy blast of indie pop that heavily channels their Ohio brethren Guided by Voices and drums up some serious replay factor....