Anyhow, at about 7 PM Friday night, I got derailed. I followed a couple New York-based rock critics (who shall remain nameless) to see some second-string Pitchfork faves (who shall also remain nameless), and I saw badness. It threw off my schedule and I sought solace at the Biz 3 showcase. I was an hour early for a set by rap's new savior, the mix-tape king out of Gary, Indiana, Freddie Gibbs.

• Aaron Wooten
• Portrait of Alderman Patrick Levar

Show: The Aldermen Project: 50 Alderman/50 Artists Curators Jeremy Scheuch and Lauri Apple got 50 artists to immortalize an alderman apiece for "The Aldermen Project: 50 Aldermen/50 Artists," including Derek Erdman, Phineas X. Jones, Jon Gitelson, Aaron Wooten and more. [Apple is an assistant editor at the Reader, which is a sponsor of the show.]

Opens Fri 3/19, 7-11 PM. Through 4/2: Sat noon-5 PM and by appointment, Johalla Projects, 1561 N. Milwaukee, 312-636-4966 or 312-833-1108, free

Dinner: Big Star Unlike Paul Kahan's other ventures (Blackbird, Avec, the Publican), Big Star is a bar. But you may have to remind yourself of that, because it's got probably the tastiest Mexican menu of any bar in Chicago.

1531 N. Damen Ave., 773-235-4039

Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month.

This Salon piece about well-educated 20- and 30-somethings buying organic and artisan food from their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program allotment has been making the rounds; One Story Up's Megan Cottrell has more over at change.org. It's been causing consternation in the usual circles, and while it's raised some compelling questions about why the cheap, shitty food that the poor are apparently supposed to confine themselves to is actually cheap (here's a hint), I'd been looking for something brief and resonant to squeeze the matter into a ball, as it were. And fortunately, Reason came through.

One of the very angry commenters on their aggro-libertarian blog mentions how when his daddy was the same age as the U of C grad above ("this pathetic fuck is 31 years old"), he was working the land like a good solid American midwesterner. 640 acres, which is a lot. I was curious where it came from.

Turns out, according to the commenter, the farm was built up over the generations, going back to the 1870s, when... wait for it... it came from one of the federal government's biggest welfare-to-work programs in history, the Homestead Act.

My book larnin' isn't worth much on the free market, but it does sometimes provide a rich sense of historical irony.

• kristak.com
• Indian paillette silk tank by Twelfth St. by Cynthia Vincent, at Krista K

Tonight Urban Style Emporium holds a party celebrating its grand opening with snacks, drinks, and live music. Attendees can also check out the new hat salon inside the shop, Loreta Corsetti Millinery Atelier. The opening festivities run from 6 to 9, RSVP to info@urbanstyleemporium.com.

• Thee Satisfaction

I headed to their show on a tip from fellow critic Ann Powers of the LA Times, who said they were the only folks she was really adamant about checking out during SXSW. Their show was running three hours behind, so I kept walking the three blocks from the Kill Rock Stars showcase back to the Thee Satisfaction show to check if they'd started playing, hoping all the effort would be worth it. If I had known how good they were going to be, I would have been willing to wait in a Porta-Potty the whole time.

• Shirin Mozaffari's "The Story of Ama and Baba"

Rebecca Schoenecker's girlish narration and animated puppets imbue a storybook glow to her liberation fable Sphinx, screening in Creation, Destruction, Chaos, a program Schoenecker curated of animated takes on legends and war stories Saturday 3/20 at High Concept Laboratories.

Featuring Shirin Mozaffari's stop motion creation myth The Story of Ama and Baba, Jeremy Bessoff's flying ace puppet dream Ghost Conversations, Jim Trainor's Peruvian POW tale The Presentation Theme, Jodie Mack's animated photo negative WWII tragedy Lilly, Diane Christiansen's Notes to Nonself, and Matt Marsden's natural history meditation Wormroom. Schoenecker's puppets will be on display.

Trailers after the jump.

Days after his appointment as alderman of the First Ward, Proco “Joe” Moreno, is being billed as the headlining guest at a fund-raiser for the First Ward Democrats' political organization. Hosts of the event include some of the biggest names in local politics, including Cook County Democratic Party chairman Joseph Berrios and alderman Toni Preckwinkle, who ran as a reformer to win the Democratic primary for county board president.

According to Michaud, Lukaba has been looking for space for three or four years and was quick to respond when they learned that the TBC building, which hadn't been listed on the commercial market, was available. "The details are still being ironed out. . . . We're hoping to keep as much of the TBC staff as we can." An official announcement will be released tomorrow, she said.

Usually people don't like being portrayed as bad, even if they do all sorts of bad stuff, but in a new and completely insane interview with the L.A. Record Fowley doesn't even seem close to giving a shit. Interviewer Chris Ziegler stays mostly out of the way, and as a result the piece reads less like an interview and more like an extended rant by Fowley on the music business, celebrities he's known (and/or fucked), and his life philosophy, which seems located just south of Anton LaVey-style satanism in terms of the importance it places on decadence, disregard for conventional morality, and self-worship. Sure, Fowley is self-obsessed and greedy, but interviews with nice people are rarely this much fun.

Fans can help with the effort Friday and Saturday, March 19 and 20, from 11 AM to 5 PM.

Yeh also reads from Steve the Dog & the Winged Tiger at Open Books' children's story time program on Saturday at 11 AM.

In this week's issue I review Paul Greengrass's Iraq war thriller Green Zone, which opened last week but wasn't screened for the Reader until three days before the release date. In case you haven't read me kvetching about it already, this is standard operating procedure for Universal Pictures.

• GeorginaValverde.com

Tonight at 6 PM, the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington) hosts "Domestic Studio," a talk about making art at home featuring artists Jason Lazarus, Georgina Valverde, Brian Kapernekas, and Gallery 400 director Lorelei Stewart. The discussion takes place in the Washington Room (5th floor) and is copresented by Gallery 400 and Studio Chicago, a yearlong project with events focusing on the artistic process. More information is available here.

• Aida Folch in "25 Carat"

"With chemistry to spare, Folch and Garrido make one of the hottest criminal couples since Bonnie and Clyde," Gene Siskel Film Center programmer Marty Rubin proclaims about Aida Folch and Francesc Garrido, the double-crossing scam artists at the center of 25 Carat.

Paxti Amézcu's Barcelona-set thriller screens Sunday and Thursday in the Film Center's European Union Film Festival.

Trailer after the jump.