Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the obits I’ve seen in the past couple of days have given him credit for helping invent the mambo, which is somewhat accurate. According to Cuban music authority Ned Sublette, who called Cachao “arguably the most important bassist in twentieth-century popular music,” Lopez joined Arcaño y Sus Maravillas–one of the best charanga bands the island ever produced, led by the great flutist Antonio Arcaño–in 1937, at just 19, and there helped develop a tune written by his piano-playing brother Orestes “Macho” Lopez called “Mambo....

Alto saxophonist Rob Brown is a key figure on New York’s bustling free-jazz scene but there’s more to his game than just squawking. On his latest effort, Sounds (Clean Feed), recorded with cellist Daniel Levin and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, he demonstrates impressive restraint even during the trio’s most explosive moments. Like Cecil Taylor’s longtime sideman Jimmy Lyons, Brown has a deep understanding and love of bebop, and his work is often imbued with the magical rhythmic buoyancy that was the trademark of Charlie Parker’s sound....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past 42 weeks chart watchers have had the constant company of the confusingly named “Cups (Pitch Perfect‘s ‘When I’m Gone’)” by Anna Kendrick. It’s a cover of an old Carter Family song, “When I’m Gone,” and more specifically a cover using an arrangement combining A.P. Carter’s composition with the Cup game that was originally devised by the British twee-folk band Lulu & the Lampshades and went viral via Reddit back in 2009....

An ominous shot from Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers Two of the more accomplished films screening this weekend at the European Union Film Festival—Radu Jude’s Everybody in Our Family and Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers—walk a thin line between black comedy and pure horror. If I prefer the former over the latter, it’s because I find its lead characters more believable and find its nightmare scenario more affecting. But if you like to get a good jolt when you go to the movies, you should have a good time at both....

FeedtimeThe Aberrant Years (Sub Pop) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Feedtime disbanded in 1989, shortly after the release of Suction, on the eve of what would’ve been their first stateside tour. I was a huge fan of the band in their initial incarnation, and I didn’t even remember they’d made a fifth album—Billy, cut with a different drummer for Amphetamine Reptile in 1996—until I started writing this....

On the morning of February 15, right in the middle of rush hour, a meteorite exploded over the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk. It was the first meteorite explosion in nearly a century, and since many Russians keep dash cams in their car for insurance purposes (fraud is rampant), it was also the most documented. Originally 50 or 60 feet long, the meteorite shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, scattered over an area 200 miles long, and caused $33 million worth of damage....

From the Thai film Beautiful Boxer, a high point in Reeling’s programming history Last week it was announced that Reeling, Chicago’s LGBT film festival, will resume this November following a yearlong hiatus. The fest took a break in order to reconsider its mission in light of the changing nature of film exhibition. Chief among its goals, festival founder Brenda Webb wrote at the time, was to “evolve [in a way] to better address the needs of LGBT filmmakers....

Gorilla Tango Theatre The cast of Bikini Shakespeare’s production of The Tempest You wouldn’t normally think of Shakespeare and bikinis (and Speedos) as things that would naturally go together. And yet Bikini Shakespeare’s production of The Tempest, which opened at Gorilla Tango Theatre (1919 N. Milwaukee) last Thursday night, and which will run Thursdays at 9 PM through 4/25, is the actual Shakespeare play, condensed into a hour, performed by actors in bikinis (and Speedos)....

On December 5, 2009, Cook County sheriff’s police sergeant Patrick Donovan spotted two men in a white, windowless cargo van on the loading dock of a shop called the Brew and Grow, tucked between Elston and the Kennedy expressway. Donovan watched from his car 40 yards away as the men—one of them medium height and stocky, the other tall and gangly—loaded large tables, fans, and four-foot filters into the van....

The Bay Citizen opens for business this week in San Francisco, and there are two big reasons the news industry is paying attention. One is that the New York Times has given the Bay Citizen instant credibility, paying it to provide four pages of local news a week for its Bay Area edition—just as the Chicago News Cooperative has been doing in Chicago for the Times for the past six months....

Ben Fasman, DJ and bar manager of Big Star is plumbing the depths of: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Visions of ends-of-the-earth oceans so vast that they almost seem apocalyptic coexist with shots of what life is actually like for these men who perform the most dangerous job in America: swells the size of buildings, hilarious high jinks, industrial steel rigging covered with what seems an insurmountable layer of ice, and maniacal amounts of dead crabs, circling gulls, and a myriad of other sea creatures....

Jeffry Stanton, director of Hot ‘n’ Throbbing at Interrobang Theatre Project, gets all Don Draper for: Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf On a recent hunt for a funky, comfy boîte for after-dinner cocktails to celebrate my husband’s 40th birthday, we found ourselves at the newly opened Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf in River North, by restaurateur Brendan Sodikoff. The expansive restaurant transports you to another time with Prohibition-era red leather booths, dark wood, and a long zinc-topped bar, but the downstairs lounge is magical....

This is the second installment in our occasional series on poverty and segregation in Chicago’s schools. This isn’t a new development. It’s a legacy of the racial segregation that has characterized Chicago and its public schools for decades. In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, the schools here changed from predominantly white and middle-class to overwhelmingly black, Hispanic, and low-income. Why do such parents choose to move? Can anything be done to keep them?...

Low on inspiration? Open your wallet. “Let me just first thank each and every one of the residents that are here today—I’d like to really acknowledge them,” said Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Beale, speaking in the chamber of Chicago’s City Council on Thursday, June 24. “It’s residents like this who really give me the energy and drive to fight on their behalf.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it’s possible not everyone felt as strongly about the project as their T-shirts did....

The most common response to the ongoing Blago media blitz – which is less a blitz, I guess, than a sustained war of attrition – is that he’d be well advised to shut up and let his lawyers speak for him. But this, from Phil Nugent, is kind of convincing: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What did Blagojevich really hope to get out of it?...

Again courtesy of the management of the Sun-Times Media Group, I’ve been shown a second letter from the nonunion employees of a STMG daily to the paper’s Newspaper Guild members. This one’s from the Joliet Herald News and it carries 28 signatures. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As with the first letter, which originated at Indiana’s Post-Tribune, the the message comes down to this: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth even if it’s a godawful looking horse, because there’s nothing else to eat....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a cocktail on the menu at the Berkshire Room called the Old Money, and it’s fine. Actually it’s more than fine, it’s splendid: bourbon, Aperol, walnut liqueur, a nice little hint of allspice, all aged to perfection, like Maggie Smith. But if you really want to know what old money tastes like, I submit to you the Weston, an aristocratic mixture of bourbon, coffee, and pipe tobacco, which induces in the drinker a sensation I imagine to be something like sniffing Hugh Hefner’s smoking jacket, and I mean that in a totally complimentary way (the guy can afford nice stuff, you know?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years ago I was walking through Washington Park, asking park users for their thoughts on Mayor Daley’s proposed Olympics. Pretty much everyone I spoke with was against it, though no one thought it could be stopped. I spent about half an hour talking to some old-timers at the tennis court. We ran down a roster of south-side politicians, looking for one–that’s all–who would oppose Daley’s Olympic land grab, but we came up empty....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Malick graduated from St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, Austin, Texas, where he played football as a linebacker. Malick broke the school record for most defensive sacks on the quarterback his senior year and was nominated for Texas football player of the year. He graciously declined the nomination and forfeited his chance at the award. “Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1965, and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar....

The Reader’s Choice: Hai Woon Dae Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it comes to late-night Korean barbecue, the small, friendly Hai Woon Dae is a better bet than the vastly more popular San Soo Gap San. As at the latter, live coal grilling is the focus, but there’s a greater, more interesting, and lovingly prepared selection of table meats and kitchen-cooked dishes. I particularly like the yook hwe, beef tartare dressed with raw egg and julienned Asian pear (also available on bi bim bop), steamed eggs (gyelan jjim), cold spicy buckweat noodles with raw fish (hwe naengmyeun), the panfried bacon with kimchi (sam gyeop sal kimchi bokum), and a thick, tangy kimchi pancake....