Robbie Guajardo had never worn makeup before. It felt wet and thick, but strangely soothing, as the makeup lady brushed it across his cheeks and forehead. They’d arrived in the vast confusion of LAX and everything had amazed them, especially the luggage wheel, which had magically dumped their bags onto the conveyor when the plane landed. Outside, the air was warm and dry, the airport rimmed with palm trees which, Robbie informed his impressed family, are the only flowering plant in the order monocot....

On December 5, I was part of a mass of concertgoers who’d packed into the Satyricon, a small, dark bar in Portland, Oregon, to see sludge lords Eyehategod, and early in the night the members of the band were squeezed right in among us. “The more drugs you give us, the longer we’ll play,” drummer Joey LaCaze told me. Guitarist Jimmy Bower shot back, “He came from Chicago. He doesn’t have any drugs....

Silk Rhodes Albums released in December are invariably overlooked in end-of-year lists made by music publications. For one, most of these lists are compiled in November. Then there’s the issue of December albums not having enough of a shelf life with listeners, who need time with an album before they can pronounce judgment. One album that might be a casualty in year-end roundups is the self-titled debut of Silk Rhodes, a duo out of Baltimore who produce a slinky yet disjointed mix of soul, funk, and R&B....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They were all dismayed by Rockford. They had been expecting one of America’s fabulous cosmopolitan cities, gleaming with wealth and excitement; the train left them in an industrial town deep in a wintry countryside. Their sponsors were nice people but appeared to think that everybody in China lived in mud huts: on the first day, they took their guests on a proud tour, plainly expecting them to be dazzled by Rockford’s meager attractions — the corner drugstore and soda fountain, the little downtown movie theater, the car dealership near the main highway, the glass and steel roadside diner where the truckers ate … for once Maria spoke for the whole family: she kept saying in Russian, “Well, it’s just like some little peasant village, isn’t it?...

“If people don’t want to read about the zoning board” Trust me on this: people don’t want to read about the zoning board until people do want to read about the zoning board. No one wanted to read about the arcane details of Robert Moses’s control of New York City until it turned out he was a massively corrupt, discriminatory tyrant, and then everyone wanted to read about it. But if people hadn’t been writing unread (and unnoticed by the major city newspapers) articles about him before the story got sexy, it may never have broken at all, at least not in the depth that it ultimately did....

Chicago contemporary classical | Peter Margasak Chicago is in the midst of a revolution in contemporary classical music, with young artists taking matters into their own hands and forming bold, forward-looking groups rather than waiting for that elusive symphony job. Northwestern, DePaul, and the University of Chicago have been producing a dazzling number of fearless composers and hungry, open-minded musicians. The following five albums, presented in no particular order, feature some of the greatest talents....

When their six-day sit-in at Republic Windows and Doors ended last week, a crowd of jubilant workers and union activists cheered in triumph. Based on what city officials tell me, it’s very unlikely the city of Chicago will ever recoup any of its money from Republic because under its contract the company has been exempt from potential penalties since June 2006. “I’m not sure there’s much that we can do,” says Pete Scales, spokesman for the city’s Department of Planning....

[Update: In spring 2012 executive chef Todd Stein left the Florentine for Piccolo Due; in his place is Coco Pazzo vet Chris Macchia.] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not so for executive chef Todd Stein, who can often be seen purposefully striding across the dining room on critical tasks. Last summer the MK vet stepped away from an all-too-brief tenure at Cibo Matto—another corporate-owned hotel restaurant—and moved over to this, the first Chicago outpost of BLT Restaurants, a steak-centric New York group once fronted by Laurent Tourondel....

Publishing? Your guess is as good as mine. The basic idea is the same as it ever was: get words and pictures—which is to say ideas, art, entertainment, information, instruction, enlightenment, beauty, smut—to the masses. It’s how to do it that’s gotten crazy. What does it mean to put out a book when the very concept of a page is in play? Where’s the silver lining on the Intercloud? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Admiral is billing Amy Fisher as the “Long Island Lolita,” which by coincidence is how she was billed before she went into journalism. The tag goes back to May 19, 1992, the day she rang a doorbell in MassapequaMeassapequa and when the wife of her boyfriend, Joey Buttafuoco, answered, shot her in the face. After seven years in prison and four on the outside, she joined the Press in 2003, assuring readers of her new column that she’d “come a long way from the 16-year-old girl who made worldwide news with one reckless, regrettable and indefensible act....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The identical Oakes twins,Trevor and Ryan, who were profiled in the Reader in October in The Magic Easel, return to Chicago this week to begin a residency at the Field Museum. They’ll be using their remarkable method of splitting what the eyes see to create a perspective drawing of the museum’s great hall. From Damien James’s Reader story:...

An uncle who hadn’t seen Scott Nychay for a while asked him at a family party a few weeks ago how things were going at work. The Northwest Herald laid me off last October, Nychay replied. Then why, a puzzled cousin asked, is the Herald bragging about you on TV? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his eight years at the Herald Nychay won ten first-place state awards from the AP and the Illinois Press Association, along with several other honors....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marché starts off a day early with a Bastille Day Garden Party on its patio from 6-8 PM on Friday. Champagne, martinis, and an appetizer buffet (plus the special ambiance created by servers dressed as can-can dancers and French maids) will run you $45 per person; reservations are required. Pops for Champagne celebrates on Saturday from 3-6 PM with a French sparkling wine and champagne festival in the courtyard of Tree Studios (behind the Pops space), featuring live music....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thompson explained, “You can’t go on a corporate board with the assumption management is going to be dishonest. . . . Unless you went on there believing that Conrad Black and David Radler and Mark Kipnis and Boultbee and Atkinson were all out to deceive shareholders from the beginning, you wouldn’t have found it until we did our own investigation after the clues piled up....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Minkkinen concedes that Smith is, by reputation, a superior designer who distinguished himself at the Sun-Times Media Group’s daily in Joliet before coming to the Sun-Times. But Steckles was a mystery to him. Not to me, however. A couple years ago I had a couple of long phone conversations with Steckles, who described himself to me as a restaurant owner in Saint Kitts who served Cooke as the Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621, Puritans sat around a table, joined hands, and recited the following hymn: “And so today, my world it smiles / Your hand in mine, we walk the miles / Thanks to you it will be done / For you to me are the only one / Happiness, no more be sad / Happiness, I’m glad....

Neko Case and Mavis Staples both have glorious voices that can stop you in your tracks, and when they’ve got you in their grip, they both make sure to impart serious ideas about what it means to be human. Case, whose solo career took off during her early-aughts sojourn in Chicago, and Staples, a Chicago lifer who made her name in family gospel band the Staple Singers, are separated in age by more than three decades—the former turns 43 on Sunday, while the latter is 74—but they’re connected by the passion for social justice that fuels much of their music....

Pilsen’s Chicago Urban Art Society, which got our attention when it opened as the pioneer tenant in a rehabbed factory at 2229 S. Halsted a few months ago, was the victim of a break-in last weekend. Burglars apparently entered by prying open a window in another part of the building late Friday or early Saturday. But Executive director Lauren Pacheco says no art was stolen. Confronted with CUAS’s current exhibit, Doug Fogelson‘s “Field Work,” which includes photograms of roots and dirt, several large pieces of rammed earth sculpture, and a Chicago flag of live clover and wild onion, the burglars went for computers, a camera, and a bike....

JACK HILL: THE EXPLOITATION AND BLAXPLOITATION MASTER, FILM BY FILM calum waddell (McFarland) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Waddell’s written several previous books on exploitation fare, and he covers every one of Hill’s films in detail here, from the famous Foxy Brown to the utterly forgettable Track of the Vampire. He tells who worked on each of these projects and how the financing and distribution worked....

Philip Montoro, Reader music editor, is obsessed with . . . Ahab, “Further South,” from The Giant This funereal German band’s website bears the slogan “Doomwards let us row,” and on their latest album, The Giant, their nautical obsession leads them to Antarctica—a voyage entangled with despair and madness. Beautiful, monstrous, and desolate, “Further South” magnifies private misery to the scale of an ancient saga: “Whither should I / Flee from myself / Further down / Further down / Further south....