Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Richmond, Virginia, is hardly the first place that springs to mind when the subject of contemporary salsa comes up, but it’s the home of Bio Ritmo, an eight-piece band active since the mid-90s that’s been tinkering for years with the classic clave-driven sound forged by the Fania Records roster in the 60s and 70s. They’ve tried a relatively poppy approach and dabbled in the jacked-up beats of Cuban timba–they have a curiosity that’s not stifled by purism–but the down side of the members’ varying musical backgrounds (reggae, disco, rock, et cetera) is that no one is a bona fide salsa virtuoso....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Regarding Sotomayor: this does not speak well of me, but as someone who grabs the popcorn when race, gender, and class privilege goes transparently public, the time between now and her hearings is going to be a sociocultural trainwreck of mindbending proportions. To borrow a line from the comments section at Alicublog (don’t have a link, it’s been awhile): it’s amazing how quickly they’ve gone from dog whistles to electric sousaphones....

From The Other Side of the Mountain On Friday I posted the first part of my interview with Joon Bai, who was in town over the weekend to introduce the film The Other Side of the Mountain, which he wrote and produced. Mountain is the first fiction film produced in North Korea by an American citizen, and there probably won’t be any more of them for some time. As Bai explained to me, making the film was a difficult six-year process that involved constant negotiation with the North Korean government and long periods in which he was unable to work there at all....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While I’m grateful for any opportunity to see classics like On Dangerous Ground or Phantom Lady on 35-millimeter, the highlight of this year’s Noir City series at the Music Box was hearing film scholar Foster Hirsch introduce William Castle’s Undertow (1949). That film—a thoroughly generic programmer, even by Hirsch’s generous estimation—attracted one of the best turn-outs of the week simply because it was shot partly in Chicago, and one could feel the room surge with pride when the Monroe and Wabash el platform appeared on-screen....

Consider Jay Mariotti: he’s long been the blithe spirit of the local press box, yet when he competes for the Golden BAT a curse is upon him. You’ll recall that Mariotti’s 2000 pennant picks earned him first place in this column’s assessment of horsehide foresight. But in 2000 the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that there was not only no shame but a presidency to be had for finishing second, and in deference to that shift in the zeitgeist, when the time came to declare a winner the next spring I renamed the coveted honor the Dimpled Chad BAT and gifted it to Teddy Greenstein, who’d trailed Mariotti by so little that what the hell....

One thing about Chicago: even in the throes of a bone-chilling winter, it ain’t boring. There’s always something to keep us from dropping into hibernation. The Emanuel residency circus, for example, or the unruly turn of events at the usually staid Cultural Center. Who could’ve predicted that Department of Cultural Affairs head Lois Weisberg, an 85-year-old civic icon and Daley family favorite, would be going out with guns blazing this week rather than making a graceful exit along with the mayor when his term ends in May?...

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times The Koch brothers, David and Charles, aren’t particularly identified with Chicago yet except as archenemies of our favorite son, Barack Obama. That might change. They may soon take over one of our local institutions, the Tribune. Those who fear the worst are fearing it increasingly noisily. The Newspaper Guild and its parent Communication Workers of America just issued a statement calling on the Tribune Company to publicly pledge that “they’ll only sell to a buyer that will protect the objectivity of the news product....

The cover of Horrorscension I have a theory as to why the most recent Behold the Arctopus record, last year’s Horrorscension (Blackmarket Activities), has been pretty much unanimously panned at Encyclopaedia Metallum. Well, it’s not so much a theory as it is a biased and potentially inflammatory assumption, but isn’t that what music criticism is all about? Behold the Arctopus consists of guitarists Colin Marston (Dysrhythmia, Gorguts, Krallice) and Mike Lerner (Direwolf) and drummer Weasel Walter, a former Chicagoan best known as mastermind of the Flying Luttenbachers (though he’s also a ferocious improviser)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m a fan of pretty much any football game, on any level, at any time, but I’ve always found the opening weekend of the college season particularly thrilling. Back when I was being raised by an Indiana alum, it meant I could briefly walk proud among the Michigan, Michigan State, and Notre Dame fans in my school, since no one had administered any drubbings yet and all was possible, even a Hoosier victory or two for the health of my poor father....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iron Horse Ale House’s logo is a hybrid of a locomotive and a beer tap. It’s pretty manly, pretty turn-of-the-century. Stamped on the doorway of Norwood Park’s new brick fortress—just to the right of the banner advertising a Miller Lite bucket special—it exudes a burly, industrial aesthetic similar to that at Revolution Brewing, which brands its own logo with a triumphant fist that also serves as a handle for each beer tap and a pillar for the bar....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year Chicagoans got a rare chance to hear some benga music, the dominant dance style of Kenya for the last four or five decades, when the band Extra Golden played here during the World Music Festival. The band was started by Ian Eagleson and Alex Minoff of the Washington D.C. indie rock band Golden as a collaboration with some of the benga musicians Eagleson met while pursuing ethnomusicological studies in Kenya....

Instagram Chief Keef Salty hip-hop heads have been complaining about the declining quality of lyricism in rap music from just about the minute someone wrote something more complex than “Rapper’s Delight,” but over the past decade those concerns have seemed a bit easier to understand, pretty much ever since Cam’ron made it acceptable to rhyme a word with itself. But understanding those concerns isn’t necessarily the same as sharing them—I love Cam’ron, as well as Waka Flocka Flame, whose favored vocal technique is yelling non sequiturs over beats, and Future’s “Karate Chop,” where his raps are an incomprehensible blur of Auto-Tune and stoned slurring....

“This is a Cook Book by the people and for the people.” So begins the preface of The Chicago Record Cook Book, published in 1896 and reprinted the same year under the title The Daily News Cook Book. Like cookbooks put out by parishes, schools, or civic organizations, The Chicago Record Cook Book was comprised of recipes from homemakers—but on a grander scale. The newspaper, the morning counterpart of the afternoon Chicago Daily News, conducted a contest beginning in 1895, asking the women of America to submit menus for an entire day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner....

Abiquiu Cafe A restaurant dedicated to the highly specialized southwestern variant of New Mexican food—most commonly identified by dishes blanketed in red or green roasted chile sauce—is a noble venture. This Lakeview spot unfortunately executes it with uneven results, though the house-roasted red and green New Mexican chiles that form the foundation of the cuisine offer a good start. That’s particularly true of the almost soupy green chile (available vegetarian or porky), which has a nice depth of flavor, and the brick-red variety carries admirable heat, particularly as it drenches a cheesy plate of chicken enchiladas or small order of pan-seared corn cakes....

Today’s word is “credit default swap.” Basically we’re well past the point where mere mortgage fraud and default is the problem. Over the past decade, lenders made it possible for people to take on home loans they never should have gotten into, either because the borrowers were too poor to buy a house at all, or because the excessively generous initial terms (low initial rates, “liar loans,” etc.) tempted people to buy homes that were too expensive, or to buy too many homes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know it’s just a coincidence, but it feels appropriate that Johnnie To’s Drug War is opening in Chicago on the same weekend that a series of newly restored Alfred Hitchcock films comes through town. To is one of the only contemporary filmmakers in a position similar to the one Hitchcock enjoyed in his prime—that is, he’s simultaneously one of his country’s most commercially successful directors and one of its most important living artists....

With so much attention focused on the ever-expanding lineup of candidates to replace Rahm Emanuel in the job he’s vacating in the Fifth Congressional District, it’s instructive to reflect on how the incumbent got the gig: Mayor Daley anointed him. In other words, five days after Emanuel steps down—and he hasn’t yet—Blagojevich will call for an election within 115 days, and sometime in the next six months, the winner takes all....

INSIDIOUS Aesthetically, Insidious operates at the level of a decent high school video project. The story transpires mostly in uncomplicated close-ups and medium shots; nothing apart from the most basic visual information (faces, relevant props) registers in the frame or takes hold in your imagination. The sound design, so important to establishing tone in a horror movie, is even less inspired: every potentially scary moment is embellished with an over-amplified shock chord or sound effect that pounds the content into you like a blunt object....

Ransone (right) with Ethan Hawke in Sinister The Mark Wahlberg vehicle Broken City, which opens Friday, is a solid, old-fashioned detective movie. Barring a speech about social equality for gay couples and some superfluous helicopter shots, the film feels a lot like a mid-40s noir programmer. Wahlberg’s flawed private investigator (a former police detective trying to earn his keep), the casual intimations of political corruption, director Allen Hughes’s gritty-but-affectionate portraits of marginalized neighborhood communities: all these qualities agreeably recall a second-tier Robert Siodmak effort like Cry of the City (1948) or The File on Thelma Jordan (1950)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday and Valentine’s Day: a look back at the touching, moving, fake love letters of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge. In 1929, the Atlantic got taken in by one of the great historical hoaxes, inspiring its editors to publish the tastefully named three-part story “Lincoln the Lover.” It was quickly debunked by young scholar Paul M....