Mark Seliger Michael Hainey The column I recently wrote about Michael Hainey’s new book, After Visiting Friends, ran three weeks before Hainey was due to Chicago to promote it, and therefore—in the view of his Scribner publicist—two weeks too soon. When the time comes, I’ll get back to the book on my blog, I told her. Here I am. Hainey’s father was 35 and the night copy desk chief of the Sun-Times when he died suddenly and mysteriously in the spring of 1970; Mike Hainey, who was six years old then, grounds his book in his quest to learn what really happened....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spike Lee’s films range from undeniable masterworks (Do the Right Thing, Inside Man) to flawed but intriguing efforts (Summer of Sam, Clockers) to outright failures (Miracle at St. Anna, Malcolm X). This drama, about a 13-year-old boy from suburban Atlanta (Jules Brown) who spends a summer in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood with his preacher grandfather (Clarke Peters of The Wire), falls into the middle category: its sights and sounds evoke Lee’s best New York stories, and there are some noteworthy performances, particularly from Peters as the charismatic holy man with a dark past....

When you set out to write a book that you know will take years to complete, it’s reasonable to wonder whether it’ll still be relevant by the time it’s published. It took historian Beryl Satter a full decade to write Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (published last month by Metropolitan Books), but if she had any doubts about the material keeping its edge she needn’t have worried....

YouTube “I really struggled with the decision to do that commercial,” Kim Wasserman told me yesterday. The commercial begins with a closeup of Wasserman as she relates that, after her infant son’s asthma attack, she realized there were “a lot of people affected in Pilsen and in Little Village by air quality issues,” and that “these coal power plants were having an impact on our community.” Another headline appears over a smokestack—”Chicago’s two coal-fired plants to close”—as Wasserman adds, “That’s the kind of leadership that our communities need....

Jason Pratt Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Spring is coming (supposedly) and that means it’s tour season. One (of many) reason(s) why midwesterners are badasses is because we have to endure driving through some of the most boring terrain on the planet just to get out of here. If you’re headed to the east coast, you’ll most likely roll through the not-that-exciting landscape of Ohio, but the state does in fact have some cool things to do....

Rabble Rabble used to be one of those bands that seem to turn up on every third bill in town. By their own estimate, in 2009 they played more than 80 times in Chicago. And this year they had 35 shows between January and early July, when they left for almost a month on a tour of the south and east coast. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bands that play out as often as Rabble Rabble has don’t usually keep it up forever....

QI’m a 20-year-old bi girl and I’ve been with my boyfriend a little over a year. We’ve talked about having an FFM threesome, but the first time we talked about it, we realized that we were not on the same page, and now every time I try to bring up the possibilities of a threesome, we end up in an argument. I’d like to talk about some rules, just in case it happens as he imagines it—we pick up a girl at a bar—but he won’t talk to me, because he claims that it would make a threesome not as spontaneous....

Students in the Intonation Music Workshop and MusicianCorps Chicago, organizations that provide instruction for young local musicians, have put together an outdoor music festival for kids, The Stars of Tomorrow Summer Spectacular. At this free daylong show, organized to celebrate the end of the school year, the bill features Intonation mainstays like Trace, the Pop Tots, and all-girl teen R & B group Fatal Attraction (in a new lineup), plus half a dozen other kid bands....

By now you’ve probably had your fill of Yeezus think pieces (if not might I recommend checking out the Gchat conversation I had with Miles Raymer about it). And chances are you’re probably also a little sick of reading about Jay-Z’s partnership with Samsung: the company bought a million digital copies of the rapper’s forthcoming Magna Carta Holy Grail at $5 a pop and is giving the album away to a million Galaxy smartphone users who download an app July 4....

Sensory overload, care of Otto Splotch For the past few years Bitchpork has run the same weekend as Pitchfork, providing a gnarly alternative to the comparatively mainstream festival lineup. During its run the three-day megafest, hosted in warehouses and basements around town, has featured weirdo punk and noise acts from all over the country, at one point highlighted by an insane secret Lightning Bolt set. Bitchpork isn’t returning this year, but something even better is swooping in to take its place: Rotted Tooth Fest, put on by Oozing Wound drummer Kyle Reynolds and his record label, Rotted Tooth Recordings....

Michael Scott was one of the first political operatives I met after I moved to Chicago. That was back in 1982, and I was writing for the Chicago Reporter. The editor, John McDermott, decided to have three reporters cover the three-way race heating up in the mayoral Democratic primary. The candidates were Harold Washington, Jane Byrne, and Richard M. Daley. Scott and the campaign’s other black staffers had a separate suite in the campaign office, at 127 N....

thursday25 Thursday25 Goes CubeRickie Lee JonesVampire Weekend Friday26 CitayDeadstring BrothersTegan and SaraVampire Weekend Saturday27 AltanJudson ClaiborneAna Tijoux Sunday28 Denise LaSalle Monday29 Janelle MonaeTatsuya Nakatani Tuesday30 Janelle Monae Wednesday31 Tatsuya NakataniSerena-Maneesh RICKIE LEE JONES Rickie Lee Jones is 30 years into her career and two albums into a fierce little comeback of sorts (she never really left us). As pretty much every review has noted, her latest, Balm in Gilead (Fantasy), is her best album in some time (some say a decade, others two—depends on how your preference in Rickie runs)....

As I was writing this story, word came in that the City Council had caved, voting to give Mayor Emanuel what he wanted—in the most recent case, an infrastructure trust fund that has the potential to be an even greater burden on taxpayers than the parking meter deal. Speaking of aldermen yielding to the whim of a powerful mayor. One of the beautiful things about Lavicka is that he never subscribed to this view even though he—as much as anyone, and more than most—actually did put his livelihood on the line by fighting powerful mayors....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For its 30th birthday last year the Chicago Jazz Festival threw one hell of a party, opening with Sonny Rollins, closing with Ornette Coleman, and presenting commissioned work along the way from four undisputed heavyweights—pianist Vijay Iyer, trumpeter Dave Douglas, bandleader Gerald Wilson, and trombonist T.S. Galloway. After such a spectacular blowout—and especially given the brutal economic crisis—I wasn’t expecting to be impressed by this year’s incarnation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There is no such thing as a perfect plan,” Suarez said. “But other cities don’t even come near our plan.” But then Second Ward alderman Bob Fioretti asked to speak. Fioretti is somehow as earnest as he is slick, a white guy representing a predominantly black ward who was smart enough to introduce a resolution commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the NAACP, then smart enough to laugh and shrug when Mayor Daley’s staff took it out of his hands and let the council’s black aldermen officially cosponsor it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dave Douglas Meaning and Mystery (Greenleaf) Trumpeter Dave Douglas is one of jazz’s most restless spirits, and even when he treads the well-worn path of postbop with this quintet he manages to sound like he’s blazing a trail. The addition of saxophonist Donny McCaslin helps make this the group’s finest release. Gianluca Petrella Indigo4 (Blue Note) This wonderful Italian trombonist has created the best fusion of postbop and electronica I’ve ever heard....

The latest addition to the growing field of Chicago outdoor fests devoted to electronic dance music, the Wavefront Music Festival takes place on Montrose Beach Sat 6/30 and Sun 7/1 and features dozens of artists on four stages. On Saturday the music runs from 11 AM until 10 PM and includes sets by bloghouse faves Boys Noize and MSTRKRFT, techno veteran Bad Boy Bill, and avant-popster Matthew Dear. Sunday’s bill likewise kicks off at 11 AM and wraps up at 10 PM and features progressive house legend Sasha, A-Trak and Armand Van Helden’s Duck Sauce, and early DJ sets by former LCD Soundsystem members (and disco obsessives) James Murphy and Pat Mahoney, among others....

Michael Gebert Scott Buer at Bolzano Artisan Meats in 2010 A Chicagoan wandering the Dane County Farmers’ Market, the vast farmers’ market that wraps around all four sides of the state capitol in Madison on Wednesdays and Saturdays, could be forgiven for thinking that if there’s an artisanal food paradise, its name is Wisconsin. The creativity of everything from cheese makers to beekeepers to buffalo-jerky curers seems boundless. But two stories in the past few months of creative, artisanal businesses being forced out of business politically suggest trouble in foodie paradise....

It’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard of Chippy Nonstop unless you lurk certain parts of the Internet where the weirder fringes of hip-hop, dance music, and Tumblr culture overlap, but within these zones she’s a superstar who manages to combine those elements in addictive and frequently hilarious ways. She’s a member of an Internet crew named Young Klout Gang after the online-presence-rating website, and her new EP, Finally Verified, plays off both the name of a Big Sean album and the recently acquired blue check mark on her Twitter page....

Until recently music from Mauritania has rarely been more than a curiosity—that is, if people noticed it at all. But with the ascendance of Tinariwen‘s soulful strain of desert guitar music over the last decade, sounds from the Sahara have become the latest international music craze (relatively speaking). Located on the southwestern edge of the Maghreb, Mauritania has produced some remarkable guitar music, with most players craftily adapting sounds and patterns once made on the traditional tidinitt (an hourglass-shaped lute with four or five strings)....