Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The accepted rationale for college-level art history classes is that they teach you “how to look at art.” I’ve always found that irritating. The implication—that observing, analyzing, and interpreting art are skills that must be learned—is somewhat insulting, suggesting that those who haven’t received the right training can’t relate to visual art. “Kids go into class and they regurgitate what they’re told,” Williamson told me in a telephone interview....

On NPR the other day, somebody was pointing out that the U.S. consensus on same-sex marriage has gone from negative to positive with a speed unprecedented for such a controversial issue. Demographically, it’s a seismic shift. Pundits and scholars searching for the reasons behind that shift would do well to study entertainments like this 2006 jukebox musical and the 1994 movie that inspired it. The tale of two drag queens and an aging transsexual who take their glitter show on the 1,200-mile road from Sydney to Alice Springs, Australia, Priscilla is part of a long string of sympathetic pop explications of gay life that have made it easier for everybody to talk about the love that dare not speak its name....

Chicago sound artist Olivia Block tends to make intricately detailed music that collides field recordings with live instrumentation in unexpected ways, but she outdid herself on Resolution (Erstwhile), a collaboration with Boston trumpeter and noise maestro Greg Kelley, creating her most surprising and disorienting piece yet. Using extensive and meticulous post­production work, she surrounded Kelley’s mix of breath sounds, sibilance, and brittle smears with ingeniously manipulated collages drawn from a variety of sources: room ambience, the sound of a cassette tape being played, field recordings made at a garbage-processing and recycling facility, even layers of unidentifiable noises she produced from the innards of a piano....

Don’t buy into the granola-crunching, knit-and-purling, homely hipster rep of indie e-bazaar Etsy; for every necklace made from driftwood there’s something bangin’, like Meaghan Garvey’s rap/R&B votive candles. On one, a very busty Nicki Minaj intones, “I don’t give a F-U-C-K.” On another, a shirtless and languid R. Kelly croons, “But my body’s telling me yeah.” Other trippy, kitschy pieces for sale on her Moneyworth Etsy account include stickers of selected Kanye West and Lil B tweets (“I just threw some kazoo on this bitch,” says Kanye), an original book illustrating the not-uncommon notion that some rappers are members of the Illuminati (Garvey also was named Best Rap DJ and Hip-Hop Illuminati Conspiracy Theorist in our Music & Nightlife section), and a screen print of Rick Ross in silhouette under the words FUCK YOGA GET MONEY....

Between Boutique Cafe & Lounge Between opened in 2007 offering creative Indian fusion small plates by Radhika Desai, who went on to make a splash on Top Chef. Since last year, though, the restaurant’s been focusing on a different but equally creative fusion: Peruvian-Asian dishes dreamed up by chef Jose Victorio. On one visit tilapia ceviche got a traditional Peruvian preparation: the fish, lightly “cooked” in a citrusy marinade, was topped with kernels of Andean corn and served alongside slices of sweet potato....

A torture scene in Zero Dark Thirty Betrayal is in the air, and it’s reflected in the Oscar nominations. Zero Dark Thirty made the list for best picture, but Kathryn Bigelow was passed over for best director. David Denby’s New Yorker capsule puts the matter dispassionately and succinctly: “The filmmakers landed themselves in trouble by making the torture of a minor Al Qaeda member by the C.I.A. appear to yield a useful scrap of information—something that did not happen in the actual investigation....

Suburbia can’t catch a break. The lifelong urbanite’s scorn of the sprawling cultural wasteland is palpable, and suburban-born, restless, creative types going back to Hemingway can’t wait to escape. Can we get over these biases? At least in terms of food? Look outside the edges of any major metropolitan area—say, the San Gabriel Valley to the east of LA, or Annandale southwest of D.C.—and you’ll find concentrations of highly specialized ethnic cuisines or chef-driven, farm-to-table outliers, tucked into highway strip malls or bucolic hamlets....

A primer for Chicagoans on cooking ethnic at home–what you’ll need, where to get it, and what to do with that 64-ounce jar of kimchi once you get it home. The grocery stores can be baffling too, the aisles packed with myriad brands of dried seaweed, rice, frozen fish, snacks, and dumplings indistinguishable from one another to anyone who doesn’t read hangul. But even a blind run-through can be rewarding if you’re a little adventurous....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem being, per DiCrescenzo, that it represented “worse songs and less realism.” He compares the sound unfavorably to “Nebraska and Welcome to Asbury Park—or ‘the albums without Clarence Clemons.’ Those cheesy sax bleats….” Two problems here: it’s Greetings From Asbury Park. More importantly, it features Clarence Clemons. It has cheesy sax bleats. So that leaves Nebraska. Here’s the funny thing about Nebraska, which is my favorite Springsteen album: it’s a sophisticated conceit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blagojevich says he decided to do interviews in New York rather than defend himself in the state senate in Springfield against impeachment charges because in his view the trial is “rigged, and it’s fixed.” Just for the record — since I’m as eager to see Blago go as anyone else in the state — but he’s got a point....

Objects in Motion The Building Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the usual way of festivals, each of the programs is scattershot, and—except in the “Intimate Program,” featuring small-scale puppet pieces the audience gathers around to see—with many long set changes between acts, forward momentum is in short supply. If Objects in Motion teaches anything, it’s that people can craft all kinds of ingenious, beautiful things without knowing how to build a performance out of them....

The Chef: Iliana Regan (One Sister)The Challenger: Brandon Baltzley (Crux)The Ingredient: Dried limes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iliana Regan didn’t know any of this, though. “I did not do any research. I did not look it up. I didn’t even think about it until today,” she said. “I was like, what am I going to make? So then I looked in my refrigerator and freezer and just pulled out some stuff and was like, yup, this is going to be it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The annual Adventures in Modern Music festival, presented by British music magazine the Wire and the Empty Bottle, is in full swing through Sunday night. The Reader has a handy sidebar, and Jessica Hopper wrote about tonight’s set by Peaking Lights, a dubby Madison duo who recently decamped to LA—but of course there’s more. Headlining that Peaking Lights show at the Museum of Contemporary Art is Oval (aka the longtime solo project of German electronic musician Markus Popp)....

Titled after Piet Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, James Benning’s experimental masterpiece One Way Boogie Woogie (1977) consists of 60 one-minute takes shot with a stationary camera in an industrial valley near his native Milwaukee. The film strikes a graceful balance between abstraction (either found or created) and personal history, with ingenious uses of on- and offscreen sound, and it plays like a portfolio of 60 miniature films, each a suspenseful puzzle and a beautifully composed mechanism....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After the anarchic laughs and cagey political allegory of The Dark Knight (2008), Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy sinks back to the level of the thundering, self-serious Batman Begins (2005). Christian Bale has always been a stiff as the Caped Crusader, but the second movie was blessed with Heath Ledger’s outsize performance as the Joker; the celebrity villain this time around is Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman, and while her shiny black leotard may conjure up impure memories of Julie Newmar, her snarky line readings can’t compare with the show Ledger put on....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Granik made her feature debut with Down to the Bone (2004), a stark working-class drama starring Vera Farmiga as a young mother in upstate New York whose struggle to kick a ten-year coke habit is constantly undermined by the men in her life. Farmiga has since moved on to classier backdrops, but with Winter’s Bone, Granik steps even farther down the economic ladder, to the piss-poor Ozarks....

QI have a cousin with whom I am very close. He recently proposed to his girlfriend. I have several issues with this, but the most important one is the fact that everyone who meets this young man thinks he’s gay. (I don’t know how the girlfriend hasn’t seen it.) When I told my friends he was engaged, their jaws dropped. Everyone said, “But he’s gay!” He’s admitted to me that he did “play for the other team” in college and every once in a while he mentions that he has a “man crush” on so-and-so....

In 1987 Big Black released a CD compilation called The Rich Man’s Eight Track Tape with the following admonition printed on the face of the disc: “When, in five years, this remarkable achievement in the advancement of fidelity is obsolete and unplayable on any ‘modern’ equipment, remember, in 1971, the 8-track tape was the state of the art.” Though CDs have hardly gone the way of the eight-track, it’s hard to argue that they’ve earned their longevity—whatever advantages they may have offered in 1983, they’re a crap format now....

On the evening of February 27 police and representatives from the Department of Revenue and Department of Business Affairs and Licensing walked into the AV-aerie and closed it down. They issued citations for operating without a Public Place of Amusement license and for selling alcohol at retail without a liquor license. Marshall Preheim, the AV-aerie’s founder and director, is expected in court March 17. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While we’re talking about perennial also-rans with once-in-a-generation stars, the 76ers’ Billy King comes in #3. Before I point out how stupid this is, I should mention that it reveals an interesting bias. Sports doesn’t value reliable success so much as total victory. If fans and athletes cared about mere playoff berths and regular-season winning percentage, people would talk about the genius of Brian Cashman and his propensity for relying on proven (if expensive) talent to ensure high winning percentages, media interest, freakish apparel sales, and large crowds year in and year out....