Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story also says something about Chicago and, perhaps, its bumbled rush to be seen as sophisticated and worthy. “Chicago prides itself on being a city with more daring restaurants than Manhattan,” [Max writes]. “The city also has Moto, an Asian-inflected outpost of molecular gastronomy–and the home-town response was unequivocal. The Tribune exalted the very dishes that the Times suggested were contrived or showy, declaring the P....

QI’m a smart, professional woman in my mid-30s who dates the same. I also happen to use a wheelchair; I was diagnosed shortly after my first birthday with a motor neuron disease. I have about as much physical strength as a quadriplegic but I have full sensation. (Boy howdy, do I!) I am careful about who I date because of my physical dependence on the people around me. I am also wary of folks who call themselves “devotees,” who are individuals with disability-related fetishes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Rudin had asked a trick question. The right answer was Arizona — where Evan Mecham was impeached and removed in 1988 and Fife Symington resigned in 1997 after he was convicted of bank fraud. Here in Illinois, Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, and George Ryan all served out their terms and went to prison later. Political corruption at the highest levels is a serious competition, and with Blagojevich we’ve finally got a dog in that fight....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the comments to this entry (which really had nothing to do with bluegrass–bloggers just love a good tangent), Whet Moser, possibly the only other SW Virginian on the Reader staff, reminisced about seeing the great Ralph Stanley play a benefit for the local masons at Martinsville High School. Now, high schools are a popular place to play in that region, since they’re usually the largest venues in town—my dad saw Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at Floyd County High School on a tour when he also played the Old Town School—but still, Stanley’s decision to play there does say something about his down-to-earthness....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jonathan Gardner at Health Affairs links to a lot of debate over these things. I don’t debate, I use them, but it’s interesting to see what people have to say — especially Clayton Christensen, who gives an in-depth interview in the actual magazine Health Affairs (free online until May 22). The personal computer is a disruptive innovation — compared to the mainframe, it’s incredibly cheap and easy for a nonexpert to use....

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except to get laid, Samuel Johnson said—or something like it, I’m pretty sure. Similarly, when the genderqueer performance artist Vaginal Davis started showing her art publicly, in 1980s Los Angeles, it was for reasons lesser than glory, as she explained last year in an interview: “I know! I’ll use my apartment as a gallery. . . . And at the openings I’ll meet a cute, gorgeous boy, and he’ll be my boyfriend....

Dave Mata, DJ and Reader People Issue subject, is flipping through: Grime Time magazine In the past several decades, people’s appreciation for outsider art has grown considerably, yet there are still fringe areas that remain undocumented. Whether for lack of an audience, fear of the Man, or just plain ignorance, there’s been a serious gap in the documentation of Chicago’s graffiti scene. I’m not referencing the last ten years’ art-school vomit of ironic wheat-pasters, but the guys that keep it old-school with rattle cans, fill-ins, trains—you know, the scary stuff....

Manhattan Murder Mystery Blue Jasmine, the latest work by Woody Allen, hit theaters this week, and Ben Sachs has a typically insightful review in the paper and online. As I’m writing this, I’ve yet to see the movie, but I share many of Sachs’s views of Allen and his current output. The success of so much of his recent work relates to the strength of his cast, and I often find myself taken with a particular performance while disliking the film as a whole....

If the Huffington Post is the future of journalism, I don’t believe in the future. There’s no news-oriented Web site with a higher public profile, and possibly none more entertaining to visit (if you’re a Democrat), but HuffPo doesn’t pay contributors a dime and it aggregates (some would say poaches) tons of content from media that do. That’s “not our financial model,” Ken Lerer, a HuffPo founder, once said about the old-fashioned idea of paying the people who do the work....

Shopping for organic food has gotten a lot easier since Irv Cernauskas and Shelly Herman started doing it 20 years ago. “Back then there wasn’t a lot of choice,” Herman says. But even with all the options that exist now, from CSA subscriptions to specialty sections in 24-hour supermarkets, the couple saw room for improvement. Local farmers, they thought, needed infrastructure to connect them to wider markets. So two years ago they hatched a plan—-a way to help farmers and make a living doing it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Jeff Parker maintains a pretty strong presence in Chicago, which is something we should all be grateful for. What’s unfortunate is that he’s only made two records as a leader–we’re talking about one of the most exciting and original guitarists of the past 15 years. His most recent outing is the 2004 Thrill Jockey release The Relatives, which veers away from the austerity of his 2003 trio recording for Delmark, Like-Coping, thanks to the plush electric piano of a fellow named Sam Barsheshet (pictured)....

After the UK’s Second Summer of Love in 1988 and ’89 gave house music a firm foothold across the Atlantic, Derrick Carter was part of the first wave of Chicago DJs and producers to invade Europe, in the process permanently altering its pop-music landscape. A couple of decades later, songs built on a house-music framework have started to dominate the pop charts in America too—it wouldn’t be hard to draw a straight line connecting Carter to radio juggernauts like Will....

Solitary confinement, Taviani style, in St. Michael Had a Rooster Tonight’s your last chance to catch two of the best movies in town, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (playing at Landmark’s Century) and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die (playing at the Music Box). Given the popularity of Mungiu’s previous feature, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, I expected Hills to hang around for longer than it did; I’m not surprised, though, that Caesar would vanish so quickly....

In a pattern common among artists who run labels, Chicago electronic musician Brian Labycz launched Peira to release one of his own recordings when he couldn’t find anyone else to do it. The label started slowly in 2007, but in the past couple of years it’s issued a steady albeit modest stream of music—its catalog recently reached 13 titles. Most of those releases document local musicians from the free-improv and experimental communities, playing in ad hoc groupings and working outfits that include Green Pasture Happiness (a trio of Labycz, Aaron Zarzutzki, and Daniel Fandiño) and Fandiño’s Zarzutzki’s duo with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm....

feeltrip.bigcartel.com/product/feeltrip-lovers If you’ve ever walked up or down Milwaukee Avenue near the Whistler, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a large portrait of a doubly bare-chested couple in a half embrace. The size of the photo will catch your eye, and the gaudy-yet-sincere image will keep you gazing into Foto Quetzal’s front window like it was the scene of a gnarly multicar pileup. With its ripped-from-a-dime-store-romance-novel-cover composition and gauzy touch of soft focus, the portrait is awkward and a little nauseating, but the unpretentious and heartfelt display is charming enough to win you over, or at least stick with you; it’s the only thing people reference on Foto Quetzal’s Yelp page....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “They wrote to the University of Chicago to get to use the name Chicago Review,” says Cynthia Sherry, Chicago Review’s current publisher. “They thought it would give it extra cachet. The name implies that all we do is Chicago-based books. But we do lots of national-interest titles, too.” “Everything is a little quirky, a little edgy, smart,” says Sherry....

Challenged by Naha’s Steve Carrow with baby formula, Longman & Eagle bartender Derek Alexander—a recent father—”went really over the top,” perusing more than 20 chai recipes for this cocktail inspired by the historic spice trade. In addition to making “pearls” with the Enfamil, he threw in a foam made with some of his wife’s breast milk. Batavia arrack is an Indonesian spirit distilled from sugarcane and fermented red rice. (Recipe below slideshow....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Victoire “Along with Clogs and William Brittelle, this New York chamber-ish quintet is part of a thriving community of classically trained musicians incorporating ideas from rock into serious composition,” writes Peter Margasak. “Victoire’s forthcoming Cathedral City (due September 28 on New Amsterdam, a label that’s been specializing in such hybrids) delivers a kind of mesmerizing, catchy minimalism, blending elaborate counterpoint, rich yet often dissonant harmony, and sophisticated melodic development into warm, accessible pieces you might even call songs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week’s Reader is special for the entire staff because it’s our annual Fall Arts issue, where we run down the events in visual arts, theater, dance, and, of course, music that you should know about over the next 80 days. It’s a special issue for me too, because it’s the last one I worked on as a Chicago resident....

Chicago-based Tantalus Theatre Group is dead now, its college-buddy founders having turned thirtyish and moved on with their lives. But its legacy is about to flower. Back in 2008 Tantalus took one of its shows, Dreadful Penny’s Exquisite Horrors, to fringe festivals in Minneapolis and New York. Traveling by Megabus, schlepping costumes and props, and crashing with strangers, the troupe shared the total-immersion theater-party atmosphere with hundreds of other performers and avid audience members....