Julia Adams SummerSweet Garden Design Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before she even knew that Lounge Ax, the legendary club she’d co-owned for a decade, would be closing for good, Julia Adams had embarked on her next career: garden design. With an old friend, Dianne Andrews, Adams had begun taking classes through the Joseph Regenstein, Jr. School of the Chicago Botanic Garden; both ended up earning certification in ornamental plant materials and garden design....

The bottle labels for Cerveza de los Muertos identify it as a product of Cerveceria Mexicana, which is in Tecate, about 30 miles east of Tijuana in Baja California. It’s the third largest brewery in Mexico, and it does a fair amount of contract brewing—though best known for Mexicali, it also makes the Ed Hardy beers, the Trader Jose Mexican lagers, and the legendarily nasty Cave Creek Chili Beer, among others....

What’s next in alternative trap One of my favorite music stories of the year is about a tune that didn’t make the official cut of an album released at the tail end of 2012—that being Chief Keef‘s “Citgo,” which is one of the three bonus tracks included in the deluxe version of Finally Rich. It would’ve been easy to miss “Citgo” since its placement on Keef’s studio debut makes it look like an afterthought....

Ethan Miller/Getty Images Boehner and McConnell obstruct; Obama defies. Last Friday I had a dandy idea for a Bleader post. The night before President Obama had spoken to the nation about immigration reform. “Last year,” said Obama, “68 Democrats, Republicans, and independents came together to pass a bipartisan bill in the Senate. It wasn’t perfect. It was a compromise. But it reflected common sense.” And so forth. Alas, Friday was a busy day and the post didn’t get finished....

Since late 2007 representatives of governments from the United States, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, and Canada, among others, have been negotiating a treaty known as ACTA. The negotiations—the seventh round is scheduled for Mexico in January—are held in strict secrecy, and ACTA memos are physically watermarked to prevent leaks. Some Freedom of Information Act requests regarding ACTA—including one in January by the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)—have been flat-out denied, and similar requests have produced papers so heavily redacted that blacked-out text runs almost edge to edge....

Dancer-choreographer Nora Chipaumire offers a glimpse of “the real Africa” in the world premiere of Lions Will Roar, Swans Will Fly, Angels Will Wrestle Heaven, Rains Will Break: Gukurahundi, created and performed with musician-poet-activist Thomas Mapfumo and his band Blacks Unlimited. Chipaumire—who exiled herself from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in 1989 and now lives in the U.S.—says that her aim in this piece is to confront the “packaging” of Africa as an exotic land of safaris, violence, and famine....

RELIGULOUS ss Directed by larry charles Written by bill maher Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maher’s first film project, Religulous, is a major disappointment because here, unlike on Real Time, he aims for laughs instead of insight—and aims low. The movie opens with Maher in Israel, perched on a hill in what was once the ancient city of Megiddo, which the Book of Revelation prophecies will be the site of Armageddon....

TICKETS TO THIS year’s Pitchfork Music Festival went on sale earlier than usual—in fact, you could buy discounted three-day passes as of 12/21. The three-day event will be held the weekend of Fri 7/19 in Union Park, and though the lineup hasn’t been announced, this Wolf has a few guesses about who might play: noise-rap provocateurs Death Grips, British R&B singer Jessie Ware, Florida postpunks Merchandise, foodie MC Action Bronson, Toronto grunge trio Metz, downer R&B group the XX, San Francisco metal band Deafheaven, and local singer-songwriter Angel Olsen....

Recently a number of Chicago soul-record fanatics have founded reissue labels, bringing belated exposure to little-known regional acts of decades past, but John Ciba isn’t stopping there. Since launching his Rabbit Factory imprint with last year’s terrific compilation CD The Birmingham Sound: The Soul of Neal Hemphill, Vol. 1, Ciba’s helped get some of these rediscovered artists back onstage. Last week he put on an old-school soul revue in Brooklyn; today it arrives in Chicago....

D.H. Lawrence wrote three versions of the novel that we know as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Pascale Ferran adapts the second version, John Thomas and Lady Jane (the pet names of Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover for their sex organs) into a masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling (2006) that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace. Ferran proves that a distinction between sensual and sexual art is worth making....

“Not only has it not worked, it has sucked—and sucked the life out of the very entity that made it possible (WBEZ).” Anyway, it’s clearly not just a matter of fiscal resources, it’s a matter of human resources being misused… Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like the people in the article, like the folks at the station, like the posters on this forum… I too am torn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Robert R. McCormick Foundation—now separate from but historically entwined with the Tribune Company—just announced that it’s giving away $6 million over the next three years on a campaign “to expand innovative approaches to improving news literacy.” The campaign’s called “Why News Matters.” The first $1 million in grants have been awarded. They’ll fund news literacy programs in various Chicago-area schools and colleges....

Scott Olson/Getty Images Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police superintendent Garry McCarthy at a news conference January 31. They announced that they were reassigning 200 officers to patrol because of a rising murder rate. The city’s stunning homicide rate last year has stretched into 2013. The 42 homicides last month were the most for a January in Chicago since 2002. The White House announced today that Michelle Obama will attend Saturday’s funeral service for one of January’s victims—Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old who was shot to death nine days ago in a park not far from the Obamas’ home....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » St. Louis, my hometown and the home of Perennial Artisan Ales, is a Budweiser town through and through—even now that Anheuser-Busch is owned by InBev. (Coincidentally, I just started reading Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer, which is fascinating so far.) True, new microbreweries are springing up there almost as fast as they are in Chicago, and Schlafly has been making craft beer for more than 20 years....

Tuesday nights, after the Film section is finished, I sometimes stop off at the Red Lion Pub near Lincoln Square. The bartender, Joe Heinen—who owns the place with his wife, Sue—mixes a mean manhattan, and he seems to know all there is to know about the great western director John Ford. One afternoon Ben Sachs and I stopped in to test his mettle—two against one, just like in a real western....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ron Santo got screwed again by his peers last week. The Veterans Committee of the Baseball Hall of Fame selected Joe Gordon as its only inductee this season. Gordon, an admittedly great second baseman who was the 1942 Most Valuable Player for the Cleveland Indians (in a year when Ted Williams won the triple crown), snuck in as part of the election based on players whose careers began before 1943....

If you’re a three-year-old colt in Stickney, Illinois, the ticket to Louisville, Kentucky, is winning the Illinois Derby. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year’s winner, Sweetnorthernsaint, was the Kentucky Derby favorite. This year Todd Pletcher, one of the top trainers in America, split up his best three-year-olds to give himself two chances at a Kentucky Derby starter. Any Given Saturday ran in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct in New York (a race once won by Secretariat)....

Quite a few of the folks at Three Floyds are incorrigible metalheads, and the brewery has made plenty of beers in collaboration with (or in homage to) metal bands: a doppelbock called the Creeper with Pelican, an imperial pilsner called Evil Power with Lair of the Minotaur, and a porter called Ragnarok with Amon Amarth, among others. Currently the brewery is selling a Pig Destroyer pale ale, Permanent Funeral; an Eyehategod black IPA, In the Name of Suffering; and a Municipal Waste stout, Toxic Revolution....

Friday7 ChaperoneWeezer Saturday8 Samuel Blaser & Bobby AveyPieta BrownVulgar BoatmenWeezer Sunday9 Agogic Monday10 Distractions Wednesday12 GenerationalsHouses WEEZER Future pop historians may discover that Weezer’s late-career Horrible Period, defined by egregious Dr. Luke-isms and brutally inane lyrics, was just Rivers Cuomo pulling a perverse prank on fans who expected him to carry on as a power-pop auteur and not become the creepy, older, male Avril Lavigne. (His line about “messing with the journalists”—from the awful “Memories,” on Weezer’s awful Epitaph debut, Hurley—could be a clue....

If I were the sort of food writer who thought about page views as much as I’m supposed to, I’d write a blog post with a headline like “Squid ink is the new bacon,” and then send the unpaid interns out to kitchens across the north side to take pictures of all the black food chefs are cooking these days. I loved and wrote about all of those dishes in recent times, but by now you’d think everybody—especially chefs—would be bored with their ilk....