Music Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Tortoise 2.0 The group was commissioned by the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Jazz Institute of Chicago to kick off the series Made in Chicago: World Class Jazz with an original composition incorporating some of the city’s most interesting jazz players. Reedists Ed Wilkerson Jr. and Greg Ward, flutist Nicole Mitchell, pianist and ARP wizard Jim Baker, and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm won’t merely be stepping up in turn to improvise solos—they were invited to rehearsals to develop their own parts and help shape the work....

Borders have frequently shifted around the land now known as the Republic of Macedonia–over the past two millennia it’s been a Christian and pagan nation, ruled by Byzantines and Communists, and neighboring Greece still disputes its right to call itself Macedonia. As you might imagine, a place with this much history has a rich folk tradition, sorting generations of cultural confusions into poignant and mesmerizing song and dance forms. Goran Alachki is a master of Macedonian folk and its tricky time signatures–an accordionist and composer, he’s performed professionally since he was 15, run a studio devoted to folk music, documented festival performances, and operated a music school since 1999....

I found myself in the Wells high school auditorium last week eagerly anticipating the big public hearing on the city budget. You know—the annual rite in which the taxpayers get to tell Mayor Emanuel what they think about his plans to spend about $8 billion of their tax dollars. Then they wait a couple weeks before approving almost everything the mayor asked for. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The public doesn’t participate in the City Council hearings because—well, this is not some small village in New England....

Foie gras is a product that is legal to produce and sell, thanks to the overseeing USDA. They approve the food for legal sale, and they are a federal institution. I was under the impression that city laws don’t get to contradict federal laws [“When Activists Attack” by Mick Dumke, June 22]. Even more foolish is that a banned-city restaurant owner can purchase foie gras legally from another city, but can’t sell it back (although it can be legally given away for free)....

LAST DECEMBER SIX off-duty Chicago police officers reportedly attacked four businessmen in a bar, leaving one in need of reconstructive surgery and another with four broken ribs. In February off-duty officer Anthony Abbate beat up a young female bartender who declined to serve him any more drinks. Both incidents were recorded by security cameras. The damn thing about it is that Michael Pleasance would probably be alive today if the two officers assigned to cover the Red Line station at 95th Street hadn’t been late for work....

The Illusion Court Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But if Kushner’s The Illusion is basically just a warm-up exercise for his magnum opus, it’s a mighty successful one. Especially as staged by Charles Newell for Court Theatre, Corneille’s Kushnerized tale of paternal crime and punishment comes across as a dark lark. Naturally, Pridamant is overjoyed to see his son alive. But the images raise some disturbing issues for the old man....

Huberman’s Raise Why do you have to use the Freedom of Information Act to get this information? Every dime they spend comes from the public. We pay them. Clearly those at the CPS know that the law means that we are entitled to this information. Why do they need to be compelled if they have nothing to hide? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why should we trust them?...

I’m still not real sure how interested regular people are in the Muxtape service, but I know that Internet nerds are eating it up. I didn’t actually realize how much they’re digging it until I ran across Wired’s Muxtape guide and its comments section. Apparently there is not only a tumblelog of Muxtape recommendations up now but also a Muxtape search engine and a script for making those streaming song files downloadable....

Right now pop music is as genre blind as it’s ever been. Though the Internet has encouraged the development of ever more specialized niche communities, it’s also erased many of the aesthetic and social distinctions between styles—rock bands are making EDM tracks, R&B singers are stealing moves from indie bands, and country music has recently found an unlikely source of inspiration in hip-hop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This community coalesced in the mid-80s around a small group of DJs who were coming up in the city’s burgeoning house scene, among them Matt Warren, Miguel Garcia, and Ralphi Rosario....

The first question that pops into anyone’s head when confronted with Takito Kitchen should be “Does Wicker Park need more gringo tacos?” Sure, Big Star‘s patio overflows anytime the mercury rises above 60, but isn’t that what Antique Taco is supposed to take care of? OK, Antique Taco has a Mexican in charge of taco construction, but its atmosphere is as white as a cracker factory. Dworshak offers as precursors to the tacos a selection of seven shareable plates, and in some cases they steal the show from the main event....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was not born with a silver spoon. I was raised in a single-parent family. My mother was a welder by trade. My sisters and I loved our mother, and she loved us. But you know, when your mother has to work long, hard hours to provide for three children, that leaves some potential for gaps in your development....

Traditionally, when people say hardcore bands have “progressed” it means they’ve begun the slow process of abandoning the genre for something more accessible. Plenty of hardcore bands have started slipping into 90s alt-rock territory, but Baltimore’s Turnstile use their new album, Glow On, to draw out the fact that heavy radio-friendly rock was built on hardcore’s DNA. After all, you don’t get Rage Against the Machine without the Inside Out seven-inch Zack de la Rocha helped write before his more famous band formed....

The set for Victor Alexander’s Line of Sighs is genius. One glance at the precisely arrayed bungee cords tells you the piece is about connections, which Cuban native Alexander—now a Hedwig Dances performer—sees in terms of past, present, and future. “I miss my home a lot,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t move forward.” Far from sentimental, the 45-minute Line of Sighs catches the six performers in a web of complex, uneasily negotiated relationships and life paths....

40 years ago Tuesday Dennis Byrne tells us something in his Tuesday Tribune column that I’d forgotten—if I ever knew it in the first place—and surely almost all his other readers had forgotten too. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling 40 years ago that established a constitutional right to abortion, was not handed down alone. Byrne explains that Roe established a right to abortion “to preserve a woman’s health,” but that this right is less than absolute (a limitation Byrne calls “reasonable”)....

RED RIDING: 1974 directed by Julian Jarrold A gnarled oak of a man (played by veteran character actor Warren Clarke), Molloy has clearly been on the case too long, and his statement of sympathy provokes such an uproar that his superiors decide to replace him. But his words hang over the entire trilogy, which portrays the West Yorkshire force as a cesspool of corruption and misogyny. men are the enemy reads a placard in one of the news photos that’s intercut with Molloy’s broadcast....

Pie Hoosier Mama Pie Company 1618 1/2 W. Chicago, 312-243-4846, hoosiermamapie.com Pie is about obsession. What else would compel someone to spend hours blending and chilling and rolling and crimping the perfect crust, and then dreaming up the perfect mixture of fruit or custard or chocolate to fill it? In comparison, mixing up a batch of cupcakes is nothing. The pie sign at Hoosier Mama draws customers to West Town from all over the city, either to buy a dessert to take home, to sit at one of the shabby-chic tables and enjoy a slice of pie (chess pie pictured above) and a cup of coffee for $5, or, on Friday nights, to partake of the pie flights, where they can sample any three of the ten varieties on offer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s nothing original about becoming introspective this time of year. For about a week, we’re all prepared to scale mountains of personal truth and finally obey the Nietzschean dictate to become who we are. In the restraint and relative sobriety that follow in the wake of holiday bacchanalia, we’re ready—yep, really ready this time—to become vegans, yogis, patient and attentive partners, and speakers of conversant French....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alison Bechdel is a badass. Her book Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was my first experience with the graphic novel. To this day I remain blown away. Fun Home is a memoir that chronicles Bechdel’s relationship with her father and her attempt to understand his unexpressed homosexuality. The story unfolds like a Tarantino film; Bechdel describes her father’s suicide toward the beginning of the book and the rest of the 232 pages move back and forth in time, revealing details of her childhood and relationship with her father....

Brave New Art World, bravenewartworld.com The art world can seem like an intimidating place. Galleries can have a particularly exclusionary feel, like immaculately tended gardens seen from the other side of the hedge. But as part of the cultural ecosystem, art needs us as much as we need it. And in order to achieve that symbiosis, there can be no perception of barriers. Enter Claire Molek: generational ambassador, intrepid gallerist, and all-around ball-busting iconoclast....

I still haven’t quite gotten over “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s,” a blockbuster of an exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth that was on display last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was beautiful and moving, sure, but it was also the thing you hated most about museums as a kid: it was educational, highlighting the radical, tragic beauty of AIDS-era queer activism that gay rights groups today are largely content to forget....