Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t even get a quarter of the way into Mick Wall’s new Led Zeppelin biography, When Giants Walked the Earth, before I got tired of dude’s hyperbole addiction and worshipful attitude toward the band—to say nothing of the awkward, douche-chill-inducing passages written in the second person, where you are genius rock enfant terrible Jimmy Page—and put the book down in favor of Dave Simpson’s infinitely more entertaining and engrossing The Fallen: Searching for the Missing Members of the Fall....

Courtesy of Letherbee Distillers R. Franklin’s Original Recipe Malort Malort has been a thing in Chicago for a while now—about 75 years, to be exact—but suddenly everyone’s talking about it. In just the last few months a Second City short attempted to answer the question of where Malort really comes from, NPR’s blog the Salt published a detailed look at how the wormwood-infused spirit made its way from Sweden to Chicago during Prohibition, and Serious Eats went on a Malort crawl in Wicker Park....

Remember when we were all so excited about “The Carrie Diaries?” I have a complicated relationship with “Sex and the City.” I could say I like it because it’s “so bad it’s good,” but that’s not exactly true. I mean, I actually cried when Miranda and Steve got married. I really laughed when Carrie ate shit on a slippery floor inside a Chanel store in Paris. I REALLY laughed every time she said she “couldn’t help but wonder” about something....

Over the last decade or so the Korean cellist Okkyung Lee has nonchalantly toggled between disparate music worlds, leading her own projects, helping out others like Vijay Iyer, Laurie Anderson, and Wadada Leo Smith, and improvising in countless contexts. She’s a terrific composer and arranger, as you can hear on the 2011 album Noisy Love Songs (Tzadik), which presents her in some of those disparate contexts. But until now there hasn’t been a recording that really captures her interest in and talent for creating dense, in-your-face noise....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ann Arbor’s Barbara Lewis was planning to study nursing when her father learned that a local DJ who was managing the pop singer Del Shannon was on the lookout for songs for him to record. Lewis had been writing her own tunes for a decade for fun, and her mother encouraged her to submit a few to the DJ, Ollie McLaughlin, so she borrowed a friend’s reel-to-reel tape recorder and sang some of her little ditties....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city’s largest summer neighborhood festival returns to Washington Park at 51st and Cottage Grove this Friday through Monday for its 20th annual installment. Presented by the Africa International House, the African Festival of the Arts attracts roughly 250,000 visitors and features several stages of music—funk, hip-hop, jazz, gospel, soul, blues, African music—with top-notch performers headlining every night. Friday’s highlights include traditional African dance demonstrations early in the day and, in the evening, K’Don and the Ohio Players (don’t blame them for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ cover of “Love Rollercoaster”)....

As the lights came up on Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater‘s production of Petite Mort, somebody in the audience whooped. “Ow!!” Like Petite Mort, a company premiere for AAADT, Minus 16 (performed here again this year) gains new force and meaning before an African-American audience. Both works are packed with witty surprises, made for laughter and applause. Moreover, during one extended, affectionate scene, Minus 16 brings audience members onstage to dance....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier today Monica Kendrick mentioned a CD-release party by Sabertooth this weekend, and I just found out about another release celebration this Sunday night–fellow Delmark artist Ari Brown will play three sets, beginning at 7:30 PM, at the New Checkerboard Lounge at 5201 S. Harper Court. A few months ago Brown, one of the sturdiest and most flexible saxophonists in the city, put out a live CD and DVD cut at the Green Mill–no idea why that venue wasn’t chosen for this occasion–and it ably captures his range, from Coltrane-style soprano workouts to blues-rich Chicago hard bop and modal balladry....

It’s easy to make fun of the recent proliferation of restaurant names with ampersands in them, but it could be useful if only someone would standardize their use. Instead of having to explain that a new place is an organic, local, sustainable, nose-to-tail gastropub, for example, you could just say that it has an ampersand in its name. Those in the know wouldn’t need to hear anything else. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Paul Fehribach of Big Jones 5347 N. Clark 773-275-5725 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Laurent Gras’ elegant blog for L2O or the saucy Pickled Tongue by Lockwood chef Phillip Foss are perhaps better known, but I find Paul Fehribach’s instructive, conversational outlet more transporting and—especially in the throes of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe—more inspiring in its ongoing interest in sustainable seafood sourcing. On the blog he regularly dissects recipes, providing an “anatomy” of a dish—farro piccolo, for example, with absinthe-soaked raisins, smoked mushrooms, salsify, and white and green asparagus....

Built with a direct tax on citizens and known as the People’s Palace, the Chicago Cultural Center opened in 1897 with a dual purpose: the south half housed the Chicago Public Library and the north a Civil War memorial hall. The center’s distinctly dual interiors include marble and mosaic walls and staircases and two magnificent Tiffany domes. In 1991, the library moved out and Mayor Richard M. Daley—after some prodding—decided to keep the old building as a free museum....

Fri 12/20: Negative Scanner at Burlington Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Exactly one year to the day from their very first show, local jangle-punk band Negative Scanner will be playing at the Burlington, the place which hosted that show as well. Kevin Warwick writes about the band and their excellent front woman Rebecca Flores, “Soulful and raw but with an unapologetic flamboyance, they put her in a class with Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females....

Spinach and Mashed Potato at Piece Brewery & Pizzeria 1927 W. North 773-772-4422 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It might sound like carbohydrate overkill: hearty scoops of homemade mashed potatoes and handfuls of fresh spinach atop thin, hand-tossed crust, baked New Haven-style. And in fact the Pieceniks say spinach ’n’ spud isn’t one of the most popular combos. But if you like food with complex textures, it can’t be beat....

Among the wind instruments typically used in jazz, the trombone–essentially a giant slide whistle–might be the most challenging when it comes to intonation. Luckily for trombonists, jazz listeners have learned to accept a degree of imprecision from the instrument–which makes the pinpoint virtuosity of Conrad Herwig stand out all the more. In every generation there’s been a handful of trombonists capable of nailing every note at tempos that would make a saxophonist blanch, but unlike some of his predecessors, Herwig has always placed communication above sheer technique....

The last time French performance artist and musician Jean-Louis Costes came through town, a large, hesitantly curious audience dwindled steadily during his 45-minute noise opera till it was down to a couple dozen iron-stomached folks who could handle the sex, violence, piss, vomit, blood, and feces–it’s not every day you see a guy stick a needle up his urethra or set his pubic hair on fire. His current piece, Les Petits Oiseaux Chient (“Little Birds Shit”), is less a horror show than a filthy comedy acted out to his spastic, boingy, flickering tracks, which not even the outrageousness onstage can overshadow....

If The Empire Strikes Back was the cultural flash point for a teenage Generation X in the 80s, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) was omega to its alpha, the herald of young adulthood for the generation’s maturing art-school subset. And unlike George Lucas, once Lynch had captured those imaginations, he never really let go. So when the foremost practicing surrealist in American film holds forth on consciousness, creativity, and his own oeuvre–as he does in his new book Catching the Big Fish (Tarcher/Penguin)–it can be a bit of a mind fuck for the thirtysomethings who grew up on him....

PETER PAN Lookingglass Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years later Barrie published his masterpiece, the children’s play Peter Pan, in which Peter is about ten years old—perpetually poised on the brink of puberty. It was adapted into a novel, initially called Peter and Wendy, in 1911. With Smee turned into a mother, Peter’s nemesis, Captain Hook, is all the more emphatically a terrifying father figure....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McCourt was a major figure in Chicago journalism over the last quarter century, and I’ve written about him many times in Hot Type, usually when things were going wrong. In 1985 McCourt was an options trader who’d contributed theater reviews and a gossip column to Gay Life under the pen name Mimi O’Shea and then become features editor. His lover, Bob Bearden, was Gay Life‘s sales manager....

Two Syllable Records is based in Brooklyn, but the heart of co-owner Zach Pollakoff is in Chicago. Pollakoff is from here, and in 2011 his interest in the local scene inspired him to make a cassette compilation of his favorite underground Windy City musicians. Next week Two Syllable drops a follow-up, Chicago Cassette Compilation: Volume 2, and it includes plenty of Reader favorites such as Cairo Gang, Gel Set, and The-Drum....

First, Reverend Wright gives a couple of speeches, imitating how white people clap, and talking about the differences between white and black brains. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My advisers tell me you’re subconsciously trying to destroy Obama’s campaign because you’re envious of the national attention he’s been getting. So one more time, here’s how things work around here. I give you the city contracts and zoning changes you need to run your church fiefdoms....