“I was a choirboy most of my life,” says Ahmad Simmons. “My whole family is religious. But when I started to dance, I started to feel different in church.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Simmons means “choirboy” literally. He started in fourth grade at the Texas Boys’ Choir School (now the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts), where students began each day with two hours of singing, followed by academics and what he laughingly calls PE: “We’d walk along the levee across the street....

It’s been one of the wettest springs on record, but with Memorial Day come and gone, Chicagoans are champing at the bit to eat (and drink) out of doors. For our annual Alfresco guide, we’ve combed our listings to find great spots for alfresco dining, from rooftop patios to secluded garden nooks to lantern-strung terraces. A basement little brother to Bin 36, A Mano retooled earlier this year after a burst pipe shut it down for more than a month....

Niky Dogatzis Intronaut never step in the same Los Angeles River twice. I have a four-story nerd boner for Meshuggah, and I’ve never tried to hide it: I worked myself up into a proper lather over their previous Chicago show, and later declared it one of my five favorite live metal experiences of 2012. So I’m not exactly on the fence about whether to recommend their Friday concert at the House of Blues, even though front man Jens Kidman has been fighting an ugly flu (for at least one show last week he was replaced by a propped-up inflatable doll wearing a cutout of his face while the band played along to prerecorded vocal tracks)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past few weeks I’ve felt as if I’ve discovered a significant French filmmaker every time I’ve turned my head. This feeling derives in part from the recent Chicago runs of Philippe Garrel’s A Burning Hot Summer and Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen (which I wrote about on Friday); the Music Box Theatre’s upcoming French film series is another factor....

“People say that a bottle of Angostura lasts longer than most marriages, but not here,” Balena mixologist Debbi Peek says. She’s based her cocktail menu on not only Angostura bitters, but a whole host of other herbal alcohols in the bitters family—mostly amaro, an Italian liqueur. They’re not all bitter, though: amari can range from syrupy sweet to face-puckeringly harsh. Peek tasted dozens while creating her cocktail menu, taking notes on each one, assigning it a bitterness rating on a scale of one to ten, and experimenting to see what spirits worked with which amari....

Wend Kuuni Tomorrow night Black Cinema House will present two overlapping film programs in the north and south sides. At 6 PM the group will present a program of work by British filmmaker and former architect Patrick Keiller at their center in Grand Crossings. (Fittingly, it’s part of their series “Image, Building, Object: Exploring Architecture and Design on Film.”) Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared Keiller to Chris Marker in his combinations of documentary observation and fictionalized narration; his “Robinson” trilogy—London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997), and Robinson in Ruins (2010)—contemplates historical and modern landscapes in England as part of a larger spiritual meditation....

Next Tuesday the city’s Community Development Commission is expected to sign off on a $60 million project that’s symbolic of the region’s shifting economy and energy needs: a deal between the city and energy giant Exelon to turn a polluted, long-unused former industrial site into the biggest urban solar power facility in the country.Assuming the CDC signs off, the project is likely to go before the City Council on July 29....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve just been listening to someone inside the Tribune who’s trying to think it through. (This person’s years and experience add up to a perspective I’ve learned to respect and trust.) Lipinski had been editor seven years already, and Sam Zell and his cowboys were obviously not her style; if she thought of herself as a short-timer why put herself through the agony of deciding who stays and who goes?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I do believe that vodka is vodka and that those high-priced brands in the fancy bottles are just a form of downpouring at the distillery level and are not worth the price,” wrote author Bryan McDonald. We are convinced that the two greatest scams of the last decade are boutique bottled waters and luxury Vodka, with Vodka essentially being the spirit world’s version of water, where its chief attributes are its neutral character and the ability to mix easily with other ingredients and fade into the background....

“Under Daley the main qualification for service on the [Chicago Plan] commission is loyalty to Daley.” —”A Commission of Puppets” by Ben Joravsky, May 15 Bright Spencer The mother-in-law sandwich is known in Mexico as a “torta de tamal.” In Mexico City it is a bolillo [stuffed with] a hot tamal (please do not spell it tamale; in Spanish the words that end in a consonant are pluralized with an “es” ending)....

Founded by first violinist Eric Lewis in 1968, the Manhattan String Quartet is best known for its affinity for the music of Shostakovich, which can be traced back to the quartet’s pioneering mid-80s tour of the Soviet Union. Here they’ll perform his Twelfth Quartet, a work less tinged with the anguish and despair characteristic of the composer’s other late quartets and a good match for the Manhattan’s lean, propulsive approach. The concert opens with Charles Ives’s First String Quartet, a precocious student work that demonstrates the composer’s ability to integrate American sounds–in this case, Protestant hymns–with European influences....

A couple weeks ago the “urban culture” site Ruby Hornet threw a private party at the James Hotel’s posh and futuristic J Bar in River North. The occasion was the release of Chicago Picasso (Duck Down), the first solo mix tape from Kidz in the Hall MC Naledge, and a fair cross section of the local hip-hop scene turned out. The mirrored partitions in the bar’s seating area—actually panels of one-way glass concealing flat-screen monitors—displayed a video slide show that was mostly photos of the MC....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I wrote earlier this year in a post about Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, I can never bring myself to hate inane family comedies like Parental Guidance because I’ve witnessed firsthand how happy they make people with developmental disabilities. Movies like these operate on the simplest level in terms of visual content, regularly depicting characters performing familiar actions (making toast, starting a car, watching a baseball game, etc) with little to no conflicting detail in the frame....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s something about freedom of speech that doesn’t sit well with some members of the press. Any notable who says anything provocative is in for a lecture — as if the First Amendment is some sort of “Get out of jail free” card they’re shabbily taking advantage of. The other day, Rick Majerus, the men’s basketball coach at Saint Louis University, showed up at a Hillary Clinton rally, and, being a local notable, was buttonholed by a TV reporter....

skpy A human brain subjected to pseudoscience Do experimental subjects exposed to words suggesting age—Florida, bingo, gray—walk slower? In 1996, psychologists from New York University said they did—and when Malcolm Gladwell recounted the study in his best seller Blink, the “goal-priming” effect “soon became a staple of pop psychology,” the author of an essay in the New York Times wrote yesterday. The slow-walker study and other goal-priming studies seemed to show “the power of subtle cues to influence our attitudes and actions,” Sally L....

I’m not upset that Rammstein have released a new album called Liebe Ist für Alle Da, which is German for Lube Is for Your Ass, which is of course English for Ugh. (Check to be sure your sense of humor is working before you correct my translation, please.) I’m not upset even that the superdeluxe edition includes actual lube, along with, y’know, six translucent pink dildos allegedly based on the band members’ members....

When I met Angela Mullenhour a little more than five years ago, she was 19 and had a habit of sneaking into open mikes at bars like Quenchers and the Inner Town Pub. She played raw, inelegant solo sets of folk-soul heavily indebted to Cat Power and Bob Dylan, and even though she was obviously nervous and still figuring out what to do with herself onstage, her intensely heartfelt songs and gorgeous voice consistently made her the best performer of the night....

Sculptor Bob Emser switched his college major from business to art 35 years ago but never left commerce behind. If you’re an artist, you are in business, Emser says, and your success is likely to depend as much on your management and marketing skills as your talent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Emser says he entered a lot of competitions and participated in a lot of outdoor art fairs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve always thought A Tribe Called Quest were OK, but I never rode hard for them. When the six or so people at my high school who listened to rap they couldn’t hear on the radio were passing around The Low End Theory, I thought it was weak compared to the blare of Fear of a Black Planet and too smooth compared to Check Your Head....

Jason DaSilva in his video-shot documentary When I Walk It’s increasingly common for distributors to make movies previewable on password-protected webpages, and for exhibitors to send critics passwords rather than discs, as they’ve done in the past. Truth be told, this is how I watched several movies I reviewed in the last month. There are obvious practical benefits to this arrangement: distributors save money on DVDs, and exhibitors don’t have to worry about discs getting lost in the mail....