Taste of Randolph Street celebrates the West Loop’s restaurant and arts scenes this weekend on Randolph from Peoria to Racine. As usual, some of the neighborhood’s favorite restaurants (including BellyQ, Wishbone, and Publican Quality Meats) will be selling food, but the best part of the three-day fest might be its three music stages—the West Stage, the East Stage, and the DJ Dance Stage. On Fri 6/14, music begins at 6 PM; headlining the West Stage is indie-rock sorta-supergroup Divine Fits (featuring members of Wolf Parade, Spoon, and the New Bomb Turks), after locals JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound and Great Divide....

QI’m a 23-year-old homo who came out one year ago. Life has done good and bad things to me. Good things include success in the intelligence lottery, a full ride to college, and now a job with a six-figure income. Sadly, I find that my place in life is different from the place occupied by most other young gay men. When meeting someone, I am often bummed to discover that they are in a state of transience (between cities, between degrees), or bummed because I detect a difference in socioeconomic upbringing/status that will make it hard for us to relate to each other, or bummed because they are not as smart as I am, or most often bummed over a combination of all these things....

friday13 LUCINDA WILLIAMS Lucinda Williams has the power to hypnotize with her voice, but that didn’t keep me from noticing the shortcomings of her new album, West (Lost Highway). It seems like she’s lost some of her lyrical sharpness, far too often plodding through verses that make a single point over and over, and though she and producer Hal Wilner assembled a stellar supporting cast (including guitarist Bill Frisell, violinist Jenny Scheinman, and keyboardist Rob Burger), the guests rarely contribute anything other than ethereal swirls of fluff or stolid grooves....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two Saturdays ago my boyfriend and I took a ride out to Elmwood Park. We were headed back to Caputo’s Market. This flagship store of the local chain opened last year, we “discovered” it a month ago, and we’ve been back three times already. Such produce! Ground lamb! An aisle of olive oil alone. And the “exotic” eastern European food section—not just the widely offered Polish specialities but items from the Czech Republic....

Albert Camus finished his first draft of Caligula in 1938, when he was just 25—”the age when one doubts everything except oneself,” as he later put it. The tragedy’s central character is a young man of about the same age who nevertheless doubts nothing: Caligula, the sister-shtupping, friend-killing, self-deifying Roman emperor whose brief, autocratic reign (AD 37-41) stands out for its capriciousness and cruelty. Prefiguring the dictators of Camus’s own time, Caligula criminalized dissent, gouged the citizenry to pay for extravagant construction projects, and had former supporters put to death....

Last spring quarter, Northwestern University music student Timothy McNair, a master’s candidate in voice, had a problem with an assignment in Professor Donald Nally’s chorale class. Among the pieces the class was required to learn and perform in concert was “Song of Democracy,” which sets 19th-century poetry by Walt Whitman to mid-20th-century music by Howard Hanson. Yes, McNair says. Whitman considered blacks to be less evolved than whites, opposed voting rights for them, and didn’t think they’d survive as a race to have a future in the great American democracy....

Nathan Christ John Yingling John Yingling, originally from Appleton, Wisconsin, made a pretty big splash during his years in Chicago, videotaping countless shows and documenting the underground scene on his blog Gonzo Chicago. He raised money for equipment and made it his mission to capture every show he could in high-quality video, and somehow managed to miss almost nothing. Last year, a change in career took Yingling to Missoula, Montana, of all places....

As the clock struck five on a recent Friday, patrons began to bounce through the doors at the Bar Louie in Dearborn Station. First two, then five, then a boisterous group ten strong and looking barely legal. Laughter erupted from a quartet of African-American women in business casual. Two young Latinos worked laptops at a two-top by the bar, where a lone white guy in a painter’s cap nursed a Corona and watched the Blackhawks game flash across a bank of TVs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About Face Theatre has launched an emergency campaign to stabilize its finances. The company announced today that it will postpone its planned spring 2009 production–the world premiere of What Once We Felt, by Ann-Marie Healy–until next fall. At the same time, the troupe’s board of directors is mounting a “Face the Future” initiative “to save the organization by raising $300,000,” according to a press release....

Last month I wrote a profile of Susan Nussbaum, a longtime Chicago playwright and disability rights activist who’d just released her first book. That she left the theater was a bit of a bummer—it stemmed from her frustration at failing to get her last and, in her view, her best play produced—but she followed it up with a respectable enough second act: Good Kings Bad Kings, a moving, creatively structured novel about a group of disabled kids trapped in a state-run institution....

The Reader’s Choice: Stella’s Sports Bar Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The jukebox at Stella’s doesn’t get more of my dollar bills than any other just because it’s located in my favorite little boozing spot in the city, although that probably helps. But years’ worth of suggestions from the bar’s eclectic cast of regulars have yielded a machine stocked with dozens of albums that any well-rounded record collection should contain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All three issues have roiled the council over the last year. Last summer’s big-box minimum-wage battles helped provoke several labor unions to get involved in the municipal elections, which produced nine new aldermen. In May Mayor Daley and his allies pushed an affordable housing ordinance through the council despite criticism from Preckwinkle and others that it didn’t do enough to help low-income families....

According to her Twitter feed, Kiran Advani has been officially named the Fashion Programming Director for the city’s fashion initiatives, effectively taking over the job vacated by Melissa Gamble last May. Advani, a publicist who was hired by the city to handle promotion for fashion events in February 2010, has been helping to handle Gamble’s responsibilities ever since her resignation and was effectively doing her job for the last several months....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weaving through the vast space of a long-shuttered warehouse at 2033 W. North, Chop Shop & 1st Ward reveals a different side of its concept with every twist and turn. Up front is a butcher shop open from 9 AM to 8 PM, serving sandwiches and coffee and selling house-made Italian sausage and meats like porchetta; in the refrigerator case are jars of pickled vegetables and the house giardiniera....

Update: Broadway Bank is officially on the FDIC’s failed bank list, along with two other local banks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ABC7 reports that the FDIC has arrived, though it’s not yet on the FDIC’s failed banks list (eight seven so far today). In a 2009 cover story, “Alexi’s Albatross,” Mick Dumke told the story of Alexi Giannoulias and his family’s bank, which was founded in 1979; the piece explains a lot about how it went from one of the most profitable banks in the country and the most profitable in the state to where it is today....

“Let’s ask the chefs at new restaurants to pick their favorite new restaurants,” we said. “With the caveat that they can’t pick their own. Wouldn’t that be interesting?” Rob and Alison Leavitt, Mado Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s so hard to choose where you’re going to spend your money these days—we know that if we go to Lula or Avec our money is going to be well spent....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saturday at this year’s Chicagoland Flower & Garden Show, Garden Gourmet features cooking demonstrations from chefs Alex Cheswick of May Street Market, Darrel Anderson of Dinner’s Ready, and Ina Pinkney of Ina’s at 11 AM, 1 PM, and 3 PM, respectively. All recipes will use ingredients that can be grown around the house, and the first 100 people attending each session get to sample the food....

Philip Montoro, Reader music editor Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Abana Ba Nasery, Classic Acoustic Recordings From Western Kenya This trio was famous in Kenya in the 60s and early 70s for playing a Luhya style called omutibo, whose instrumentation usually consists of two acoustic guitars and a ribbed glass Fanta bottle scraped with a nail. The sweet, jaunty, intricately entangled guitars, the crickety rhythm of the bottle, and the sad-happy three-part harmony singing are just the thing for a summer night you know will end too soon....

Presented by the Society for Arts, the Polish Film Festival in America runs Friday, November 5, through Thursday, November 21, with screenings this week at Beverly Arts Center; Copernicus Center; Facets Cinematheque; Golf Glen 5, 9180 W. Golf Rd., Niles; Pickwick; River East 21; and Society for Arts. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $13, $10 for documentaries, and a festival pass, good for seven screenings, is $70. Following are reviews of selected films through Thursday, November 11, plus showtimes for later weeks; for more information, a complete schedule, and ticket purchases, call 773-486-9612 or go to pffamerica....

Q I’m a 29-year-old single straight man. Over the past year I’ve become very close friends with a gay man close to my age. We have a blast hanging out, and I value our friendship. Four months ago he told me that he’d developed romantic feelings for me and said he needed a little space to save our friendship. For a couple of months we saw each other only with mutual friends....