The Reader’s Choice: Alinea and L2O (tie) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After dinner at Alinea with college friends, we realized our bill was half the cost of a year’s tuition, room, and board in the early 70s. Unfortunately our parents weren’t covering us this time around. But then you don’t “go out to eat” at Alinea like you do at other restaurants. Chef Grant Achatz challenges the conventions of dining out, playfully pushing limits while stimulating familiar sensations—diners are said to have teared up at the childhood memory of autumnal bonfires conjured when pheasant with cider gel is served with smoking oak leaves....

Black Messiah This is music-critic Oscar season. Every December, music publications compile their 50 favorite albums into lists, and music fans either cheer on or eviscerate the outlets’ choices. The rankings are subjective and often appear arbitrary—what really distinguishes a 44 from a 45?—but they mean something to readers looking to put the year in context. Lists are a good way to figure out what you missed in the past 12 months; they let you see which albums everyone’s been talking about....

With platinum albums an endangered species and the practice of selling music looking more and more outdated, you’ve got to wonder how much the recording industry will have to celebrate at the 54th Grammy Awards in February. That is, if you forget momentarily how much the recording industry loves blowing its own horn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the Grammys are also under increasing pressure to appeal to consumers acclimated to the rapid churn of Internet-enabled entertainment—people for whom the awards’ period of eligibility, which runs from the beginning of last September through the end of this September, means that pretty much anything that might win is already ancient history....

The first time most people met Jen Kirkman, she was drunk. She narrated two installments of the Funny or Die video series “Drunk History,” in which people intentionally get slurry, spitty, and heavy-lidded to explain some aspect of history that will later be acted out, right down to the dialogue, by other really funny people in period garb. (An aside: “Drunk History” is slated to premiere as a Comedy Central series this summer—way to stay current, guys....

Kelly Christine Musgraves Kacey Musgraves Tomorrow night Kacey Musgraves, one of Nashville’s hottest young singers, rolls into Joe’s to perform in support of her chart-topping album Same Trailer Different Park (Mercury). In some ways the 24-year old Texas native fits squarely into country’s current mainstream, writing overdone pop melodies for songs like “Back on the Map” and “Keep it to Yourself,” and serving up predictable romantic dross on “I Miss You....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alejandro Alvarado raised his clenched fists and bared his teeth through a black and yellow luchador mask. A Little Village native and former construction worker, Alvarado has worked as a guard at the National Museum of Mexican Art for over five years. Slight and soft-spoken, with rectangular glasses and an easy smile, Alvarado loosened up as he tried on the selection of masks in the museum gift shop, mugging for our photographer’s camera....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Starting on Thursday and continuing through Monday, the Music Box will host the Architecture & Design Film Festival, an annual program of design-related documentaries. Don’t go. I’ve watched four of the 15 feature-length selections, and none contained an image awesome enough to evoke a festival—or, for that matter, a film. Three of them—Incessant Visions, about the German architect Erich Mendelsohn; Unfinished Spaces, about Cuba’s National Schools of Art; and Pool Party, about Brooklyn’s giant McCaren Pool—were mildly engaging in an informative, PBS sort of way, yet they were interchangeable in terms of filmmaking (the less said about the glorified slide show Architect: A Chamber Opera in Six Scenes the better)....

Jim DeRogatis brings up a blast from the past: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Long before I was a twinkle in the eye of Holmes’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, I was familiar with Holmes—not through his work, the only Chicago band I’d ever heard of was, oddly enough, Freakwater—but through Thomas Frank’s 1998 Harper’s account of Holmes’s struggle to (ironically) break through with his (ironic) orch-pop act Yum-Yum (“With the benefit of hindsight, 1996’s Dan Loves Patti can almost be seen as bridging the gap between Cardinal and the Arcade Fire,” writes DeRogatis), and the brutal takedown published in Suck, still my favorite online-only magazine....

Kevin Warwick, Reader staff writer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born Against, Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children I’ve recently been rummaging for 80s and early-90s hardcore-punk records and happened across a dumped collection of some 1,200 LPs and seven-inches at Ear Wax Record Shop in Madison. Though I spotted Conflict’s The Final Conflict first, I reluctantly passed it on to a friend so I could snag Born Against’s Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children....

In the wee hours of Saturday, January 25, taxi driver Walid Ziada was cruising west on Belmont toward the six-way intersection with Ashland and Lincoln. The bars had just closed, and he expected to find plenty of fares. So Ziada told him again, more forcefully. The man smirked, as Ziada tells it, and kept shooting, saying “It’s my fucking camera, I can do what I want.” He took photos of the cab’s license plate, and then, according to Ziada, circled around to the driver’s side and through the open window hit Ziada hard in the left eye with the camera....

Patrick Sheerin, executive chef at the Signature Room at the 95th, challenged Jason McLeod, executive chef at Ria and Balsan, to come up with a recipe using asafetida for this installment of our weekly feature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet another name for asafetida, though, is “food of the gods,” and it’s used extensively in India. Once cooked it becomes much milder, though most sources still stress that it should be used in very small amounts....

Following the exits of Brach’s and Fannie May, the Chicago area lost another major candy manufacturer in January, when the American Licorice Company—maker of Red Vines, Sour Punch straws, and Super Ropes—pulled the plug on its 250,000-square-foot factory in south suburban Alsip. But while contractors broke down equipment among Dumpsters filled with enormous clumps of fused red licorice whips, a sweet aroma hung about the echoing plant like a ghost....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also on hand was Steve Brill, founder of CourtTV, American Lawyer, and Brill’s Content, to pitch a monetizing operation he launched a couple of months ago, Journalism Online, in order to offer news operations a “common platform” where news can be bought and paid for. Here’s a report on that, with plenty of links, followed by public comment that skews in the direction of “what’s Brill smoking?...

Each year I attend the Chicago International Film Festival, I end up seeing a handful of movies I find truly impressive, another handful I despise, and at least a dozen I’d rate as decent. That ratio of great to mediocre to bad movies is more or less the same as what I encounter in my regular moviegoing. The difference is that I go into most CIFF films with far fewer expectations....

Because Peter Brotzmann has a (well-deserved) reputation as one of the most ferocious free-jazz saxophonists ever to blow a note, when I write about him I tend to emphasize his overlooked skill and sensitivity on more restrained material. The fact is, he’s constantly running the gamut, from guttural and hair-raising to pensive and pointillist and back again. A record like last year’s Full Blast (Jazzwerkstatt), where he’s as relentless as a wrecking ball, is quite unusual for him....

In his inauguration speech a year ago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was unequivocal in declaring the start of a new era: “From now on, when it comes to change, Chicago will not take no for an answer.” Legend Insider Donor RepublicanContractor Favor seeker Shadow government Carrie Austin, thirty-fourth Ward alderman, chair of the City Council budget committee Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on the number of visits to his office, Austin is one of Emanuel’s favorite aldermen; she was listed on his calendar seven times for individual and group meetings as the mayor prepared for his first council budget vote....

Although Curt [“Confessions of a Music Guy,” Letters, June 22] has made some valid points, I still fail to see the problem with running a “business.” Even though people seem to think that music is the wonderful thing that inspires their lives and makes all of these great memories for them. Let us look inside the business behind all of the people that are behind the music. Even though I am not an expert, and I do not claim to be, I have worked for WBR, a major rock station, toured with bands, and played music for the last 13 years....

QI’m 16 and gay. I recently got into an argument with my parents over whether HIV is spread by saliva or if you can be infected during oral sex. I thought that you were safe kissing and that it’s OK to have oral sex, but that you need to use condoms for anal sex. My parents disagree and I found mixed answers searching online. I trust you, though—what do you say?...

Bloodshot Records says on its Web site that this legendary Kansas band’s 1996 debut, Daddy’s Farm, might be “the most polarizing record we’ve ever put out.” Well, I can understand that–nobody ever threw a scarier shot of alt into alt-country than Scroat Belly, a bloody-mouthed, poo-flinging, bottle-smashing bluegrass-based nightmare that infused your basic Flatt & Scruggs high-speed plucking with metallic violence and a sort of PCP-flavored anarchy that at times recalled early Butthole Surfers....

THURSDAY12 Thursday12 Cola Freaks Woods of Ypres Alien Queen: The Concert David Davis & the Warrior River Boys Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs Saturday14 Young Widows Sunday15 James Blake John Tchicai & the Engines Tuesday17 Kelley Stoltz Twilight Singers Wednesday18 Acrassicauda Childish Gambino Donkeys ALIEN QUEEN: THE CONCERT Jaded with classic-rock laser light shows? Tired of tribute bands? The Scooty & JoJo Show’s Alien Queen might appear to be the next logical evolutionary step in the quasi-ironic appreciation of rock greats, but there’s more than that going on in this crazily slapstick take on the first two Alien movies—which, in case the name didn’t clue you in, is performed as a musical consisting of songs by Queen....