It’s not hard to figure out what’s on Manny Flores’s mind these days. Wherever the conversation starts—governmental transparency, the economy, garbage collection, his family life—at some point he steers it toward a sustainable business project called the Green Exchange. His enthusiasm builds until even a straightforward recitation of facts takes on the cadences of a closing argument to the jury: “You’ve got 270,000 square feet of space in an old industrial site....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s it? Forget these “newspapers,” I’m watching TV from now on. This is being described as Hillary’s “Muskie Moment,” in reference to the “crying” “incident” that doomed Ed Muskie in 1972. And it’s a great comparison: this is also a crying-related, silly-ass pseudostory that’s at best way overplayed and at worst inaccurate. David Broder, one of the prime movers behind the Muskie story, describes it as “the story that still nags me....

It was a small story on Orland Park Patch, one of about 500 hyperlocal websites that AOL hopes to have up and running across the country by the end of the year. “A Few More Cuts at the SouthtownStar,” said the October 5 headline. The local daily was trimming its staff yet again; the latest to go were reporter Stephanie Gehring, described as a “well-liked 20-year veteran of the newspaper,” and Rex Robinson, a community news editor....

Jim.henderson/Wikimedia Commons Horace Mann School The time-honored way of writing a New Yorker exposé is to never raise your voice. Instead, pile one specific quietly on another until the reader is silently screaming. In just this fashion, “The Master,” the lead article in the April 1 New Yorker, considers the accusations made by former prep students at the Bronx’s Horace Mann school that back in the 1960s and ’70s they were sexually seduced by their English teacher....

I’ve decided to post the entirety of my interview with Green for a few reasons. The first is that he is one of the most lively and entertaining people I’ve interviewed, and I found his off-the-cuff remarks as interesting as anything he had to say about filmmaking. More importantly, I wanted to preserve the arc of our 25-minute conversation, which surprised me in its progression from glibness to sincerity. That surprise, I think, reveals a lot about Green, who baffled many audiences by going from poetic, independent art movies like George Washington to lowbrow studio comedies ....

The Reader’s Choice: Logan Square Auditorium Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just to be clear, “best” in this case doesn’t refer in any way to the sound quality in this echo chamber of a ballroom. It’s the bane of the city’s live sound engineers, whose valiant efforts are almost always defeated by its cavernous expanse. But if you’ve ever been a small- town punk, the same things that make the Logan Square Auditorium feel like a VFW hall retrofitted for live music—the dated utilitarian decor, the temporary-looking stage, the preponderance of all-ages shows—also make it feel like home....

The members of Chicago institution Tortoise keep busy during the group’s long periods of inactivity: percussionist John McEntire works tirelessly as a recording engineer and producer at his studio, Soma, and guitarist Jeff Parker plays in countless jazz combos, both established and ad hoc, here and in his adopted home of Los Angeles (on Thu 8/8 at Pritzker Pavilion, he and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline will play the classic Paul Bley-John Gilmore album The Turning Point)....

The story is irresistible: in the early 70s, three black brothers from Detroit form a brilliantly original protopunk band, walk away from a major-label record contract on principle, and ultimately throw in the towel, only to be hailed as visionaries when their recordings surface 30 years later. In fact, the story of Death probably accounts for the band’s cult following at least as much as its music, a mere seven tracks that were finally released in 2009 by Chicago’s Drag City Records as ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The audience for webcomics as an art form can be somewhat insular, as webcomics are primarily made by geeks for geeks and if you don’t know arcane quotes of video game dialogue or math-based puns you’re probably not going to get them. (Although that’s starting to change with comics like Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, which generally only requires a basic knowledge of Western literature and history, or Chicagoan John Campbell’s Pictures for Sad Children, which only requires a basic knowledge of clinical depression and crippling existential angst....

Image from shutterstock.com Keep away from open flame OK, so it’s not really breaking news—it happened last week. And it’s not technically cheese: brunost, also known as gjetost, is made from the whey of goat’s milk and is popular in Scandinavia (but while it’s sweet, it’s usually referred to as cheese). But a truckload of it definitely did catch fire. Twenty-seven tons of it, to be exact. The truck was in a tunnel near Tysfjord, in northern Norway, at the time (no cause for the fire was reported), and the blaze took five days to put out....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: David Sedaris‘s latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, features a crow who convinces a ewe to meditate so he can pluck out her lamb’s eyes, lab rats dying slow deaths after being injected with HIV, and an owl caught by his family in what looks like a compromising position (helping a gerbil venture into a hippo’s anus in search of singing leeches)....

Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Repertory of New Work gave us our first look at The North Plan back in 2010, and I’d say most of us were delighted with what we saw. Jason Wells’s writing came across as sharp, dark political comedy. Kimberly Senior’s staging was crisp and fast. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Theater Wit is giving The North Plan a straightforward professional run, and the question is whether that changes things....

Michael Gebert Foull at Keren Kitchen I’m all about adventure at lunch and dinner, but I admit that I’m hidebound at breakfast. My willingness to accept a food as breakfast before I’ve had my coffee usually depends on the degree to which it resembles American breakfast on some basic level—egginess, porridge-like consistency, a hint of sweetness, something. So I was surprised that this bowl of foull, as they spell it at Keren Kitchen, a sunny new Eritrean restaurant near Irving and Ashland, made sense to me as breakfast food....

As part of my effort to be as jolly as Santa during the holiday season, I’m going to say something really nice about the proposal to spend $14 million of our property tax dollars on an upscale housing complex on the north lakefront. As you might have figured, the money would come from the tax increment financing program. TIF money is supposed to be used to eradicate blight in poor communities with no other ways to spur development....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Cubs sent Felix Pie down to Triple-A Iowa before opening the second half of the season after the All-Star break. The writing was on the wall: manager Lou Piniella had been favoring Angel Pagan of late in center field. Pie was hitting only .216 with two homers and 18 runs batted in, while Pagan was hitting .267 with three homers and 13 RBI in fewer at-bats....

Geography has always been pretty important to hip-hop—there’s the famous east-west rivalry of the 90s, of course, and the crazy quilt of regional rap scenes across the U.S., each with its own history and style. In Houston the rappers take their cues from recreational cough-syrup abuse; in Atlanta they take their cues from the strip club. Memphis rappers tend to sound paranoid; San Francisco rappers tend to sound like they do a lot of ecstasy....

What’s Around the Coyote if it’s no longer around the Coyote? And what’s the Flat Iron building without it? Two weeks ago, ATC, longtime champion of Wicker Park’s emerging artists, pulled up stakes and moved out of the Flat Iron building at North and Milwaukee after 19 years. ATC traded its gallery and office across the street from the iconic Coyote tower for smaller quarters, minus the gallery, in the Splat Flats, 1815-25 W....

Criterion Collection Spend It All (1971) by Les Blank If you’re looking for a gift for a foodie for the holidays, skip the restaurant gift certificates and the weird one-use kitchen tools, and go directly to the video section. Late in November, Criterion released a box set containing about ten hours of films by one of the best American filmmakers you never heard of, Les Blank (1935-2013). Yes, he made documentaries, but he wasn’t a killjoy....

I don’t think there’s a better record label dealing in vintage African music these days than Analog Africa, which has uncovered, annotated, and beautifully packaged a load of excellent, usually funky sounds from the 70s created in Ghana, Benin, Angola, and Togo, among other locales (to say nothing of the label’s more recent excursions into Colombia and Brazil). I interviewed label owner Samy Ben Redjeb for a piece I wrote for the Reader six years ago and at the time he lamented that the market kind of forced him to focus on the funky side of his expert crate digging—in general, record buyers weren’t as enthusiastic about subtler, more traditional sounds....

The old Nickerson residence sits at the corner of Erie and Wabash in River North’s Cathedral District, nearly hidden among the high-rise condos. Built by banker Samuel Nickerson between 1879 and 1883, the three-story stone mansion was once the biggest private home in Chicago. Investment mogul Richard Driehaus bought it in 2003, restored it, and turned it into a museum. The building now houses his art collection and preserves the a piece of the Gilded Age....