It’s been five years since Horizontal Action magazine threw the last Blackout, a festival that over its six-year run became one of America’s most spectacular showcases of garage rock and binge drinking. But on May 27 and 28, HoZac Records is bringing the party back, and Gossip Wolf has the scoop on the lineup! A source in HoZac’s upper-level management confirms that out-of-towners Nobunny, the Spits, Idle Times, K-Holes, and Reading Rainbow will play, as will locals the Brides, Mickey, Heavy Times, Outer Minds, and Radar Eyes....

As Old West gunslingers and a lost generation of Russian idealists might have said about anarchy, enjoy it while it lasts. Sooner rather than later, law and order is going to muscle in. Courts don’t care for laws that send mixed messages. Addressing the contradictions that drip from Section 230, Frank Easterbrook, chief justice of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit here in Chicago, has strongly suggested on more than one occasion that the courts should take a rag to it and wipe it clean....

Persepolis Growing up, my best friend spent every summer with her father in Tehran. Without her, I would’ve never believed that there was a place where little girls had to cover their hair in public or women could be jailed for wearing a trace of makeup. I couldn’t have imagined that females were allowed to swim in the Caspian Sea only if fully clothed or that books and cassette tapes had to be traded as furtively as illegal drugs....

Art Institute photography department head Matthew Witkovsky leaves the conceptualizing to the 57 conceptual artists featured in “Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977.” In his catalog essay, he categorizes the show as simply a “historical survey,” using 140-plus works to document a tangent in photographic practice that interested certain self-conscious artists in the 1960s and ’70s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Conceptual art is little more—and maybe a little less—than the idea that art is really nothing but ideas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Marc Rich pardon. You may recall Bill Clinton’s inexplicable and inexcusable pardoning of the financier and international tax evader of mystery as one of the low points of his administration. Holder basically claims he punted on the Rich pardon, in and of itself not especially encouraging, but there’s evidence that Holder helped Rich circumvent the normal pardon process, as was SOP at the time (more here)....

Just a little over a decade ago on the Chicago board of the food chat site Chowhound, a poster by the name of “foodfirst” (aka food and travel writer Robyn Eckhardt) posted a translation of a Thai language menu from the Lincoln Square restaurant Spoon. It had been passed along to her by slavering local foodlums anxious to get a taste of real Thai food beyond pad thai and crab Rangoon....

In the Neighborhood It’s got a small, dark tiki-bar feel, with the kitchen’s beaded curtain, high rattan-backed chairs, and the long bamboo-lined counter behind which our server whipped up mango and almond milk shakes as good as the famous ones at Irazu. Atlas Cafe bills itself as an “international kitchen”: the menu hops around madly from club sandwiches to (in winter) charquican, a Chilean stew, with a welcome $10 cap on nearly every item....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Rental cars are not the favored method for visiting cities, especially those outside one’s own country. Instead, tourists and urban planners favor packaged tours or local public transport systems. Both are splendid ways for seeing the city as it used to be — the very reason for most tourist visits. The historical core areas contain monuments, prime government and religious edifices and quaint neighborhoods that are often centuries old....

“We aren’t one of those bands who put up an ad on Craigslist like, ‘Bassist needed; must love metal,’” says Prairie Spies keyboardist Evan Skow. The Spies got together almost by accident—Skow and singer Max Brooks didn’t even know guitarist Ben Fong, much less plan to form a band with him, when their mutual friend Bridget Love hooked them up as roommates in 2005. Of the six original members, only three had ever even been in bands before....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “And from there I go to Woody Guthrie doing ‘Tom Joad,’” Studs said, recalling how decades ago he used to put together a radio show called House of Wax. “In six minutes, two sides of a ten-inch record, Woody did, in his own poetic way, the whole story of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Incredible! Then I’d go [to] another thing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Craft beer is currently experiencing a renaissance in the U.S., a fact that Holl discusses in the introduction and Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery and editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, brings up in his foreword. After describing the robust brewing scene that existed in this country at the turn of the 20th century, Oliver writes, “Over the twentieth century we turned cheese into plastic, bread into chemical sponge, and beer back into water....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The extensive liner notes that accompany last year’s reissue of his 1970 debut, Cold Fact (from Seattle’s Light in the Attic label), make it clear that Rodriguez suffered from a combination of bad luck and a self-destructive tendency to shrug off music-biz protocol–he often performed with his back to audiences, casually associated with underworld types, and made frequent drug references in his often depressing lyrics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not especially sympathetic to the idea that celebrities, as people who seek fame or voluntarily accept it in exchange for certain benefits, have ceded on some abstract level the right to reasonable expectations of being left the fuck alone in public. It doesn’t follow that because Kanye West allows people to consume and profit from his visage in certain controlled contexts–videos, concerts, magazine covers–that anyone has the right to do so in any context....

The Pioneer Tavern Group, the folks behind the Pony Inn in Lakeview and Lottie’s Pub in Bucktown, have announced that their new project, Frontier (1072 N. Milwaukee, 773-772-4322, thefrontierchicago.com), will open in West Town on Thursday, February 10. Executive chef Brian Jupiter will be tapping into two trends: oysters (there will be eight to ten varieties) and whole-animal cookery, spit-roasting entire pigs, lambs, goats, or boar for groups of eight to 12; there’s also a chef’s table....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Toronto electronic trio Keys N Krates make the kind of pumped-up, ADD dance music that’s de rigueur at every multiday EDM festival where DayGlo apparel is essential. Ordinarily I wouldn’t consider writing about this outfit for 12 O’Clock Track—their music is fine but generally there isn’t enough to pique my interest—but just the other day they dropped a remix of their tune “Dum Dee Dum” which features local rappers King Louie and Tree and Georgia MC Cyhi the Prynce....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For nearly two decades Philadelphia’s Orrin Evans has been one of the most reliable, impressive, and overlooked pianists in postbop. He’s not a revolutionary, but his music always pushes forward while embracing the best of the past. Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, and Elmo Hope all inform his charged, lucid playing, but he also embraces hip-hop and soul without compromising the rigor of his improvisations....

By far the most visible advocate of the referendum is Patrick Quinn, who is considered an all-around populist by his allies and a cause-of-the-week gadfly by his foes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August Chicago waxed nostalgic. Twenty years earlier, a lot of white kids had been roughed up in the parks during the “police riot” that accompanied the Democratic Convention. Many of those kids were now movers and shakers....

Let’s talk a minute about wisdom. Collective wisdom. These days it comes in two varieties. There’s the new Wikipedia model, what we might call the wisdom of the tribe, in which each member adds his unique glimmer of understanding to a common pool. It’s a fine thing, if not as fine as some communards want us to think. Bees make honey, but solitary geniuses in dingy rented rooms make breakthroughs....

Brooklyn’s George Lewis Jr. released his first album as Twin Shadow, Forget, in 2010; its washed-out production and indebtedness to atmospheric new-wave pop got it lumped in with the emergent chillwave scene, though Lewis’s R&B leanings and mannered image made the label an uneasy fit. Recently 4AD, the label that picked up Forget from Terrible Records (run by Grizzly Bear multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor, who also produced the album), released its follow-up, Confess....

When I profiled Bill Salas in April 2007, the man better known as Brenmar was 21 years old and described his life as a “series of phases”—and at that point those phases already included indie-rap beat maker, bedroom electro-pop auteur, and experimental musician (in which guise he combined psychedelic drumming with electronic noise). Given Salas’s youth, this stylistic hopscotch came off like a young artist’s search for his niche. Six years later, he seems to have found it....