No one in Chicago has been happy about the recent hike in parking meter rates, but by last week the frustration had become outrage, and the outrage had become a political problem. Since the city’s speedy decision in December to lease the meters for 75 years in return for about $1.2 billion in quick cash, what you get for your quarter has declined precipitously. Worse, residents are fed up with the tickets they’re receiving thanks to broken meters and outdated labeling....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The label was notoriously slapdash in many ways, pressing the music on low-grade materials that didn’t hold up to repeated plays and casting a broad net when it came to signing artists. But in the end the label captured some of America’s greatest jazz, gospel, and blues artists. In fact, it’s the company’s recordings of blues artists—Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Charlie Patton, and Papa Charlie Jackson, among many others—that have long attracted the most attention....

Bananas Foster Cafe Housed in a small corner space by the Granville Red Line stop, Bananas Foster Cafe seems to be filling a much-needed niche in Edgewater, drawing droves that are routinely lined out the door. And I can certainly see why it’s a popular neighborhood spot for brunch: though the place was packed, service was smooth, and our food—eggs Benedict with Irish back bacon and standout ham and eggs with potatoes and baked beans—was well prepared and came out promptly....

The other day Pitchfork’s Twitter feed announced “DOOM live album on the way,” to which I replied “‘DOOM live album’ jokes on their way as well,” in reference to the rapper’s recent disastrous attempts to pawn off an impersonator on a crowd at the Congress Theater. Doom’s notorious for pulling this kind of shit at live shows, and there are two distinctly different theories as to why he does it. One camp considers him a flake at best and a rip-off artist at work, and that the purpose of the fake Dooms is to collect the real Daniel Dumille a check without him having to actually go through the hassle of performing for it....

We’ve got Mayor Emanuel—apparently realizing that he’s in danger of losing the votes of parents—barnstorming around town declaring his intentions to spend tens of millions building schools, as opposed to closing them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As everyone knows, I love public schools. And I’m happy for the parents, students and teachers at Wildwood, Gallistel, Faraday, Melody, Payton and Al Raby schools, which will be getting more construction money....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I found myself lost in my own dark woods recently while reading something entitled “This 4×6 index card has all the financial advice you’ll ever need.” I’m sure the article’s intent was to allay any fears one may have over the perceived complexities of financial planning. But for me it had the opposite, terror-inducing effect. Not only was I not following any of that advice, I could not with any degree of confidence define more than half of the words contained therein....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All you need is a little soul. Well, maybe a lot of soul, and a dance-off, and girl groups too. You get all of them at the Hideout, where New York DJ Jonathan Toubin brings his “recession-friendly” Soul Clap & Dance Off to Chicago. Girl Group, who covers songs by—well, I’m sure you can guess—opens. Two of my favorite things, Batman and boobs, team up tonight for Holy Bouncing Boobies: A Batman Burlesque at Gorilla Tango Theatre in Skokie at 9 PM....

Restaurant listings are culled from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 4,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are reviewed by staff, contributors, and (where noted) individual Reader Restaurant Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the Raters’ collective opinions are best expressed in the numbers. Complete searchable listings, Raters’ comments, and information on how to become a Rater are at chicagoreader....

QI’m a 20-year-old girl, and I’ve been dating my boyfriend, who’s 23, for two years. From the get-go he’s known that I’m bi, and like most straight guys, he’s happy to be with a girl who likes girls. Nice, sexually adventurous girls approached by 23-year-old pieces of male eye candy about two-girls/one-guy threesomes will assume that it’s about Eye Candy’s fantasies, not the girlfriend’s. And if you’re hanging back, looking uncomfortable, jealous, and headachy, even a girl who might be up for a threesome is going to read reluctance into your demeanor, presume your boyfriend is pressuring you, and politely decline....

This remarkable 2004 film by English documentarian Phil Grabsky (In Search of Mozart) chronicles a year in the life of an impoverished Afghan family whose home, a cave in the side of a mountain, is surrounded by the ruins of the two giant Buddha sculptures demolished by the Taliban. Without minimizing the harshness of their existence or idealizing their capacity to cope with it, Grabsky challenges us to concentrate on the story’s more inspiring aspects, such as the natural beauty of the setting and the cheerful resilience of his eight-year-old protagonist....

The Babadook—a neogothic chiller that marks the feature directing debut of Australian actress Jennifer Kent—makes a convincing argument for classy, psychological horror cinema even as it fails to meet its own lofty standard. Prioritizing atmosphere and characterization over gore, Kent illustrates how fear often derives from internal rather than external forces. A fractured state of mind can be scarier than a knife-wielding psychopath, and even the scariest knife-wielding psychopath can be the personification of a fractured state of mind....

friday4 KENT BURNSIDE Kent Burnside, grandson of the late R.L. Burnside, who helped popularize the single-chord “trance blues” of northern Mississippi, plays a rock-based version of that style on his recent debut, Cotton Field Disco. His voice is coarse and on guitar his tone is astringent and uncertain, which adds an edge-of-collapse tension to his playing. But he drives his rough, rattling music at full speed, threatening to plow through everything in his path, from chord changes to sidemen–despite his fondness for modern sounds, he’d fit right in at the sweaty backwoods jukes where R....

Julia Thiel Champagne glasses work for cider too. To celebrate a friend’s move to a new apartment last week, I opened a bottle of Vander Mill Totally Roasted Cider that I’d picked up at the Beer Temple. I realize that champagne would have been more traditional, but I can’t afford real champagne, and cheap sparkling wines tend to all taste more or less the same to me—fine, but nothing to get too excited about....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no question that arts coverage as we’ve known it is on the way out. The statistics for traditional arts journalism are even worse than those for print journalism in general. Take this one, courtesy of McLennan, who also heads up the National Arts Journalism Program, an organization founded to promote arts coverage by offering midcareer fellowships to working journalists....

In 1938, Talladega College commissioned the Harlem Renaissance artist Hale Aspacio Woodruff to paint six murals to hang in a campus library. Three tell the story of the slave ship Amistad: an onboard mutiny, the trial of the captives, and their eventual return to Africa. Three more depict the Underground Railroad; the first day of student registration at Talladega, one of the country’s first all-black colleges, in Alabama in 1867; and the building of Savery Library, the eventual home of Woodruff’s work, in 1937....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After spinning more than 170 shows in 2007, Flosstradamus is taking some well-deserved time off. While the duo’s laying low, J2K is cleaning out his room and running an eBay side hustle. Most of his offerings are things you’d expect from a hipster-beloved DJ, like spare Oakleys, a lot of ten Mishka T-shirts, and one of those confusing Japanese watches from the future....

One night nearly a month ago, Cameron Chapleau and Jaboukie Young-White, college students and roommates, were hanging out in their sparsely furnished apartment in the South Loop doing what they usually do when they’re bored: coming up with names for porno movies. Within an hour, they had three responses. Within a couple of days, they had ten. Some hopefuls sent head shots. Others sent dick shots. One sent dick shots from several angles, a photo of his body with his face blurred out, and a video of himself saying “Yeah, baby!...

REDBELT sss Written and directed by David Mamet With Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alice Braga, Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer, Max Martini, Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, and David Paymer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Redbelt emphatically reverses this decline by combining in near-perfect proportion what Mamet loves and hates about Hollywood. The most interesting aspect of his movie work has always been his ardent embrace of genre, and Redbelt is a classic fight film, with Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) as an honorable martial arts master forced into the ring for a hyped-up TV match....

Bettina Escauriza Devin Hoff In the two years bassist Devin Hoff lived in Chicago he was a fairly ubiquitous presence around town, playing in countless ad hoc configurations and forming several ongoing projects he’s remained part of since leaving for Los Angeles in 2011. In April he’ll play with one of those bands, his trio with reedist Dave Rempis and drummer Mike Reed called Days After Next Wednesday, at the Hideout—you can check out a track by the group toward the bottom of this post....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wonder if anyone at River East yesterday attempted a double feature of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, which had its second and final screening in the Chicago International Film Festival, and Gravity, which was playing throughout the day on several screens. The two films strike me as complimentary in that both are decidedly theatrical experiences and will lose much of their meaning if seen in any other context....