In January, Kendall College opened its “Culinary Curiosity Exhibition,” a culinary museum spread throughout the school. Displays in seven themed areas feature everything from early-19th-century spit motors to ornate meat and cheese slicers. For Mel Mickevic, who with his wife, Janet, donated the 300 pieces in the collection, the opening was the culmination of a long journey to find a taker for his treasures. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Does it really matter to you whether the Chicago Children’s Museum will have enough natural light? If it’s close to the “L”? Whether there’s one more obstruction in a lightly used portion of a cluttered north end of Grant Park? The mayor bulldozed Meigs Field without asking us. Made Soldier Field look like a spaceship from the outside without considering our input. Surrounded our neighborhood parks with wrought-iron fences and filled our medians with gargantuan flower pots without inquiring if that’s what we wanted....

Michael Gebert Hu Tieu Mi Thap Cam at Double Happiness My interview with underground chef Julia Pham yesterday took place at a largely overlooked restaurant on the Vietnamese-Chinese strip in Uptown, Double Happiness at 1061 W. Argyle. It was good enough that the restaurant deserves commemoration in its own right. Which it’s never had; for all the acres of ink dedicated to our ethnic food scene, for all that Argyle-area spots like Sun Wah and Ba Le have gotten notice in mainstream publications, the only substantive discussion I could find about this place goes back to a Chowhound thread from 2003....

Still, I get the impression that no amount of sobbing or backseat blow-jobbing could be more unnerving than someone getting into your cab, closing the door, and saying, “Take me wherever you want.” There used to be a show on HBO called Taxicab Confessions on which drunk and sad and horny people got into taxicabs and discussed or exhibited all manner of unseemly behaviors for the benefit of a viewing audience—unbeknownst to them, at least initially....

There’s an old saying in the newspaper business, and if there isn’t there should be: keep your reporters close to your market and your ad staff closer. Local, he says, is “where we see not just our papers but all metro newspapers. That represents a very difficult cultural shift for a lot of metro newspapers.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Journalists who don’t get their pictures in the paper alongside their stories tend to both envy and suspect the ones who do, believing those pictures fatten their paychecks, win them better tables in restaurants, and turn them into commodities....

“You remember what you’re not supposed to talk about?” Heather Kinney asks a group of boys, 15 to 17. She and her friend Carolyn Minor are teaching improv to the residents of section 4A at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, and she’s preparing them to do two-person scenes. “It takes your mind off home and court,” says Gregory, 16. “It makes you think, focus, pay attention.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On my way to the film industry summit hosted by the city at the Cultural Center earlier this month, I bumped into the crew for Chicago PD, a new television series that’s a spin-off from Chicago Fire, set to launch on NBC January 8. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pedestrians, kept at bay by crime-scene tape and real cops, clustered on the opposite corner, pulling out cell phones to capture a scene that’s not all that rare in Chicago anymore....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the past decade or so, record collectors in Europe and the U.S. have discovered 70s psychedelia from Turkey, where artists including Cem Karaca, Erkin Koray, Selda Bagcan, Mogollar, and Fikret Kizilok remade traditional songs or styles from the country’s middle region of Anatolia with modern instruments from the West—electric guitars and keyboards. I have no doubt there are still plenty of undiscovered artists who created music in a similar vein, but at the same time, I’m glad to see another kind of Turkish music from the 70s, which is only superficially related to psychedelia, getting the reissue treatment....

As a general rule if I’m having a conversation with someone about music and they bring up the tired old cliche about pop stars being interchangeable cogs in the music biz machine devoid of any individual talent who are simply “made” by faceless executives, I tune them out. It’s a good sign that the person I’m talking to either has no idea how infrequently the record industry hands out deals to anyone who’s less that one million percent devoted to making music, no matter how pop it might be, or they’re an anhedonic snob....

The exquisite vocalist Kendra Shank and her friend and mentor Abbey Lincoln have both released new records this year, each comprising selections from Lincoln’s body of thoroughly distinctive work. Comparing the two is instructive, as here the student outshines the master. On Abbey Sings Abbey Lincoln restyles her compositions in an Americana mode that would suit Cassandra Wilson or Norah Jones; but Shank’s A Spirit Free (Challenge) uses inventive rhythm arrangements and a pilgrim’s fervor to charge them with fresh urgency and cast new light on their lyrical wisdom....

The Chef: Matt Troost (Three Aces)The Challenger: John Manion (La Sirena Clandestina)The Ingredient: Dende oil Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I want to shake John Manion so hard for giving me this,” Matt Troost said of his ingredient. Reddish-orange and semisolid at room temperature, dende oil is extracted from the fruit of the African oil palm (it’s also known as red palm oil but is not the same thing as palm kernel oil, which comes from the fruit’s pit)....

Julia Thiel Logan Beyhl works on a bike They decided to open a bike shop specializing in BMX bikes, Beyhl said, because there are a lot of people in Chicago who ride BMX, and no stores that cater to them. He also wants to host community events like weekly social bike rides (BMX on Tuesdays, regular bikes on Thursdays) and yoga. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Julia Thiel They took possession of the space June 15, and Beyhl says they’ve been ready to open for a while, but getting the permits took a long time....

Charter Versus Public Schools It’s very unfortunate that some kids don’t value an education, but at some point enough is enough—what about the vast majority of CPS students who frankly don’t want classroom disrupters dragging them down? —skeptic Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I tutored a (very bright) kid through eighth grade, and then he went to a Noble high school on the south side....

“My City Was Gone” is off of 1984’s Learning to Crawl A couple months ago I was driving around and listening to the Sirius XM station 1st Wave when a song came on that I hadn’t heard before: the Pretenders‘ “My City Was Gone.” The track had a drum sound straight out of Talking Heads’ version of “Take Me to the River” and an equally killer bass line, except that unlike most other rock-gone-disco cuts this one had bluesy guitar licks that never verged on the cutting rhythmic funk that most disco guitars adopt....

RYAN ADAMS | VICTORY GARDENS THEATER AT THE BIOGRAPH, JUNE 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lord knows drama alone can’t sustain a career, which is why Courtney Love is making her living these days by auctioning off Kurt Cobain memorabilia, but Adams has the chops. In fact, just following the musical part of his career is a daunting enough task. He released–Jesus Christ–18 albums’ worth of new material through his Web site over a couple of weeks last year and has announced a forthcoming five-disc box set containing bootlegs, demos, and two whole unreleased albums....

Esther Newton is a pioneering scholar of gay and lesbian history, but she and her partner, Holly Hughes, also lived it. Newton trained as an anthropologist and made her name with ethnographic studies of drag queens and of Cherry Grove, the village on Fire Island that became America’s first queer town. Now she’s teaching at the University of Michigan and working on a memoir, My Butch Career, which begins with her early realization that she and her father dressed exactly alike and continues through her adventures in Chicago (she got her doctorate at U....

On the show’s final day, students from the School of the Art Institute, egged on by their teachers, gathered on the museum’s steps to put Henri Matisse on trial. “Hennery O’Hair Mattress,” they ruled, “is found guilty of artistic murder, pictorial arson, total degeneracy of color sense, artistic rapine, criminal abuse of title, and general aesthetic abortion.” “We don’t want to fall into the trap of ‘we know better than you,’” Lincoln explains....

My roommate is into BDSM. Fine. I couldn’t care less about his sex life. He met two women at a BDSM club whom he regularly “plays” with. They enjoy being subjected to what he calls “erotic torments.” Fine. But he also watches BDSM pornography. Since he has no way of knowing if the women in the BDSM porn enjoy the “erotic torments” they’re subjected to, I don’t think it’s fine to view this pornography....

Now that it seems like everybody is throwing a street fest, the Onion‘s A.V. Club is getting in on the action with its inaugural A.V. Fest, Sat 9/10 and Sun 9/11 outside the Hideout. Topping its impressive lineup are two bands who’ve contributed to the recent boom in 90s reunions. Hum heads up Saturday night, supported by west-coast indie punks the Thermals, local Krautrockers Disappears, and Clem Snide front man Eef Barzelay (who’ll be performing the music of Journey), among others....

Music 10 Bars 16 The closest thing to a genuine country honky-tonk in Chicago, this run-down corner bar–smelling of 30 years of spilled beer and stale smokes–offers an all-country jukebox, all-night sets on the weekends by a solid country cover band called Diamondback, and cheap beer flowing all the time. Country Claude & the Chicken Chokers play on Wednesday nights. | Mon-Tue 9 AM-2 AM, Wed-Fri 11 AM-4 AM, Sat 11 AM-5 AM | 4659 N....