Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The annual ¡Viva! Chicago Latin Music Festival has long been the weakest of the city’s big summer music festivals in Grant Park, with bookings that looked especially narrow and provincial compared to the sprawling, sophisticated lineups assembled for the blues, gospel, jazz, and Celtic music fests. From 1989 until last year Viva! was programmed by Enrique Munoz, a former sales rep and liaison to the Latino community for 7UP, who told me in 1999 that his programming was geared to “best represent the diversity of Chicago” and is “based on Billboard Magazine, CD sales, radio-play (or air-time), name recognition, and cost-effectiveness....

For fans of improvised music and forward-looking jazz, the annual Umbrella Music Festival has become the city’s marquee event. The fifth installment, which runs through Sunday, began Wednesday, November 3, with the first half of European Jazz Meets Chicago—a free mini-fest at the Cultural Center that mixes up top-shelf locals and eminent visitors from abroad. In its third year, nine European nations are participating, more than ever before (there were to be ten, but last week Lithuanian drummer Arkadijus Gotesmanas canceled due to illness), so for the first time the mini-fest is spread across two nights....

Chris Drukker Michael Blake The jazz world is filled with immensely skilled musicians who spend most of their careers in relative anonymity because they never manage to establish a truly original voice. They may be peerless sidemen—playing charts perfectly and delivering solid solos—but if and when they lead a band there’s nothing about the music that distinguishes it from the past or present. There’s a much smaller class of musicians who do distinguish themselves, but for one reason or another they don’t attract a wide following despite earning the respect and admiration of fellow musicians....

In November, Democrats in the U.S. House voted to replace the longtime chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, John Dingell of Michigan, with Los Angeles liberal Henry Waxman. This election wasn’t followed anywhere near as closely as Barack Obama’s a couple weeks earlier, but it was another clear indication that the nation’s political priorities were shifting. Dingell is the dean of the House—he’s served 27 terms since 1955—and widely admired for his loyalty, bluntness, and formidable political skills....

When I last visited the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, in April, Erik Peterson was planning to hang work linking the gallery’s West Loop neighborhood to its fast-vanishing economic base: meatpacking is giving way to haute art spaces and even hauter restaurants. Now Peterson is back again, with the same concerns. But this time he’s got allies. “Locality,” in which he shares billing with artists Barbara Blacharczyk, Angela Davis Fegan, Alexandra Lee, and curator Tempestt Hazel, makes Fulton Market its exclusive muse....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not by chance that Ronald looks this dashing: he’s been fashion obsessed since he was 15, when he started having his clothes tailor-made. His suit collection now reaches the 250 mark—plus 200 pairs of shoes and 300 ties. It’s quite impressive that, having so much to choose from, he takes only about an hour to get ready for the day....

Conrad Black and David Radler are two varieties of cynic. Radler’s the type Oscar Wilde told us about–the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Black’s a more romantic type, as certain of his own value as he is that he must make his way in a world overrun by dogs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Black took “their” money–“they” being the small shareholders of the company he used to run, Hollinger International–and if the cascade of criminal and civil litigation that’s all but buried him is to be believed, he rewarded them with a royal screwing....

On February 22 federal magistrate Geraldine Soat Brown ruled that Mayor Richard Daley could at last be put on the hot seat: he would have to answer questions under oath about the Jon Burge torture scandal. Egan and Boyle issued their final report last July. They concluded that torture had occurred, that it was too late to prosecute anyone, and that the state’s attorney’s office had demonstrated “a bit of slippage”–as Boyle put it at a news conference–in failing to do anything about it....

Wanda Kurek was six months old when her mother started taking her to work at the bar. That was back in 1924. Her father, Stanley, had quit his job in the pickling division of the meatpacker Wilson & Co. to open his own tavern on the 4100 block of South Ashland. Back then Whiskey Row was lined with saloons servicing the slaughterhouse workers from the stockyards across the street. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

This is where I apologize to Brightblack Morning Light. It’s not that I don’t like your deep burbly waterbed music–I do. The reason I left the Empty Bottle such a short distance into your set had nothing to do with you, and everything to do with Daniel Arcus Incus Ululat Belteshazzar-Higgs, who laid down a set of such glorious existential terror that any palate cleansing would feel like denial. He brings a snake-handling sense of hellfire to his lyrics of joyous dissolution in the Absolute (like Jalal al-Din Rumi on the brown acid), and I just had to go lie down for a little while....

Here’s a roundup of locally written books on food and drink, in no particular order. The latest in the Edible series of easily digested food histories distributed by the University of Chicago Press, this one is by local Asian food specialist Sen. Curry may have its origins in India, but she scrutinizes the effect British colonialism had on the dish—the word itself is an Anglicism—and from there charts its progress and permutations all over the globe via the Indian diaspora, from the Caribbean’s callaloo to South African’s bobotie to the color-coded curries of Thailand and the sweet-potato-and-carrot-studded Japanese varieties....

Avec | West Loop | $$$ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A unique hybrid of retail wine store, casual bar, and formal dining room from restaurateurs Dan Sachs and Joanne Chessie, executive chef John Caputo, and wine director Brian Duncan, who aim to demystify the process of matching wine with food. Curved racks of wine divide the retail corner from the bar, which serves tasting portions of light, eclectic fare ranging from seafood sliders and charcuterie to burgers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seven documentary makers in turn will sit at a table with these potential benefactors—the seven films having been culled from an original 150 submissions in a process that took months. At this stage each film is finished or nearly so; its creators will have seven minutes to show a trailer and then pitch their project, and for the next 20 minutes or so everyone at the table will weigh in on it and how to help it succeed....

It didn’t take long for a perspicacious 14-year-old acquaintance of mine to sit down and absorb the vibe in County Barbeque before she declared, “It’s so fake.” I’m guessing Michael Kornick and David Morton are hoping UIC underclassmen are less world-weary. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When that sort of effort is spent creating a fantasy to complement the food, you wonder how much energy is left over to spend on barbecue itself....

Whether he likes it or not—and he probably doesn’t—Eddie Pepitone has long been tagged a “comic’s comic,” meaning he’s spent 30-plus years in relative stand-up obscurity, with his backstage peers forming a lot of his fan base. Recently, though, Pepitone’s specific brand of dark comedy (an emphatic contempt for modern-day everything) has gotten more airtime. Some of this has to do with the rising popularity of contemporaries who have long admired and laughed at his brash angst—he’s a regular guest on WTF With Marc Maron, for example, and a favorite of Patton Oswalt’s....

Peter Margasak, Reader music critic, is obsessed with . . . Huong Thanh, L’Arbre aux Rêves (Buda) Huong Thanh gained international attention through a series of cross-genre collaborations with jazz guitarist Nguyên Lê, setting traditional melodies of her Vietnamese homeland to slick, thoroughly modern arrangements. In the last few years, however, the Paris-based singer has shifted her attention to more traditional sounds, never more effectively than she does on L’Arbre aux Rêves....

Hot Fun in the Summertime As for the trail, it’s too enticing to all kinds of people to be up there, away from the streets and the watchful eye of cops and parents. If you live next to it, tough luck now but a great thing in the long run when the trail gets built. I will continue to jog up there because it’s the only place in the city (save for the lakeshore) where you can run long distances without having to deal with street traffic....

FACTORY GIRL ss Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bar for historical accuracy in Hollywood biopics hasn’t always been this high–paradoxically, it’s been rising even as the public has become more ignorant of history. During the studio era, writers frequently played around with the truth when telling the stories of great men and women. Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) portrayed song-and-dance man George M....

I don’t profess to being any expert at this. Seems more like using common sense and remembering the sorts of things your parents taught you about how to treat people. Advantages we’ve got, though, I suppose are that we are a small shop. One way or the other either I hired these people or my partner [Andy Johnston] hired them. Hiring someone creates a bond of some sort, an informal contract....

In the Neighborhood rrr As its amiable Italian owner will tell you, Apart Pizza is so named because in addition to larger pies they sell a bachelor-size personal piece (thus, a part of a pizza) and because, you know, great pizza is from Italy and a lot of great art is too (thus the art). The style here is northern Italian thin crust cooked in a gas-fired oven, with a few dozen topping variations, from the standard to something called the Francese (Brie, ham, and egg)....