Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t fastidiously follow contemporary flamenco music, but I do appreciate the intensity of the ongoing debate about authenticity within the form. I understand and respect the drive to move any traditional form of music forward, but ever since the ascent of the great Paco de Lucia, guitar players have pushed and pulled flamenco in some aesthetically questionable directions....

Twenty-three-year-old Chuy Valencia is only the latest—and possibly the youngest—graduate of the School of Bayless to come out of the Frontera/Topolobampo kitchens and stake his own claim. After a pit stop as chef de cuisine at Adobo Grill, in late August he opened Chilam Balam, a cramped but not claustrophobic subterranean spot offering a small-plates menu along with a list of monthly seasonal specials—mostly more antojitos plus a few larger plates....

I could probably spend three or four hours at urbandictionary.com looking up all the street slang on Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up Gang/Star Trak/Jive), the astonishing second album from this Virginia duo, but that doesn’t mean I can’t tell what Malice and Pusha T are talking about. The record’s a conflicted trip into the drug-dealing life, with the brothers’ paranoia and pride rendered in consistently vivid narratives with a flow that’s equally rhythmic and melodic....

Though Allison Silverman briefly considering becoming a scientist, she eventually ended up majoring in humanities at Yale University. After graduating in 1994, she moved to Chicago to study with such comedy institutions as ImprovOlympic and the Second City Conservatory, the alma mater of future employer Stephen Colbert. During her graduation show at the Second City in 1996, she performed an original song called “These Are My Gandhi Years,” in which she sang about the trials of being poor and underfed as a struggling artist....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had plans to get together for lunch last weekend with some well seasoned if not totally hardened food geeks. Choosing a lunchtime destination among foodies can often become a jerky dance full of posturing and equivocation. If it’s bad, you take the blame, but if it’s good—the glory is yours alone. So when asked where we should dine, I decided to skip the dance and offer up Amira’s Trio on a shimmering platter of effusive praise....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is a woman who, in the suburban wastes of Colonial Heights, Virginia, makes her own persimmon vinegar from a tree in the backyard, grows hot and mild chili peppers and dries them in the driveway, and throws back a shot of bear gall bladder-steeped Bacardi after dinner with barely a grimace. She doesn’t do easy. Over a three day stretch the indulgent Mrs....

Just a stage he was going through? Evidently. Off-Loop auteur Blake Montgomery has announced that he’s done with the Building Stage, the near-west-side troupe he founded eight years ago. It’s supposed to shut down at the end of April, after the run of the current show—a delightfully loose yet sharp, deconstructive riff on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, called Dawn, Quixote. Says here Montgomery intends to “follow new theatrical and educational pursuits....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lead story in the section was “Target Practice: Media Bashing 101,” by Mark Leibovich. He began, “Sarah Palin’s national opening last week was judged an unqualified success by the media elite, even though much of her debut speech Wednesday night was devoted to whacking the media elite.” The very phrase “media elite” represents a serious concession to the forces of darkness....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s the county commissioner who last summer tried to get his colleagues to pass a vote of no confidence in the “failed” administration of county board president Todd Stroger. When he came up short, he ripped the commissioners who opposed him. “By voicing confidence in Stroger, they are saying loud and clear they support the rampant corruption in County government, the hiring of Stroger’s political cronies, the utilization of the County budget as a political payback tool, the continued third-world conditions at Stroger Hospital, and Stroger’s support for a property tax increase,” said the press release he issued....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You don’t call four people a generation,” argues poet Gregory Corso at the outset of What Happened to Kerouac?, a 1986 documentary by Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams that’s been reissued on DVD by Shout! Factory with two and a half hours of interview outtakes. Corso may be right, but an endless series of movies have been drawn from the relationships among Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I cast my first presidential vote for Al Gore in 2000, and I did so with pride–with just as much, and I will confess perhaps more, than when I voted for Obama yesterday, and more than I would have had voting for Clinton if I’d had the opportunity. Gore was a perfect candidate for me, an earnest, laconic southern Democrat with a passion for the future of media, technology, and the environment, a student of media theory who would later make a popular, Oscar-winning documentary from a slideshow about environmental science....

Shot on super 16-millimeter and set mainly inside a 15-mile radius, this fairy-tale period piece is Wes Anderson’s most intimate film since Bottle Rocket (1996) and maybe his most deeply felt overall. It takes place in 1965 on a fictional island called New Penzance, where a 12-year-old orphan runs away from scout camp with a morose girl he considers his soul mate. A group of adults—the girl’s parents (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand), the boy’s scout master (Edward Norton), a local sheriff (Bruce Willis)—organize a search and in the process coalesce into a little family of lonely depressives....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like a cat with a fuzzy Nerf toy and just about the same attention span. Andrew Tracy’s complained that del Toro’s Hellboy II stagings are too ham-fisted, lumbering and abrupt where they ought to be … well, I don’t know what they ought to be, aside from not existing at all, since I can’t imagine anyone bringing more keenly tuned awareness to the meticulous ins and outs of this fabricator’s art, all the precision-crafted mini motifs that, as seems to me obvious from the get-go, most contemporary pulp directors couldn’t begin to emulate, much less think of in the first place....

The Tribune had every reason to be proud of the cover story in its March 30 Sunday magazine: “Comeback Kid,” a profile of violinist Rachel Barton Pine by Howard Reich. Previously an exceptionally private public figure, Pine made Reich privy to her estrangement from much of her family, her physical limitations since she fell beneath the wheels of a Metra train in 1995, and her regrets about her career. Reich wrote: “Medically, ‘It’s never over, just because of the complicated nature of the combination of my injuries,’ she says....

The Stranglers Soundboard has as many concert recommendations as ever over the next few days, but the music that matters most to Chicago this weekend is the blues. This is a time to wallow, to sing raggedly about love lost, to slide on a guitar because there’s nothing else. The Chicago Blues Festival kicks off this evening at Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park with a show headlined by Shemekia Copeland (joined by teenage Buddy Guy collaborator Quinn Sullivan)....

Chicago Films at SXSW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Directed by Tricia Todd and Eric Matthies A year in the harrowing life of 72-year-old local R&B legend Andre Williams. Directed by Peter Gilbert and Steve James A portrait of Texas Death Row chaplain Carroll Pickett, who presided over the first lethal injection in 1982 and the wrongful execution of Carlos DeLuna in 1989, by the filmmakers behind Hoop Dreams....

Daniel Alexander Jones as Jomama Jones in Radiate The St. Lawrence Quartet, a Canadian group founded in 1989, has earned a reputation for spontaneity and informal persuasiveness. Their latest CD, of three Shostakovich quartets, stresses the music’s humanity; it’s less menacing than some recordings, and the playing–anchored by cellist Christopher Costanza, a former member of the Chicago String Quartet and the Chicago Chamber […] To record the new Natural (Quarterstick), this 30-year-old transatlantic combo convened in a farmhouse in the English countryside....

The old reasons for not liking the Tribune were legion: it was too gray and fat and rich and powerful and conservative, and its heritage was dominated by a madman, the colonel, Robert R. McCormick. Besides, its coverage of the nation and world didn’t measure up to the New York Times and Washington Post. Then Sam Zell and Randy Michaels took over, and most of the top editors and a lot of very good writers flew the coop....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city’s full of cheap symbolism–neighborhoods abandoned by humans to be reclaimed by nature, homeless people frozen in ice, the gleaming mass of irony that is the Renaissance Center–and its post-apocalyptic aura makes it a perfect subject for fear porn aimed at people who think downgrading from a mini-mansion to a normal-size house puts them just inches away from living in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road....

Thanks largely to a talented and energetic cast, this evening of folk tunes illustrating the many sorrows and occasional joys of Appalachian coal miners is both entertaining and mildly enlightening. Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman have interspersed brief dramatic scenes among the songs, portraying archetypal moments among these oppressed people: long work hours, the dangers of mining, the often violent strikes, and the ways the poor are cheated by corporate interests....