When you think of tiki, many things come to mind: beach parties, crimson-lit bars filled with smoke, grass skirts, dapper gents, and pinup girls from another time. But . . . Berwyn? The western suburb certainly isn’t a place I associated with anything tropical—that is, until I met David and Lorie Krys. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five years ago, the Kryses had their hearts set on bungalow life, and while Berwyn might not be the heart of Chicago, it’s rich with charming bungalows and is fast becoming a diverse community of young professionals and artists....

There are moments on Keren Ann, the brand-new fifth album from Israel-born, Paris-bred Keren Ann Zeidel, where it’s clear English isn’t her mother tongue: when the phrase “boreal wind” turns up in a second song, for instance, or when she sings “I miss you as hell.” But fixating on word usage would be missing the point. Zeidel’s albums in French were great too, and she’d likely sound great in Magyar–it’s the cool sensuality of her vocals, the way she shapes the words, that makes her music so dazzling....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The cap-and-trade climate program these 10 jolly green giants are now calling for is a regulatory device designed to financially reward companies that reduce CO2 emissions, and punish those that don’t…. DuPont has been plunging into biofuels, the use of which would soar under a cap. Somebody has to cobble together all these complex trading deals, so say hello to Lehman Brothers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Critics I’ve read who have commented on the Sunday finale of Homeland say the show made the right move. A few weeks earlier, Boardwalk Empire had killed off a character the audience cared about but the story runners didn’t know what more to do with, and now so did Homeland. Brody was a more central character, certainly, than Richard Harrow, but all the more reason to clear the decks....

This morning a new batch of acts were confirmed for July’s Pitchfork Music Festival. On Friday Swedish pop star Robyn, art-rock royalty Liars, and singer-songwriters the Tallest Man on Earth and Sharon Van Etten will join headliners Modest Mouse and Broken Social Scene. On Saturday the festival adds Montreal pop weirdos Wolf Parade, Spanish synthsters Delorean, hazy garage combo Real Estate, retro rockers Free Energy, Lil-Wayne-loving future-pop group JJ, Philly troubadour Kurt Vile, quasi-rapper Why?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life,” writes Adam Gopnik in this week’s New Yorker. “Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison,” he notes, and it’s true—it’s not hard to find journalism, or for that matter art or fiction, about any facet of the penal process: the criminal courts, prison life, solitary confinement....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thirty-four years! This news has sent ripples of sadness among the geeks who’ve wandered its cramped aisles clutching stained copies of David Thompson’s Thai Food, seeking out ingredients both essential and obscure to Thai cookery. At least for non-Thais, it was always easy to profit from Eddie and his cohorts’ genuine interest in just what the heck you planned on doing with everything from banana leaves to tamarind pulp to pork floss....

The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs threw a launch party at the Cultural Center on Tuesday for a pair of online entities created to serve the local publishing industry. A combination trade paper and PR tool, ChicagoPublishes.com will offer news, an events calendar, stories about books and periodicals, and a directory of publishers. CAR-Literary is a writer-centric subset of the DCA’s massive Chicago Artists Resource site—which already features pages for dance, theater, visual art, and music—offering job and other postings, a forum, links to resources, and articles and essays by and about writers and publishers....

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins) When Fri 5/18, 7:30 PM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Motivated by the widely reported statistic that the average North American meal travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from farm to table, the authors of each memoir–novelist Barbara Kingsolver (with help from her family) and writer-journalists Alisa Smith and J....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Anger and Dismay at the Sale of a City Treasure,” said the New York Times headline Thursday, over a story reporting that “in the end, sentiment and tradition were no match for a $52 billion offer from the Belgian beer giant InBev.” The Star got it wrong. Labatt was bought up in 1995 by the Belgian Brewer Interbrew. InBev didn’t even exist then....

David Pintor, director of the Southside Ignoramus Quartet is singing the praises of: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The People’s Stage Karaoke I’m not a great singer, or even a good one, by any means, but when I feel like belching out some of my favorite tunes I gravitate toward Pablo Serrano’s the People’s Stage Karaoke. Apart from being a really sweet guy, Pablo is an amazing Pilsen-based artist who absolutely loves his karaoke—so much so that he hosts it at four different spots each week!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There is a well-known story in the Talmud, that great compendium of Jewish law and lore, which describes an encounter between Moses and God on Mount Sinai. When Moses ascended the mountain to receive the Torah, he found God adorning the letters of the book with crowns. Confused, the prophet asked God why he was adding these seemingly meaningless designs....

Alas, first Michael and now Whitney. They represented two strains in 1980s pop culture: Houston, a child of the gospel tradition, and Jackson, the alien artist who took the music in directions nobody’d imagined. Not incidentally, that’s a tension that runs through the Museum of Contemporary Art’s powerful new “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.” Curated by Helen Molesworth of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the show presents artists at a crossroads between the classical and the radical—between political complacency and impatience....

Remember that Remington ad where the guy liked the shaver so much he bought the company? I can’t tell you how many times I played A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s self-released The Sunniest Day Ever EP the night I brought it home last winter, but by the time the sky had turned robin’s egg blue I’d e-mailed the band offering to release their next album, responding to an insert soliciting interested labels....

Steve Bogira Frank Tooley, who does odd jobs at New Beginnings Church, stands in the church lobby just after a poll closed in the lobby Tuesday. Behind him are canned goods the church is collecting for a Thanksgiving food drive, and a motorcycle it will auction off to raise money for a community center across the street. Chicago stuck to its faith in the governor’s election Tuesday, overwhelmingly blessing the Democrat, Pat Quinn, citywide—but the Magnificent Mile opted for a higher power....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the items on the finance committee’s agenda this week was a resolution endorsing Mayor Daley’s plan to make nonunionized city employees take 15 unpaid days off—essentially a 10 percent pay cut. After Burke introduced the resolution to the full council yesterday, he took a rhetorical detour, as he is wont to do, and demonstrated, with no small outrage, that the city has other places it could cut costs besides worker pay—such as the contract for transporting dead bodies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the letter, Eisenhauer further finds that granting a license to the store would “have a deleterious impact on the health, safety, and welfare of the surrounding community,” which has apparently been “plagued with problems including loud late night disturbances, disorderly conduct, traffic congestion, public intoxication, and other incidents which endanger the safety of the residents.” Still, residents have apparently opposed granting a liquor license to the store, writing letters to that effect to both Alderman Reilly and the Local Liquor Control Commission....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow Neurosis release Honor Found in Decay (Neurot), their tenth studio album. It’s been five years since the hugely influential Bay Area-based band put out Given to the Rising, making this the longest gap between releases in their 27-year career. Neurosis recorded it with Steve Albini, sort of a band tradition going back to 1999’s Times of Grace—during their stays in his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio, vocalist and guitarist Scott Kelly often plays shows in town....

Long before she became a professor and researcher, Kathie Kane-Willis had an unpleasant personal look at our nation’s drug policies. She started using heroin at 19, and as it developed into an addiction she went through periods of homelessness and ended up in jail for credit card fraud and shoplifting. When she was released she went back to using. And she says it could have been worse. Kane-Willis was eventually able to get treatment, kick her habit, and redirect her life....

thisamericanlife.org There’s a moment in part one of the This American Life series on Harper High School where a social worker, Crystal Smith, is talking to a junior, Devonte, about his little brother. The teenager and the social worker are watching a camera-phone video that Devonte took of himself and his brother. Devonte watched it constantly. “He was a strong little boy, too,” Devonte says—to which Smith responds in the most cheerful, sweet, sad way imaginable: “Yeah, you could tell....