Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You might have noticed that President Obama spoke repeatedly about the environment during his inauguration speech. But the Environment Report notes that he didn’t call it out as a key, separate issue—he assumed it’s tied to all of the most pressing issues facing the country. As environmental advocates and business groups close and far continue to present plans for stimulating a green economy (issuing Clean Energy Victory Bonds?...

The cover of Cosmic Slop Despite its being some of my friends’ favorite Funkadelic album, I’ve never quite gotten into the George Clinton-led band’s 1973 LP Cosmic Slop. Having recently acquired the album on vinyl, I realized that my ambivalence is mostly relegated to side one, which is simpler and more groove-based. Cosmic Slop features a stripped-down version of the band—two guitarists, Bernie Worrell stealing the show on keyboards, and a tight rhythm section consisting of Cordell “Boogie” Mosson on bass and Tyrone Lampkin on drums—and it works much better on the more song-based tracks on side two....

Colleagues: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our thinking was driven by the Tribune’s goal to be the Chicago region’s top destination for news and information and grow especially in the digital space. That means we must concentrate our resources and energies on covering the Chicago area better than anyone else across all of our media. But with today’s actions, we are making the leap to a newsroom structure that we believe is sustainable barring further significant declines in advertising revenue....

Ten Ninety, Imperial Witbier and Imperial Porter: I first tried Ten Ninety’s high-gravity beers at the Glunz Expo this spring, and ever since then I’ve been seeking them out at beer tastings (their beers are available on tap in some Chicago bars, but I haven’t come across them yet). My favorite is the imperial porter: brewed with cayenne pepper and pomegranate juice, it’s tart, spicy, and deeply chocolatey. But close behind is the imperial witbier, light but complex, with a rich mouthfeel and flavors of lemon zest and orange peel....

Family legend has it that my Irish-born great-great-grandfather fought on the Union side during the Civil War and was at the siege of Vicksburg. We’ve never confirmed that story. But if he was one of the boys in blue, he maintained an ironic sense of humor about it, naming his son Jefferson Davis Norris after the president of the Confederate States of America. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The mutability of identity in wartime is at the heart of E....

Julia Thiel A tank named George Off Color Brewing, the new project from John Laffler (formerly of Goose Island) and Dave Bleitner (formerly of Two Brothers), has been in the works (more or less) since 2009, and there have been several opportunities to taste its collaboration beers over the past few months. But Monday was the official release of their two year-round beers, and they celebrated by opening up their brewery to the public and pouring not only those beers, but a couple collaboration brews as well....

I didn’t review all that many packaged beers this year. These are most of them, in fact. I wrote 32 Beer and Metal posts in 2014, down from 42 last year, but the Chicago craft community was busier than ever. Though I like to think I made up for the drop in quantity with an increase in quality (and I did break a few stories, in my own way), I definitely overlooked some solid breweries....

Municipal Reference Collection Harold Washington Library Center 400 S. State 312-747-4526 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year the City Council passed the TIF Sunshine Ordinance, which requires the city to post all kinds of documentation about its tax increment financing program online—yet the city’s only complied in piecemeal fashion, and it’s very difficult, even for experts, to get on the city’s Web site and figure out what’s being done with the $500 million in tax money siphoned off into the program every year....

Boers & Bernstein 1-6 PM weekdays WSCR (670 AM) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Terry Boers and Dan Bernstein have been teamed together at the Score for more than ten years, giving them the longest-running sports talk show in the market. It’s also the best, although their unique twist on the format is often hated when it’s not simply misunderstood. Like David Letterman, Boers and Bernstein do a show that’s antithetical to the very genre they supposedly represent....

Trap Door Theatre is almost literally a hole in the wall: you reach it through a deep, narrow crevice between two buildings. And the programming can seem equally inaccessible. Under founder and artistic director Beata Pilch, the company specializes in what their mission statement calls “challenging yet obscure” works, often by European playwrights with avant-garde sensibilities, dangerous politics, and/or histories of awful behavior. You don’t go to Trap Door for an easy time....

Dutch Wife in the Desert screens at the U. of C. Film Studies Center on Saturday. The “pink film” is a Japanese cinematic genre almost without analogue in American movies. English-language critics usually describe it as soft-core pornography; and while pink films trade in sexual content (and often in a sensational manner), they don’t exist solely to gratify spectators’ sexual fantasies. Historically the genre has afforded filmmakers a good deal of creative freedom....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With all of the stuff taking up my attention today, I almost missed that the Black Lips just announced a tour of the Middle East. This tour is great on a couple of levels—like how there are a lot of young rock fans in the region, where being a rock fan can still get you in trouble and is therefore way, way more rebellious and dangerous than rock ‘n’ roll has been in America in half a century (and they don’t even get to see that many bands)....

Mike Sula Inasal chicken, Bacolod Chicken Haus Speaking of chicken, the Philippine city of Bacolod is famous for chicken inasal, a grilled bird notable for its tanginess—imparted by the juice of the small, sour citrus fruit known as the calamansi—as well as contributions to the marinade like garlic, ginger, coconut vinegar, lemongrass, and sugar. Bacolod Chicken Haus, adopting a bit of the MO of a popular chain back on the islands, has brought it to North Park in a bright, open space on Lincoln Avenue....

Give me three words to describe Tom Roeser and they’d be conservative, Catholic, and curmudgeon. With room for more, I wrote in 2007 that Roeser, “full of years and beans, writes the most fully realized blog I know (blog.tomroeser.com). He’s a ruminator, his decades in politics the cud he now chews twice, and he’s spellbinding. . . . Roeser, who wears his values on his sleeve, admires some people and despises others....

VENUES Chase Auditorium, 10 S. Dearborn (Black Perspectives Tribute); Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph (opening night); River East 21, 322 E. Illinois; 600 N. Michigan. The funniest movie to play Chicago last year wasn’t Knocked Up or Superbad—it was Roy Andersson’s You, the Living, a desperately dark Swedish comedy that screened twice as part of the 2007 Chicago International Film Festival. I wanted to recommend it to all my friends but didn’t get around to it, figuring it would open shortly at Landmark or the Music Box anyway....

Daniel Levin’s recordings offer an incomplete accounting of his versatility. On the cellist’s two albums as a leader, both with a quartet including vibes, trumpet, and bass, the music can be intense, despite its chamber-jazz restraint, but the instrumentation lends itself best to carefully woven melodies and fine gradations of texture. Levin appears on three discs as a sideman, most notably Sounds (Clean Feed) by free-jazz-friendly alto saxist Rob Brown–but Brown recruited him to help explore a “quieter, more exotic” idiom....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Judging by the recent pop charts, disco’s in for a very good 2014. The genre’s revival and rehabilitation have been going on for awhile, as anyone familiar with LCD Soundsystem and/or the deep cuts on Justin Timberlake albums could tell you, but heading into the end of 2013 the sound is poised at a major tipping point. The two most inescapable songs of the summer, Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” both work in the organic disco tones that LCD’s James Murphy’s been promoting for years, with Thicke’s smash being a rather unabashed pileup of ideas lifted directly from Murphy’s recordings....

I’ve mentioned before what a weird place the Hot 100 has become, with country artists rubbing elbows with European arena techno producers and songs from commercials competing against songs from Internet memes. But amidst all of the futuristic rap music and earnestly old-timey folk pop you see very little in the way of alternative rock in the original, 1990s sense of the term, meaning aggressive but melodic guitar rock with at least a vague suggestion of punkish edge....

When I was a weird little kid, obsessed with history and the Civil War, I always rooted for the South, because the South always lost in the end. There is an implicit romance for little boys in lost causes and perpetual grievance, but when it came to the Civil War, I simply felt that the less interesting side had won. This opinion was not random: I was the kind of kid who, after fourth grade, pestered my parents into spending a full three days of our family vacation at Gettysburg, and cried during the group bus tour we took, at the failure of Pickett’s Charge and the inevitable Confederate loss....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Ending Spending Action Fund, the Super PAC funded entirely by Ricketts, has spent more than $1.3 million since 2010 influencing elections, all of it benefitting Republican candidates, according to federal election filings. Like a closer in baseball brought on in the ninth inning to seal a victory, the group’s moves have come just days before voters head to the polls, and only once has it failed to ensure victory....