Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The great soul and gospel singer Fontella Bass died yesterday in her native Saint Louis, Missouri, from complications following a heart attack. She was 72. The singer will probably always be known best for her indelible 1965 smash “Rescue Me,” recorded in Chicago with the Chess Records house band; but her other soul work was nearly as strong. Early on in her career she played piano behind the blues great Little Milton, but she moved to Chicago with her then-husband, the singular trumpeter Lester Bowie....

The Reader’s Choice: Relax on Milwaukee Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Relax straddles the divide between gentrifying Logan Square and blue-collar Avondale: crotchety old regulars camp out in the back of the huge bar by the dart board and pool table while kids from the Rat Patrol bicycle gang hang out in front, drinking dollar beers and eating popcorn from a greasy machine embellished with a picture of Rick James....

Buying something from a rude and pretentious salesperson can truly make for the “Worst. Shopping experience. Ever.” Especially when you’re buying within a niche market where snobbery can run rampant—you know, something like fixed-gear bikes, or records, or in this case comic books. That’s where Challengers shines. The shop’s laid-back, pleasant staff, headed up by owners W. Dal Bush and Patrick Brower, won’t bat an eye if you approach them with novice questions like “Which issue of Spider-Man did Gwen Stacey die in?...

Vive la Femme 2048 N. Damen 773-772-7429 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In most of the retail clothing world, sizes 14 and up are considered “plus.” But at Vive la Femme, which caters to larger figures, any woman size 12-18 is what owner Stephanie Sack calls an “in-betweenie”—someone whose figure is fuller than the average shop can outfit, but who might not have the right proportions for Lane Bryant....

Lydia Burns is one of several fromagers at Fox & Obel, and when I stopped in a few weeks ago to ask her about her favorite cheese, she went straight for the Caprino Castagno, a product of Italy that is currently mentioned almost exclusively on Italian sites. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wrapped in chestnut leaves, and a little oozy around the edges, Caprino Castagno is made by affineur Gianni Cora in the Piedmont, a northern state of Italy surrounded by the Alps and centered in Turin....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The musicians’ contract expired September 16, but they were continuing to play during negotiations. According to a statement on their Facebook page, when management presented them with a contract that “represented an increase of only $20 over the contract term” [three years] from the previous offer, they “concluded that management was not negotiating in good faith and felt compelled to call a work stoppage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Four Tet “On There Is Love Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden, backs away from his kitchen-sink collagist’s approach and moves toward a more focused and strictly rhythmic aesthetic that’s closer to traditional techno,” writes Jessica Hopper. “That’s not to say he’s gone retro—he pulls moodiness and space from new sources like dubstep and chillwave, so that his music amounts to the sort of reserved and classy London club cool-out that makes sense coming from the polymathic producer, DJ, and rocker....

The Goodman Theatre couldn’t possibly have known how much Puerto Rican identity would be in the news when it scheduled José Rivera’s Boleros for the Disenchanted (see Albert Williams’s in-depth review at chicagoreader.com) and the Teatro Vista/Collaboraction coproduction of Migdalia Cruz’s El Grito del Bronx for overlapping runs. But with Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the unique role of Puerto Ricans in American life—U.S. citizens in law, colonial subjects in reality—has taken center stage....

British saxophonist Evan Parker, who plays a free concert with reedist Ned Rothenberg on Sunday at the Chicago Cultural Center, is one of the most instantly recognizable improvisers in the world. He’s developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary distinguished by mastery of circular breathing and polyphonics, and throughout a career spanning more than four decades he’s stayed open to new ideas. A committed sonic explorer, he’s had a dizzying variety of collaborators—he’s made pioneering music with the likes of Derek Bailey and Peter Brötzmann and he’s played in a swing band with Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The nonprofit Friends of the Parks recently caused an uproar by promoting its vision of “completing” the lakefront park system from 71st south to the Indiana border and from Hollywood north to Evanston. Along with some environmentalists and other community activists, people who own lakefront property in those areas have raised a stink over the idea that acres of lake could be filled in to ensure a park stretches the entire length of the city....

Laura Miner Perhaps I’ve uncovered an actual craze that over a century ago struck Chicago. Perhaps it was nothing more than a relative handful of Chicagoans beating the summer heat by getting up when it was cool. At any rate, I just searched the Tribune archives for a story I had a hunch I’d find. Sure enough, “Trailing the Patient Golf Fiends Over the Public Links” was published on July 11, 1909....

Kevin Ashtari learned a couple things in the U.S. Navy: how to replace the explosives under the ejection seat of an EA-6B Prowler and how to roast a perfect batch of coffee beans on a gas-powered barbecue grill. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He mail-ordered some green coffee beans and in the backyard of his house on the base tricked out a triple-burner grill with a high-speed rotisserie motor and a one-gallon stainless-steel drum....

In May this wolf reported on the breakup of raucous local garage rockers Heavy Times—but now the band is back! Or at least part of the band. Alas, bassist Matthew Hord and drummer Luca Cimarusti (the Reader‘s music-­listings guy) are no longer involved. Guitarists Bo Hansen and Matt Courtade have recruited Matt Williams to drum, and last weekend the three of them cut five songs at Minbal with Russ Calderwood on bass and Cooper Crain on synths....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Decided to punish myself last weekend with Judd Apatow’s latest assembly-line homage to all his good-guy high school buddies, Enduring Sarah Marshall . . . whoops, fucked up the title (excuse my French, apparently it’s contagious), but y’all know what I’m driving at. Just the familiar beta-male blend of regressive gender fantasies: self-pitying schlub hero (calling Mrs. Portnoy!) wins over va-voom!...

Longtime local cycling entrepreneur Josh Squire has a sorry tale to tell about the city’s new plan to put thousands of rental bikes on the streets of Chicago. That’s $9,600 per bike. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On April 26 Bike Chicago filed a protest. Foremost among its complaints: both the head of the city’s Department of Transportation and the intern who wrote Chicago’s request for proposals had recently worked as consultants for Alta, and the intern is now an Alta employee....

Between the opening of the revolutionary Avec in 2003 and the refreshing arrival of Jose Garces’s Mercat a la Planxa in late 2008, could there have been a more enervated, bush-whipped restaurant style around town than sorta-Spanish tapas and their mutant offspring? These were characterized by unhappy arranged marriages of incompatible cuisines or half-cocked conflations of the traditional and the Adria-esque. The inauthentic imitation of casual, progressive Iberian bar snacking ruled night and day, as tiny nibbles were forced into family-style eating arrangements....

There are many reasons for the City Council to turn against Mayor Daley’s tax increment financing program. As faithful readers should know by now, TIF is an off-the-books property tax hike passed by the City Council at Mayor Daley’s urging. When the aldermen create a TIF district, they freeze the amount of property tax dollars the schools, parks, county, and other taxing bodies can collect from that area for up to 24 years....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you might’ve read in this week’s Three Beats, local far-out art-rockers Ono, awakened from dormancy in 2007 by Steve “Plastic Crimewave” Krakow, are about to release their first record in 26 years. Ono’s resurgence and high profile in the local scene over the past few years has increased demand not just for new recordings from the band but also for their hard-to-find old stuff, which has resulted in their out-of-print debut, 1983’s Machines That Kill People (Thermidor), going for an outrageous sum on eBay....

The Maids Writers’ Theatre’ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Genet’s own tale had many of the same elements as the play. A bastard, given up for adoption as a baby and packed off to a reformatory as a teen, he spent most of his first four decades either in jail or doing what was required to get there. He was a thief, a vagrant, a prostitute, and a sexual criminal by virtue of his homosexuality....

Last week, as the Cubs extended their first losing streak of the season to four games, a question hovered over the team: who would manager Lou Piniella lose patience with first, his players or the press? Last Friday, after a 6-5 loss to the Cincinnati Reds, the press won, though it was close. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “And then I bring in a reliever who’s throwing 30-, 40-foot curveballs to boot,” he continued, referring to Will Ohman, who replaced Zambrano only to throw eight balls in nine pitches, walking in the tying and go-ahead runs with the bases loaded....