Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who didn’t have high hopes back in August when it was announced that Jonathan Zaragoza had been hired to take over the kitchen at Logan Square’s Masa Azul? Up until then it had been a great tequila bar and a middling southwestern restaurant. That’s all changed now. Zaragoza, scion of the clan that runs the great Birrieria Zaragoza and a veteran of Sepia, has brought the menu up to par with a lineup of tacos: pork belly, shrimp, mushrooms, a superjuicy Yucatan-style cochinita pibil, and of course the mole-rubbed roasted birria his family is known for....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A while back I posted on the passing of Pehr Bolling, a Swedish immigrant and local resident who (among many remarkable things) after retiring built a functional replica of a viking ship. The obit is unfortunately deep in the Trib archives now, but the family was kind enough to send me a video of the ship’s launch. It’s particularly moving to me since my own grandfather has been building and restoring boats as a serious hobby/part-time job for most of his adult life*, mostly gorgeous mid-century power boats but also James River bateau, an old, distinctively Virginia shallow-water boat that was used for shipping on the James River....

Formed in Milwaukee in 1980, Plasticland was the third incarnation of a band that had already gone through two related genres, prog and Krautrock, to arrive at a sound that put it out in front of the mid-decade psychedelic revival. Like the best of their better-known peers–the Lyres and Rain Parade come to mind–they were able to back up their paisley pretensions and hairy fuzzbox spew with some very solid songwriting....

Other than that, it was a great story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Burris has been keeping a fairly low profile lately, aside from his spirited appearance in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade (where, according to some press reports, he inspired murmurs and jokes; Cobb sent around pictures of him shaking hands with kids). “I’ve seen some of the comments written about me—like I must be in it for a paycheck,” she told me in an interview....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More and more often I come across think pieces that claim rock is dead, and I honestly have to wonder if the writers of those articles have ever listened to Screaming Females. The New Jersey punks have been ripping through sets at DIY spaces, hip venues, and large theaters from coast to coast for close to a decade, and front woman Marissa Paternoster‘s wild guitar shredding proves there’s still a life force in rock....

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH The Artistic Home | CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF Raven Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alexandra Del Lago, the heroine of Sweet Bird of Youth, was inspired by Williams’s friend Tallulah Bankhead. But there’s much of Williams himself in her as well. A middle-aged movie actress, Alexandra is wracked by the fear that her talent has vanished along with her looks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the risk of sounding like Freud, none of this would have happened had Governor Blagojevich not lost sight of who he was or where he came from or, most importantly, whom he owed for his success. His relentless desire to shake down folks doing business with the state, his hunger to build the mightiest of political machines, his obsession to be the man, the kingmaker, the top pol in Illinois–it all stems from the fact that he would be nothing if not for alderman Richard Mell, and he knows it....

If you were young and on fire and in anguish over the war in Vietnam, was there anyplace to be in late August of 1968 but the streets of Chicago? The trouble with the standard Chicago ’68 story is its limited cast of characters. No one associates Bill Singer with Chicago 1968. Or James Houlihan, Grace Barry, or, for that matter, Edward Burke. Actually getting him nominated wasn’t likely, but maybe, against the fierce opposition of the loyalists to Lyndon Johnson and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey, they could get the convention to adopt their so-called peace plank repudiating the war....

Of the fervent wishes I’ve been privy to over the past many years, the most sympathetic was probably that of Scott Stantis, the Birmingham News editorial cartoonist who longed to draw for the Chicago Tribune. It’s conservative and I’m conservative, he’d moan. We’re a perfect match. And so it seemed to me. “Well, frankly, I think newspapers are idiots that don’t do that,” Stantis said. “While it’s nice to have a global viewpoint—and important—I think it’s local news that’s going to drive journalism in the foreseeable future....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People like to criticize rap music for glamorizing illegal and immoral behavior, and honestly it has a long history stretching back to its earliest days of doing exactly that, especially since the concurrent rise of gangsta rap and the crack trade. But despite the rags-to-riches fantasies that Rick Ross and Young Jeezy enjoy weaving, most people who live off selling drugs or other illegal activities will tell you that for most part street-level hustling is a shitty job, where you’re on call around the clock and paid far less than any sane person would consider fair for the amount of risk—either from the cops or other criminals—that you’re put in....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel like 2013 is ushering a new era for industrial music, or at least some sort of fresh industrial awareness. Yeezus, the Godflesh tour, Author & Punisher opening up for Phil Anselmo’s solo project, Nine Inch Nails at Lollaplaooza—it just seems to have jumped back on to everyone’s radar recently. Another act to add to the list are local favorites Disappears....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I profiled Gatekeeper in 2009 they were living in Chicago and making tracks heavily indebted to filmmaker John Carpenter, who writes and performs scores for his movies that have had an unexpectedly serious influence on modern electronic music. The pair have since moved to Brooklyn and developed a considerably more polished style. Gone are the lo-res synthesizers, glitchy samplers, and dark atmospheres, replaced by big rave sounds and a gleaming, technophilic vision of the future buffed to a high-definition shine....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The City Council’s ________ [NOUN] committee met ________ [ADVERB / DAY] to discuss a seemingly well-intended ordinance on ________ [IMPRESSIVE, AWE-INSPIRING ADJECTIVE + NOUN] pushed by the Daley administration but disliked by just about everybody else affected, including _______ [NOUN], _______ [NOUN], and ______ [NOUN]. Even aldermen typically loyal to the mayor _______ [ANGRY SOUNDING VERB] the measure, but because committee members had previously agreed to sign off on it, the proposal ______ [VERB THAT MEANS “PASSED”] unanimously....

thehumminbird.com For a few years now, Muyassar Kurdi has been performing as the Humminbird. Even if you haven’t seen her play, you’ve probably noticed her around town, with her long dark tresses, psychedelic tattoos, and gypsy adornments. Kurdi’s “songs” are often chorusless mood pieces ruminating on family, past lovers, and the splendor of nature; she started out as a solo multitasker, combining vocals, harmonium, Autoharp, Raagini (an electronic substitute for the tanpura, which sitar players use as drone accompaniment), and a sea of effects pedals, but lately she’s been working with other musicians, including Kyle Klipowicz (harmony vocals, percussion, flute) and Graham Stephenson (trumpet)....

AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe I’ve just seen a wave crash over journalism. Ten days ago I had never heard of Abenomics. The introduction was made by the Economist, a weekly magazine with a reputation for spotting and analyzing economics trends that matter. The May 18-24 edition arrived bearing a cover that likened Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to Superman. Inside, the Economist told me this:...

The outdoor festival season gets under way in earnest this Saturday and Sunday with the 14th annual Celtic Fest Chicago in Millennium Park. Presented by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events and flynovascotia.com, the free festival runs from 11 AM to 9 PM both days and features rock, folk, and Celtic music from Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, Galicia, Cornwall, Wales, the Isle of Man, Canada, and the United States, spread across three stages (well, two stages and a tent)....

ANDREA BAUER Psalm One Tonight local rapper Psalm One (aka Cristalle Bowen) opens for Doomtree MC Dessa at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion to close out this year’s Downtown Sound series. Psalm says it’s one of her biggest hometown shows, and it’s an excellent opportunity to catch up on her recent spate of work. At the end of May Psalm released Free Hugs, an EP she describes as a “breath of fresh air”; the project started a couple years ago when producers A Plus and Aagee (aka Compound 7) woke her up in the middle of the night and sent her a pack of beats, and she challenged herself to record a song for every track and ended up releasing Free Hugs under the name Hologram Kizzie....

Brian Posen rented Theatre Building Chicago for the inaugural edition of this annual sketch comedy blowout back in January 2002—and for each one since. Now the inmates are running the asylum: Last May, a Posen-led group took over the three-theater TBC complex on Belmont, renaming it Stage 773. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 10th SketchFest, touted as the nation’s largest event of its kind, features 150 performances by 129 sketch troupes comprising more than 800 artists....

Alexander Richter Alex Fruchter Late last week Ruby Hornet editor-in-chief Alex Fruchter (aka DJ RTC) sent me an e-mail with a subject line that took me a couple minutes to process: “Leaving Ruby Hornet.” Fruchter is hardly the only person who has contributed to the popular local rap site and he’s had plenty of projects separate from his editor duties, but I’ve long considered Ruby Hornet and Fruchter to be inseparable....

Emma Watson as Alexis Neiers The Internet Movie Database informs us that Emma Watson prepared for her role in The Bling Ring—as real-life criminal turned reality TV star Alexis Neiers—by studying Neiers’s body language as exhibited on her TV show. You get a sense of her process in the on-screen results. Watson’s performance is a series of precise, concentrated gestures, which is never undermined by the sort of self-consciousness actors tend to exhibit when playing real people who are still alive....