Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was just e-mailed a link to a recent conversation between Nathan and writer/performer Susie Bright posted on 10zenmonkeys.com. Again she rails at laws that pretty much don’t let anyone even look at child pornography but the FBI. She tells Bright: “We all know Gonzales is in big shit right now because of a bunch of things including illegal use of the Patriot Act and the firing of all of these attorneys....

Expo Chicago launched last year with ambitions as big as its Navy Pier digs—to bring an international art fair to the shores of Chicago. We asked Expo’s president and director, Tony Karman, what’s in store for its sophomore effort. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 20 special exhibitions, does that mean booths? Some are booths, some are sculptural exhibitions. We’ve got IN/SITU, which is the large-scale site-specific works that are peppered throughout the floor....

For nearly a dozen years, Joe Judd was a fixture in Wicker Park. A wiry guy with a baseball cap practically glued to his head, he could often be found planting flowers around the neighborhood or hosting late-night chess tournaments at Myopic, the used-book store he opened in 1991. But that all changed one morning about five years ago, when Judd woke up to find that his left leg no longer fit in his pants....

It isn’t Alexander Brunacci’s fault that we live in a city that’s afraid of food trucks and runs down outlaw eloteros, fruteros, and tamaleros at whim. But it does smart a bit to see a full-service restaurant pairing wines to “elevated street food” in a city historically hostile to the real thing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » OK, there’s an elote, if by elote you mean a shucked ear of corn piled precariously with a matrix of chicharron, hazelnuts, and blue cheese that you’d have to scrape off the sidewalk if you were eating it on the street....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to his current label, Yep Roc, the ultra-prolific Jim Lauderdale plans to release three stylistically disparate albums in nine months. Two are already out: last fall he issued a fine bluegrass outing called The Bluegrass Diaries and in February he released Honey Songs, which doesn’t fall neatly into any category. (The third will be a collaboration with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, their second effort together....

To kick off this new feature, we challenged Grant Achatz of Alinea—recent recipient of three Michelin stars—to come up with a recipe using the southeast Asian seeds called kluwak kupas. Achatz got to choose the next chef and the next ingredient, that chef will issue the next challenge, and so on. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We settled on kluwak kupas—the seeds of the kepayang tree, also known as keluak nuts, buah kelauk nuts, and kluwak nuts—and cleared the shelf of them at Golden Pacific Market (5353 N....

“I can’t understand it. Why would people who aren’t Nusinows keep this junk safe for nearly a hundred years?” asks Bernard Nusinow. He shakily pulls another milk bottle down from an antique Dutch cabinet in the Nusinows’ living room and adds it to the fragile pile balanced in his arms. Bernard picks up the largest cream jug and twists it in the late afternoon sun reflecting off the lake—you can see Oak Street Beach out the living room windows....

Nothing about Portugal. The Man’s Waiter: “You Vultures!” (Fearless) makes much sense to me. I’m still trying to figure out how they can execute the most terrible-sounding ideas–like switching, in the course of a single song, between textural psychedelia, skritchy art-punk, and Timbaland-style sequencing–without coming off like pretentious assholes. Or how they’ve managed to bomb with indie kids, who are pretty friendly with daring art-rock, and score instead with emo kids, who listen to one of the most strictly by-the-book styles around....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Dollface (New American Library), set in 1920s Chicago, writer Renee Rosen cuts right to the chase in the first pages. Vera, the titular Dollface, is at a Prohibition-era speakeasy, acting bold, taking risks, and seeing how much she can get away with. She’s there with her childhood friend and roommate, out for fun and adventure. Vera’s tiny, but she’s a looker who can hold her liquor....

Chicago’s Jam Productions has a long and contentious history with concert-industry behemoth Live Nation, and Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster earlier this year. So it’s not exactly surprising that Jam is suing Ticketmaster, which sells tickets to Jam concerts, in order to terminate its contract. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger represents a massive shift of power in the live-music business, combining the largest promoter in the country with the company that’s dominated the ticketing industry for years....

Editor’s note: Oon closed in December 2013. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With my first bite at Oon, Eversman’s year-and-a-half-in-the-making Randolph Street restaurant, I was relieved. It was a blackened grilled prawn, its shell painted with the muted heat of a Japanese spice blend, resting across some squirts of smoky grilled scallion puree, dabs of creamy liquid lemon, and coins of candied kumquat, all strewn with strands of lightly wilted baby mustard greens....

The Auditorium Theatre threw itself a 125th birthday party last week, on its own capacious stage. John Mahoney was the master of ceremonies, and Broadway’s Patti LuPone was the star attraction. The checkered history of the landmark Auditorium Building and its 3,900-seat theater provided the narrative for the evening. Designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan (when Frank Lloyd Wright was a draftsman at their firm), it was the nation’s largest structure when it opened, and one of the first mixed-use buildings....

A few weeks ago I reported on an internal debate over education coverage at WBEZ. Should Becky Vevea, a freelancer who contributed hugely to WBEZ’s superb coverage of the 2012-’13 school year, be hired to cover education full-time? Education reporter Linda Lutton thought so. But this sort of small-scale tweaking of staff and budget was hard to sell to Chicago Public Media CEO Torey Malatia, a big-picture guy. (Vevea was eventually hired, but as a producer instead of a reporter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As if it didn’t have enough problems already, the American press is facing an election-year crisis. Long kept afloat by peddling shock, distortion, and outright calumny about our finest public servants, it now must ask itself: who’s going to buy newspapers that suck up to both candidates? Mind you, a presidential showdown between Bambi and Grandpa Walton figures to be a classic, especially if Bambi’s running mate is Scarlett O’Hara (Maureen Dowd in the Tuesday NYT), and Zeb Walton’s is Mary Poppins (Dowd again....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The concept of zero waste—reengineering industrial processes to eliminate and/or make use of byproducts and leftover materials—seems like a nice idea with little chance of being applied on a large scale anytime soon. But the idea is slowly gaining traction in the fashion industry. Zero-waste creations by such designers and artists as Martin Margiela and the School of the Art Institute’s Nick Cave will be on view as part of the exhibition ZERO Waste: Fashion Re-Patterned, at Columbia College’s Averill and Bernard Leviton A + D Gallery, 619 S....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I was in college and first heard New Orleans brass-band music, I dug it, though I think what first grabbed me was the debut album by Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, I Only Have Eyes for You (ECM, 1985)–I still love his version of the Flamingos hit. But my deeper love of brass-band music came much later, whenever the Music Box first screened Emir Kusturica‘s Underground....

LAKEVIEW TERRACE ssss Directed by Neil LaBute Written by David Loughery and Howard Korder With Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington, Ron Glass, Jay Hernandez, and Regine Nehy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lake View Terrace, you might remember, was the suburban district of LA where King was pulled over by the LAPD in March 1991 and beaten by four officers with batons for more than a minute while a bystander caught the incident on videotape....

Sharon Evans’s portrait of a troubled Chicago sex-crimes cop boasts an intriguing concept. At the story’s center is Jim, whose glib detachment crumbles after a rape victim he’s disrespected places a curse on him. Jim’s already strained relationships with his current and former partners and his lieutenant–all women–become even more tense when he’s pursued by three Furies, ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance. Evans and director Peter Amster’s excellent cast convey the odd combination of drudgery and danger in police work and the psychological stress on the officers as they deal with lying perps and devastated victims....

Something in the Air In this week’s long review Tal Rosenberg makes a case for Olivier Assayas’s latest feature, Something in the Air, as a mature revision of his first international success, Cold Water, akin to James Joyce’s revision of his aborted first novel, “Stephen Hero,” into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If that’s not literate enough for you, we’ve also got a short review of The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann’s big-screen adaptation of the F....

For an icon, Martha Graham doesn’t get around much. She died in 1991 at the age of 96, but of course I’m not talking about the person. Her company hasn’t appeared here since 1992, at Ravinia, and according to Ravinia’s then executive director Zarin Mehta, the troupe was a tough sell. In a way Graham has been a victim of her own success: because her distinctive choreography is instantly recognizable, it’s easily parodied and clearly associated with the art of a half century ago....