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Bay Area death-metal band Autopsy, founded in 1987 and split in 1995, have been reunited full-time since 2010, and their 2011 LP Macabre Eternal landed on plenty of year–end best-of lists. Influential but hardly famous in the 90s, Autopsy are now revered as pillars of “old-school” death metal, alongside the likes of Possessed, Terrorizer, Obituary, and Chicago’s own Master. Among other things, “old-school” metal preserves the raw, ragged energy of humans playing instruments in a room—no songwriting in Cubase, no drum triggers, no quantized blastbeats....

Bea Arthur, who died Saturday at the age of 86, was best known for her deep voice and dry comic delivery in the TV series Maude and The Golden Girls, and the Broadway musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Mame. But before becoming a star, she paid her dues in adventurous off-Broadway productions of the late 1940s and early 50s. Early credits included Gertrude Stein’s verse play Yes Is for a Very Young Man (which teamed her with her husband-to-be Gene Saks, who later directed her in the Broadway and film versions of Mame), Ulysses in Nighttown (Burgess Meredith’s adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses, starring Zero Mostel), and Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, in which she appeared with Weill’s widow, the great Lotte Lenya....

Joe Meno has a way of capturing, in Polaroid moments, the unexplainable allure of the Second City. Hometown pride pulsed throughout 2004’s Hairstyles of the Damned, and again last year through Office Girl (Akashic Books), a novel that ping-pongs around the various landmarks, topics, and minutiae of the urban mosaic that Meno is so skilled at representing. The story revolves around two purposeless artists hell-bent on fumbling into some kind of purpose....

Second Story‘s reputation preceded it. I’d heard for years about a North Michigan Avenue bar, perhaps mythic, that was proximate to but untouched by the Mag Mile’s hypercapitalist excess, its Burberried masses, its clog of traffic and light and iParaphernalia. By god, it was true: a small and exceedingly charming gay bar, Second Story is sandwiched between an Armenian restaurant on the first floor and a psychic’s parlor on the third....

Gene Siskel Film Center, siskelfilmcenter.org Apologies to Jacqueline Stewart of Northwestern University—whose six-week series “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema” spanned the north and south sides and brought numerous pioneering black filmmakers to Chicago—but the best retrospective of the past year was Gene Siskel Film Center’s eye-opening series on the forgotten French comedian Pierre Etaix. A professional circus clown and a filmmaking protege of Jacques Tati, Etaix wrote, directed, and starred in a series of wildly imaginative comedies—The Suitor (1962), Yoyo (1965), Le Grand Amour (1969)—that combined sight gags worthy of Buster Keaton, a hip sensibility reminiscent of his contemporary Jerry Lewis, and a decidedly mordant view of love and marriage....

The Reader’s Choice: North by Northwest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hardly celebrated as a “Chicago film”—most people remember it for the crop-duster sequence, shot in northern Indiana, and the climax on Mount Rushmore. But nothing else shot in Chicago really approaches the classic status of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller, which includes scenes at the Ambassador East and Midway Airport. It’s the big CTA bus blocking the lane, but behind it sits an impressive line of steamed motorists: Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1964), Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973), Paul Brickman’s Risky Business (1983), John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993), Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008)....

“That place has rats,” Reader staff writer Kevin Warwick once told me when I asked him about the Logan. Once known as the north side’s dumpiest second-run house, the Logan—which opened as the Paramount in 1915—changed hands last year and has gotten an impressive makeover that includes an adjoining bar and a small lounge furnished with expensive club chairs. Some of the theater’s swank decor has been restored (the stained-glass arch over the front entrance, marble walls that had been covered with plaster and paint), and other nice touches have been added (handsome art-deco carpeting in the lobby)....

On June 4, Mayor Daley will be recognized by the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., as one of their “Visionaries in Sustainability” for his “long dedication to a sustainable urban environment.” Yet within a month, if his administration has its way, bulldozers could be moving in to demolish and discard at least 28 of the 29 buildings on the former campus of Michael Reese Hospital. Last week the city opened the bidding process for the job....

Under the Radar Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Chicago’s once-thriving performance art scene hadn’t fizzled out a decade or so ago, Cupola Bobber would be a rising sensation rather than an isolated curiosity. Like Goat Island and Lucky Pierre before it, Cupola Bobber (Stephen Friehn and Tyler B. Myers) takes various high- and low-culture junk—the list of stuff that got sent into space with Voyager in 1977, for instance—and funnels it though many months of rehearsal....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andy Aroonrasameruang first made a mark with his explosively flavorful cooking at Wrigleyville’s TAC Quick, attracting intrepid non-Thai eaters with authentic dishes like fish maw salad, crispy fish guts tossed with shrimp and cashews in a sweet-hot dressing. Now he’s struck out on his own, opening Andy’s Thai Kitchen in a prime spot beneath the Brown Line stop on Wellington....

Gossip Wolf couldn’t have been happier to hear that Dischord punk duo the Evens (aka Amy Farina and Ian Mac­Kaye) will play Logan Hardware on Mon 7/1. This wolf hasn’t seen too many shows at the record shop, but MacKaye has a perfectly reasonably explanation for why the Evens decided to play there. His relationship with the building that houses Logan Hardware began in the early 90s, when it was the U....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art A collection of unconventional art that turned up in California in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Talk by curators Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss at 5 PM. One of our visual arts recommendations for fall. Imperfect Symmetry: A Compendium at Columbia College Chicago Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery A group show featuring different perspectives on imperfect symmetry....

The Chef: Amanda Rockman (Balena, the Bristol) The Challenger: Meg Colleran Sahs (Terzo Piano) The Ingredient: Pu-erh tea Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The tea is known for its earthy taste, and at first Rockman was worried it would be “nasty and herbaceous.” But she got a 2003 oak-barrel-aged pu-erh mixed with wild rose petals that she described as “delicate, but kind of funky ....

The Chef: Thai Dang (Embeya)The Challenger:Andres Padilla (Topolobampo)The Ingredient: Maguey leaf Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thai Dang (Embeya), challenged with maguey leaves by Andres Padilla of Topolobampo, had trouble describing their flavor. “I tried to taste it—they were right. It’s not that great in your mouth,” he said. “It’s very fibrous, dense.” Grilling it added a nice aroma and flavor, though, Dang said....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play concerns seven guys at a birthday bash in a midtown Manhattan apartment. As the liquor flows, so do the bitchy witticisms and bilious expressions of self-hatred. Though the conceit was familiar–not least of all from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—The Boys in the Band pioneered a new openness about the gay subculture, with its campy humor and sexual explicitness, paving the way for such works as Angels in America, A Chorus Line, Love!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some people, including members of the United Church of Christ, have scoffed at Wright for speaking to his community first and foremost without “speaking truth to power.” The truth is that he has established (or at least re-presented in a compelling way) a counter-narrative within the black community that God wants them to be free from Pharoah’s lashes. That is intolerable to the powers and principalities of our nation....

You could say Ilko Davidov learned English from Lemmy. As a teenager in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 70s, he scoured the black market for albums by Motorhead, Kiss, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath. “The antiauthoritarianism of the lyrics appealed to me,” he says. “I wondered how they understood how we felt, when they lived in a free society and their government let them do that.” His parents were classical music fans, taking him on frequent trips to the opera, though his father occasionally picked up pop records on business trips abroad....

I’ve been collecting records since middle school. I started playing records in small venues around 2006. Soul music is really interesting as far as the DJ scene goes; it’s pretty divided. One of our goals was to bring together different types of DJs as well as some relevant contemporary acts. We wanted to run the gamut, from northern soul to funky breaks to Motown, and do something different than a typical 60s soul-club kind of party....

Sarah Polley has been acting in movies and TV shows since she was four years old: the Toronto native made her screen acting debut in the Disney feature One Magic Christmas (1985), and her role in the CBC series Road to Avonlea made her a star in Canada at age 11. By the time her screenplay for Away From Her (2006) was nominated for an Oscar, Polley had been in the movie business for nearly a quarter century, though she was still only 28....

QNot sure that even you can help with this one, but I’ll give it a shot . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve spoken to him about these incidents, and even though I try to laugh them off to hide my fear, he feels terrible about what he’s done. He is fully asleep when these incidents occur, so it’s not as if he can do anything about them....