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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve said clearly and frequently that I don’t think raising the sales tax is the right way to help the CTA and other transit agencies. People already pay too much in taxes; I believe they should pay less, not more. Even though the increase in the bill passed by lawmakers is small, people will still feel an impact. Despite my public support for an alternative bill that would address the CTA’s long-term needs without increasing taxes, lawmakers did not send me that bill....

Julia Thiel Presumably it’s not always this empty A 24-hour Lakeview diner with white tablecloths, chandeliers, a jukebox, and a couple flat-screen TVs, Autentico 5 de Mayo seems to have a slight identity crisis. Maybe that explains why the spacious Tex-Mex restaurant was almost entirely empty on a recent visit—or maybe it was the fact that we went at 6 PM on a Sunday. It certainly can’t be explained by the quality of the food (mostly excellent) or service (prompt and friendly), or by the prices (very reasonable)....

WATCHMEN s Directed by ZACK SNYDER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, the cold war ended for real four years after the series concluded. We now know, more or less, what a world dominated by the U.S. looks like. Yet even after two decades, Watchmen doesn’t seem quaint or outdated; on the contrary, it seems more prescient with each passing year. In the comic, American dominance leads to paranoia....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the points Stewart kept pressing is that Cramer, on his show, treats serious financial analysis as entertainment, which is why I’m disappointed that the interview itself is being treated as entertainment, as sport. “Stewart creamed him.” “What had been touted as the ‘week-long feud of the century’ culminated in a dressing down of CNBC and Cramer by Stewart…....

Asked how he and his wife and musical partner, Gretta Rochelle, met, My Gold Mask guitarist Jack Armondo admits, “We were both kinda drunk.” It was at someone’s Fourth of July party in 2002, and after discovering that they were compatible musically as well as romantically, they got serious on both fronts. Their first project became the popular local “sex rock” band Bang! Bang!, with Rochelle (aka “Gretta Fine”) on bass, Armondo (aka “Jack Flash”) on guitar, both on vocals, and a series of drummers behind them....

JAZZ | Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Glasses and Variations on a Blue Line/’Round Midnight, which McPhee recorded for Swiss label Hat Hut in 1977 and released in 1979, have both been out of print for decades. Last year Corbett negotiated with label owner Werner X. Uehlinger to reissue titles from the Hat Hut catalog, the McPhee albums among them, and it catalyzed his desire to give Corbett vs....

the rising star But alas, I have to admit that when it came to Barack Obama—the most gifted politician of my lifetime—I blew it. When it was his turn to speak that day, he talked about the trials and tribulations of trying to organize low-income black communities. I wasn’t impressed. To be honest, I’ve always been attracted to the Sammy Glicks of Chicago politics—the street fighters who scratch and claw their way to the top....

Irvine Welsh is one very busy guy. His latest novel, Skagboys, came out last September. He reworked the theatrical version of his novel Trainspotting for Theater Wit’s production last October. He spoke at the Printers Row Lit Fest this June. He’s working on a new novel, set in Minnesota, Miami, and Chicago. (The Edinburgh native has homes in the latter two locales.) He has a film script or two in the works....

Anjin Mamiri At this, Chicago’s only Indonesian restaurant, the menu doesn’t seem too hung up on regional specificity, with the exception of coto makassar, a beef tripe soup from South Sulawesia, where owner Muhammed Rukli hails from. It’s an interesting bowl, the base of which is peanut sauce mixed with the milky water that’s been used to soak rice. But what brings it alive are the garnishes—a squirt of fresh lime, a sprinkling of fried garlic chips, and a liberal dose of sambal, a spicy condiment that comes in many varieties....

To Fear or Not to Fear,” an exhibit of work by ten artists mostly from war-torn countries, probably won’t break any attendance records at Highland Park’s Art Center, where it’s now on display. Ostensibly examining the ways that “the global media perpetuates a feeling of fear that permeates all cultures,” it’s heavy stuff and mostly didactic–from Anya Belyat-Giunta’s drawings of apparently bullet-riddled babies to Granite Amit’s ever evolving Grapes of Wrath, with its litany of Palestinian and Israeli suffering....

With next to no publicity, AMC’s River East 21 multiplex regularly screens mainstream hits from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—which, oddly, makes it one of the best-kept secrets in Chicago moviegoing. This spring the diverse selections included Taiwanese historical epic Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, Hong Kong romantic comedy Love in the Buff, and a domestic drama, A Simple Life by master director Ann Hui (Boat People), also from Hong Kong....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sergio Assad is widely celebrated for the classical guitar duo he has with his brother Odair; they’ve won a Grammy together, released a series of acclaimed albums for Nonesuch, dabbled in a variety of nonclassical styles, and performed all over the globe. They seem to play locally as often as they play anywhere in the world these days, a fortunate byproduct of Sergio’s marriage to Angela Olinta, a professor at the University of Chicago; he lives here....

Verdi’s Requiem was inspired by the deaths of two of Italy’s beacons of culture and identity: Rossini and Manzoni. The seed of the work–the concluding “Libera Me”–was Verdi’s contribution to a failed attempt at honoring Rossini with a requiem written jointly by 13 leading Italian composers. In late operas like Aida and Otello, Verdi’s music seeps into the libretto’s cracks, perfectly matching the shifting moods and events. Similarly, his Requiem illuminates the Latin texts with writing so highly charged that his contemporary, the conductor Hans von Bulow, famously referred to the mass as “opera in ecclesiastical robes....

I think that’s the Side Project apricot sour, La Fosse. The Festival of Wood and Barrel Aged Beer set another record in its 12th year, fielding more than 275 entries—a jump of more than 60 from 2013’s lineup. (Those of you who need a FOBAB primer can consult either of my two previous Beer and Metal columns on the festival.) This year it moved to the UIC Forum and added a Friday-night session on top of the usual pair of Saturday sessions, but in its other particulars FOBAB remained the cavalcade of amazing beer-related ridiculousness that Chicago’s nerds have come to know and love....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bruce Kraig, president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago and a founding member of the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance, will give a talk Saturday at 10 AM at Kendall College titled Changes in Food Consumption Patterns After the Civil War. He’ll cover how food production and transportation systems for feeding the troops were organized during the war, what civilians ate, and how developments at that time—among them the popularization of tinned meat—affected food as we know it today....

Sonny’s Gospel Legacy While it is true, as Tesser points out, that many of the musicians who Rollins encountered here in Chicago are no longer with us, Geraldine Gay certainly is. Her recent disc with her vocalist brother Donald Gay, Soulful Sounds, is terrific. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to Aaron for that assessment. Unfortunately Geraldine Gay’s recent illness prevented me from discussing her friendship with Rollins at any length....

Who Says Bloggers Can’t Be Reporters? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ll side with those at WBEZ who thought the station should’ve snatched up some of the dozens of first-rate journos dumped by the Trib and S-T over the past few years. Given the kind of resources, teamwork and time possible in a more conventional journalistic setting, ‘BEZ could indeed have emerged as the city’s leading news org....

I think the opera he really liked was Meistersinger. This one is a five-hour sit without (as Mark Twain noted) any good tunes for the vocalists. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wagner’s inspiration was a medieval Grail poem, which he expanded in his own libretto. It’s a mess, but this much comes across: (1) Women are dangerous; (2) If you just say “no” to sex with them, you could be king; (3) But not if you castrate yourself to avoid temptation....

Some of Mark Bradford’s collage paintings are like the poster-covered plywood fences you see at construction sites, their various colors and layers combining to reveal complex narratives about city life. Others resemble maps, with rows of squares that look like city blocks or skyscraper windows. A 2009 MacArthur fellow, Bradford is perhaps best known for these large-scale compositions. But he also works in other formats, including sculpture, multimedia installation, and video....

The battle began at precisely 11 o’clock on a misty June morning. No one was sure what year it was—both 1809 and 1813 had been suggested—or where exactly they were fighting, though everyone could agree it was somewhere in Prussia, or maybe Bulgaria. And also that the British army was severely outnumbered: a dozen men to the French army’s 24, and therefore headed for certain defeat. “We have to stop that mad dog Napoleon from taking over Europe!...