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The Do-Division Street Fest returns this Saturday and Sunday (June 5 and 6) with two stages of music and a sidewalk sale that stretches along Division from Ashland to Leavitt, showcasing the wares of local shops, artisans, and restaurants. The two stages, at Damen and Leavitt, are programmed by the Empty Bottle (which has secured the services of “America’s Funnyman” Neil Hamburger as emcee) and House Call Entertainment (which books Subterranean and the Beat Kitchen), respectively....

My property tax bill arrived in the mail the other day. I sent my check in right away—it was the least I could do to thank Mayor Daley and Todd Stroger for giving me so much to write about over the years. The hike can’t be blamed on a rise in county or city spending, which stayed relatively flat this year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to my tax bill, my property is worth $562,620—but that’s way off base, according to Barb Head, a real estate agent and a property-tax activist who helped found the community group Tax Reform Action Coalition....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple of weeks ago the Reader‘s Asher Klein celebrated the tenth anniversary of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. He clearly considers it the band’s peak, an assessment I can’t agree with. Wilco has had a couple distinct phases, and though that record was obviously the turning point between them, the band made a lot of fantastic music both before and after it....

Your first day on the job, the only thing they tell you is, “Don’t look down.” I haven’t met a sky boy yet who took that advice. You step onto one of those girders 50, 60, 70 stories up, and all you want to look at is your feet, to make sure there’s something solid underneath. Eighteen inches of unbendable steel and on either side of that, just gravity. If Clara had seen us out on that girder, she’d have probably hopped a train for Chicago without me....

Say things go so bad the 99 percent really get angry. They’re not going to torch the Vietnamese pool hall, the abandoned laundromat, or the Korean blanket store on Lawrence. At least not right away. First they’ll smash the Mag Mile, and take dinner in the ashes of Les Nomades around the corner on Ontario. You may know it as one of the city’s most storied, exclusive, and expensive fine-dining temples—and for seven years the home of executive chef Chris Nugent, who followed the legendary Roland Liccioni (who’s since returned)....

Gossip Wolf hears that ripping Chicago garage band Heavy Times (which features Reader music-listings dude Luca Cimarusti on drums) broke up onstage after more or less playing at Quarters Rock ‘n’ Roll Palace in Milwaukee on April 27; according to Express Milwaukee, their four-song set was “incredibly unprofessional.” (This could’ve been because one member wanted to drive back to Chicago instead.) Heavy Times is done, but “rubber-­legged guitarist” Matt Courtade says HoZac will still release the band’s third and final album, Fix It Alone, next month....

We now know what the plan is for the Chicago Cultural Center’s former gift shop, dumped by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events last spring. Those who did while I was there lingered an average of 20 seconds, about the time it takes to decide that you’ve seen better installations in your neighbor’s garage at Halloween. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cahill is a lecturer in the visual arts department at the University of Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “People are wrestling with the problem [of youth violence] all over the country,” says Miles Harvey, a journalist and professor at DePaul University, and the book’s editor. “We have to start listening to people in the trenches. People commodify books. We don’t want to be on a street corner handing them out. We want people to want them, to consider them something of value....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dear Friend, For 17 years I served as Artistic Director of Redmoon. It is now time for me to resign that position and to make room for the leadership of Frank Maugeri and Rebecca Hunter. The Redmoon Board of Directors has chosen Frank Maugeri to succeed me in the position of Artistic Director and has named Rebecca Hunter to a newly created position of Executive Producer....

“All the higher power option is going to do is turn perhaps the most insightful & witty columnist we have into another white bread & mayonnaise writer.” This review assumes that AA is the only way—an inaccurate point of view often taken by the media which is really harmful to the alcoholics who don’t do well in AA. Research finds that many people quit on their own (Pete Hamill, I believe, wrote a book about doing this) and some quit via treatment based on other approaches....

Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker was the first to report last week that Brenda Sexton is leaving her high-profile job as head of the Illinois Film Office at the end of the month and that her successor is Betsy Steinberg, a vice president at Towers Productions who “worked on the governor’s re-election TV commercials.” The purported political connection didn’t exactly come as a shock, but at least Steinberg has chops in the film industry–when Sexton got the job four years ago there was a fuss over what looked like Illinois politics as usual....

Riot Fest knows you’re a sucker for the good old days. The punk-happy megacarnival (Ferris wheels included, duh) not only situates itself on the cusp of cozy hoodie weather—when the leaves are a-changin’ and the pangs of what went wrong in life become especially poignant—it also books enough reunions, one-offs, and rare performances by bands relevant to a thirtysomething’s formative years to create a bona fide time warp. The key, of course, is not to concern yourself with making sense of how (and maybe why) Paul Westerberg is onstage singing “I Will Dare,” but to wring every ounce of appreciation you can from the spectacle....

Q Here’s a hypothetical for you: You’ve been corresponding with a handsome young man who lives in Paris. You know him through a friend in France, and your friend has vetted him. He’s offered to pay more than half of your airfare so that you can visit him in Paris. You’ve spoken to him on the phone, and hearing him speak to you in French makes your knees weak. PS: I’m attaching his photo so you can see why I’m considering this....

Q The two things that I dig most on a woman are a nice big pair of . . . swim fins. Some of my earliest sexual fantasies revolve around Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep. It’s frustrating to have such a bizarre fetish. There is a small subculture devoted to scuba fetishism on the Internet, but it’s a total sausage/snorkel fest. One day I’m heading somewhere tropical like Hawaii, where I hope to meet scuba divas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Fama, 74, is best known for a theory he developed in the 1960s and 1970s that is simple to express, which has made it all the more controversial: Markets are efficient. They are accurate. They take into account all available information at all times. Whatever investors know about a stock or bond is already reflected in its price, and prices respond instantly to newly available information....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The artist Hui-min Tsen doesn’t remember when she first discovered the Pedway, but she remembers her first walk through, from the beginning (State and Wabash) to the end (beneath the Swissotel). It was on her birthday, and the approximately two-hour walk took her six or seven hours. “I stopped in hotels, got snacks,” she says, “but I also got lost a lot....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Heaven and Earth Magic (Nightingale Cinema, November) This year’s Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation featured an impressive mix of new and old works. A standout in the latter category was this feature-length collage animation by Harry Smith (1961), which screened from a 16-millimeter print. Seeing the movie in this format was significant, as Smith communicated so much through the texture of his images....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First the American League. I’ll stick with the BoSox and Yankees, in that order, in the East, with the Yanks the wild card. I’ll join with the majority as well in picking the Los Angeles Angels in the West. But then I’ll be a homer and pick the White Sox in the Central, not because I’m so optimistic about the Sox, but because I’m more pessimistic about the Cleveland Indians and Detroit Tigers (not enough pitching)....

redeyechicago.com (though it’s better in print) There will always be a segment of society—humorless tools, to a one—who think of punning as the lowest form of humor. Not for those people the Twitter account of Chicago’s premier punster, Tracy Swartz, who in her free time is the RedEye‘s transportation and homicide reporter. (She was the one using the hashtag #loopfiasco to refer to the Brown Line disruptions this spring.) That Swartz is presumably not also a full-time copy editor/headline writer in the RedEye newsroom leads you to think the place is filled with witty wordplayers, because its headlines—particularly on the front page—are hilarious....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this case, “redefining” tacos apparently means filling them with unusual stuff. On some level, that could be an effective strategy in a city that’s bursting with excellent tacos. Making the best taco al pastor in Chicago is no easy task, but Bull Horns might just serve the best meatball taco you’ve ever had. Julia Thiel Bull Horns kung pao taco, et al But that’s not necessarily saying a lot....