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The second annual AleFest Chicago, held the Saturday before last at Soldier Field, was a who’s who of area brewers: Goose Island, Two Brothers, Flossmoor Station, Piece, Rock Bottom, Mickey Finn’s, and America’s Brewing Company, makers of the beer sold at Walter Payton’s Roundhouse, were all in attendance, with offerings ranging from good to outstanding. The dark horse, though, was Metropolitan Brewing, a tiny operation drawing its pours out of a double-decker Craftsman toolbox retrofitted with a tap....

The New Art Examiner was dead, to begin with. Dead as a doornail. Guthrie’s version starts with his account of the two blows, dealt to him and Allen in their early days in Chicago, that resulted in the founding of the NAE. He shared the sorry details in the lecture and in a conversation the next day. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guthrie came here in 1969, when abstract and pop art from America was “overwhelming the UK art scene,” to see for himself what all the fuss was about....

Michael Gebert MK During the long period that Charlie Trotter has been closing and unclosing and selling off and unselling off his namesake restaurant, commenters have danced around what is perhaps the main reason nobody’s jumped up to buy the place: By the end it was seriously dated. The white painted wood and jewel tones screamed 80s, the era of Nancy Reagan, Leona Helmsley, and Donald Trump, back when his name came preceded by “short-fingered vulgarian....

The Central Loop tax increment financing district—the oldest and largest TIF of them all—came in with a boom and went out with a binge. I’d like to tell you what the city was thinking when it decided to spend all this money, but I can’t because the Department of Community Development, which oversees TIFs, didn’t get back to me about it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And before I tell you where all that money went, please allow me to offer one more tutorial on the TIF program—or as Mayor Daley has called it more than once, the only game in town for economic development....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last November I wrote about Free Jazz Bitmaps, an intriguing project of musician and designer Nick Butcher. At the time he was celebrating the release of the last of six lathe-cut seven-inch singles of sample-based music he’d created using old Chicago jazz and house records. They were handmade in ridiculously limited quantities (ten each), but Butcher wasn’t really making the seven-inches to sell records: the music’s most important function was to inspire improvisations (Butcher prefers the term “reinterpretations”) by six of the city’s best jazz players....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was particularly painful on Thursday morning, as I stood in the Hilton lobby trying to decide between cod, raw milk cheese, and butter tastings, a discussion on herbs and spices with Madhur Jaffrey, and a localism panel with Erika Lesser of Slow Food USA. I settled instead on “The Doctor is In” a Q & A with food science gurus Shirley O....

Back in the day, Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, the Negro League baseball star, was a regular customer at Gladys’ Luncheonette, the famous Bronzeville soul food restaurant founded by Gladys Holcomb in 1946. One of the game’s great defensive catchers, Radcliffe wore a chest protector that read “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” For years he held court in his booth, catching up with old friends, shaking hands with strangers, and occasionally selling an autographed photo....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Obviously, Brazier was a towering figure in the Woodlawn area,” wrote a dubious Mary Mitchell in the Sun-Times, “but his church isn’t even located on Stony Island.” That church, Apostolic Church of God, is at 63rd and Dorchester, where it takes up a city block. Long ago Brazier founded The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), and if you take one look at the massive church with his name on the side of it, you can’t doubt he was a major mover and shaker....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Creative Control, a comedy-and-variety show hosted and produced by local comic Joe McAdam, shakes down tonight at Saki. The show starts up at 8 PM, and its scheduled performers include Marty DeRosa, Cameron Gillette, Timmy Brochu, and Cullen Crawford. Creative Control is free, but donations are accepted and encouraged. Envisioning Bob Saget’s Danny Tanner as anything other than dad of the year may seem damn-near impossible, but in Attend the Tale of Danny Tanner: A Full House Musical , showing tonight at Gorilla Tango Theatre, you get to see him portrayed as a homicidal maniac....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Trib reports that Studs Terkel has died. This is deeply saddening, although it’s worth remembering how immensely long and full his life was; he was born in 1912, and as he put it, “the year the Titanic went down, I came up.” I don’t know whether they don’t make them like Terkel anymore, or whether the Terkels out there don’t get the same regard in a changed media environment....

Q I love reading your column and never thought that I would have a reason to write to you, but to my pleasure and chagrin, I realized today that I could use your help. “While receiving a blowjob,” says Urban Dictionary, “the alpha male peaks to orgasm—while the male is in the midst of ejaculation, or cumming, the female continues the act of oral sex without removing her lips and/or mouth from the alpha males penis—thus, causing the male to cum inside the females mouth, and possibly down her throat while she is still sucking the males penis....

The Mamet Repertory American Theater Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a little Mamet gazing going on in the playwright’s native Chicago, too. American Buffalo ran at Steppenwolf last winter, Steep Theatre will mount Lakeboat next winter, and right now Oleanna and Speed-the-Plow are playing in rotating rep at American Theater Company. Not that it’ll be pleasant. I’ve found these particular plays hard to watch in the past, but Oleanna was always especially excruciating....

On a weekday morning in October, in gorgeous Indian summer weather, I rode my bicycle on top of the Bloomingdale line, the dormant railroad right-of-way that runs 2.7 miles across the northwest side from Logan Square and Humboldt Park to Wicker Park and Bucktown. I hauled my cruiser up the elevated rail line’s embankment, accessing it from the south side of the parking lot of the McCormick Tribune YMCA, at 1834 N....

Saturday was of course Public Drunkenness and Green Novelty Hat Day in our fair city, but I spent the afternoon indoors at Goose Island’s Clybourn Avenue brewpub, going toe-to-toe with more than a dozen Chicago-area brewers at Stout Fest 2010. The brewers won—I’m amazed I can read my notes, honestly—but it’s easy to be a good sport about it because before I waved the white flag I managed to try 15 different stouts, some of them among the best I’ve tasted....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » TORONTO—Greetings from the Toronto film festival, where grown men will bull past you without so much as an “excuse me” to get into a high-profile industry screening, then watch 20 minutes of the movie and walk out. Last night’s screening of Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom started a half hour late, a rarity at this impeccably well-managed fest, but the young woman who came in to explain the delay still got a face full of hostility from the crowd....

Director Carl Franklin elicits naturalistic (which is to say, not cute) performances from his child actors. With the exception of River East 21, all the Chicago theaters screening Bless Me, Ultima, which opens today, are located way south or way west of downtown. It’s a shame to see the movie marginalized this way, since more than any other American film I’ve seen recently, Ultima evokes the spirit of studio-era Hollywood cinema, which aimed to please general audiences rather than target demographics....

Carl Regehr grew up in a German Mennonite community in Colorado, where, he later told an interviewer, “no ornament was allowed.” The interviewer asked him if he’d craved it. “No,” Regehr said,” I craved information.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a graphic designer in Chicago, Regehr’s job was to synthesize ornament and information. He came east in 1953; by 1960 he was able to start his own design shop, which turned out witty, sophisticated work for corporations and nonprofits....

“Lots of cocktails use dairy, but goat cheese is . . . a little different,” said Josh “Sonic” Relkin of Sable on challenging his fellow Alinea vet Micah Melton with the ingredient. Melton, now chef de cuisine at the Aviary, set out to make it even more different, stripping a log of Primo Taglio chevre of its color and creaminess while retaining its tang. Mind-bending tricks like that, after all, are what the rotary evaporators at Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas’s chem lab/cocktail lounge are there for....

“I ‘m not a fan,” said Wade McElroy, a partner in the forthcoming Sportsman’s Club, of truffle oil, his challenge courtesy of Lone Wolf bartender Austin Skiles. In McElroy’s view, it’s a desecration of one of the world’s great ingredients. Moreover, it’s so “incredibly savory, incredibly pungent” that it’s capable of overpowering just about everything. What he needed was a containment strategy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For that he turned to the pousse-cafe (literally, “coffee pusher”), an after-dinner layered drink traditionally served in a demure little tulip-shaped glass—all the better to confine the truffle oil’s telltale odor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taste of Chicago runs June 25 through July 4 in Grant Park and plates some solid old-school fare, with performances by Salt-n-Pepa, Bell Biv Devoe, and Gavin Rossdale (you remember Bush, right?), among many, many others. The Chicago Folk & Roots Festival (July 10-11), presented by the Old Town School of Folk Music, brings six stages of music to Welles Park; main-stage acts include Etran Finatawa, the Budos Band, Shemekia Copeland, and the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International featuring Samba Mapangala (Peter Margasak has more to say about this year’s lineup)....