(August 7, 2007) New York, NY-Award-winning journalist and CNN contributor, Roland S. Martin, will launch his new blog on essence.com today with the notorious question, “Is Obama Black Enough?” Martin will post to the site, the online home of ESSENCE, the preeminent lifestyle magazine for African-American women, twice daily and will cover a myriad of issues including politics, race, religion, relationships, parenting, and more. The Solution: It’s time to step on the gas....

The “plot” sounds like a drag cabaret act: seven of filmdom’s most outrageous ladies–including Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Liza Minnelli–meet in limbo and for some reason decide to act out scenes from well-known movies and musicals. But here the women are played by women. And not very well. Ann Sonneville’s sexy, bitchy Elizabeth Taylor is the exception: she does a marvelous impersonation of Taylor as Martha imitating Davis in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...

Feed Inside, Donna Knezek, one of the original owners of Leo’s Lunchroom and the founder of Bite, is roasting four birds on the WondeRoaster, a 40-year-old rotisserie. Her chalkboard menu begins: “1/4 chicken, 1/2 chicken, whole chicken.” One entire wall is decorated with framed close-ups of several dozen other birds–“celebrity chicken photos,” in Knezek’s words–and a few chickens, some with nests and eggs, have been hand painted above the molding. And then there’s the chicken on the plate: salty and succulent, with the golden crackle of skin that makes a rotisserie bird so viscerally satisfying....

John Doe has been unmasked. Last month the Reader reported that Doe, a former assistant state’s attorney, had gone to the Illinois Supreme Court in an attempt to derail the release of the special prosecutor’s report on Chicago police torture–or at the very least keep his name out of it. But the court rejected Doe’s emergency motions, and the report was released Wednesday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hyman, a supervisor in the State’s Attorney’s Office, took the Wilsons’ confessions....

In the summer of 1997 the nine-month-old Arab news outlet Al Jazeera was an almost complete unknown. Broadcasting just 12 hours a day from Qatar and stuck with a weak Ku-band transponder–all that was available on the single overcrowded satellite then serving the region–the station languished until the French, ever the agents of exotic cultural exchange, interceded. On a Saturday afternoon in July the leaseholders of the satellite’s mighty C-band transponder, Canal France International, accidentally broadcast a hard-core porn movie–Club Prive au Portugal–in place of the educational fare slated to run....

In the four years since he started making films, Joe Swanberg has received the kind of attention some directors long for their whole lives. Each of his three features has premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival. His latest, Hannah Takes the Stairs, is rolling out in theaters nationwide and airing on television through video-on-demand. At 26 he’s already had his entire body of work showcased at the IFC Center in New York and been written up in the New York Times....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » TIFs–created by City Council to divert a portion of property taxes within a defined district into a fund controlled by the city with virtually no oversight–are supposed to be used in blighted communities that would find it difficult to attract development without them. But under Mayor Daley and his planning department, the rules have been bent so that TIFs are routinely employed in some of the hottest neighborhoods–at great expense to local property owners, not to mention the schools, the parks, the libraries, and other entities that their taxes are supposed to fund....

We interrupt this entertainment product for an important public announcement: Spotted making music in Lakeview last Saturday, the Bzots–three assembly-line robots recently escaped from Globocrud LLC’s local plant–remain at large. Says Globocrud’s CEO, the Exalted Sir Cleve Crud, PhD, Esq.: “While these robots are in no way dangerous, they cost me a lot to build. If you see a suspiciously colorful, noisy, work-shirking robot, call the emergency Crudline at…” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a September article in the Orlando Sentinel, the four criminal judges in Seminole County, Florida, have since January ruled that DUI defendants have the right to technical information about the state’s breath analysis test, including its source code; when such information is requested by the defendant but not provided by prosecutors, the test data are rejected as evidence....

The city’s second annual Artists Space and Housing Expo this Saturday at the Cultural Center promises to be interesting, and not only because more than 90 artist-smitten exhibitors will be on hand to court attendees. The condo association for the Acme Artists’ Community will be manning a table, and some other Acme residents say they’ll be there too–handing out buyer-beware literature and advice. Acme’s developer, the Near Northwest Arts Council, will present its version of the story at its own table; executive director Laura Weathered is a returning lecturer on the expo schedule, and NNWAC was recently awarded a $10,000 NEA grant to publish a guide on building artists’ communities, using Acme as a model....

I’m a 21-year-old bisexual male who recently moved back home to Canada from overseas. For the last two months I was there I was involved with my first male partner. He was a virgin, I wasn’t. He knew about my bisexuality and one night propositioned me. I initially refused because I wasn’t really all that attracted to him, but a couple weeks later I asked him if he was still interested because I wanted to experiment....

Following playwright Stephen Belber’s own stage directions, this production cleverly alternates live performance with video sequences–a blend that works well, thanks in part to video artists Colby Hanik and Aaron Covich. Together technological innovation and fine acting give dramatic power to what might otherwise be a rather slack, overlong play. A troubled man in his 20s goes to extraordinary lengths to avenge an assault on his high school girlfriend by a mutual friend....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, if you’re from the southern Appalachians, as I am, the word rhymes with “latch” no matter what you’re talking about. People from north of the Mason-Dixon–including the northern Appalachians–and elsewhere rhyme it with “nation,” no matter what they’re talking about, which I reckon is their business. In other words, it’s not a contextual difference, it’s a regional one....

Friday 3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » KIERAN KANE & KEVIN WELCH WITH FATS KAPLIN Plenty of country hit makers have been handed walking papers by Music Row major labels in the past decade, but that’s actually been a boon for listeners–90s stars like David Ball, Radney Foster, and Mark Chesnutt made some of their best, most interesting records only after they wound up on indies....

One reason Ken Vandermark has so many bands is that he recognizes how changing a single musician can have a big impact on a group’s sound. Tripleplay, his trio with bassist Nate McBride (who until recently lived in Boston) and drummer Curt Newton (who still does), is similar in form to two of his other bands, but each has a repertoire and approach that’s defined by the strengths of its drummer....

The Polarity Ensemble Theatre’s debut production, a drum-driven Macbeth, aims none-too-subtly at the “purging of a tyrant” and “redemption of a nation.” But surprisingly, the show’s hippie-agitprop-shaman elements–interpretive dance, ritual song, bloody sacrifice–are its tightest, cleanest, and most effective. The able and eager acting, however, isn’t quite a match for the demands of Shakespeare’s blackest play. For the most part the problem is a lack of gravitas; open-faced leads Brent Rivera and Ann Keen seem better suited to playing a couple like Oberon and Titania than the villainous thane and his viper of a wife....

Over the past three decades, guitar visionary Bill Frisell has created one of improvised music’s most original styles, built on elegiac timbres, stately phrasing, and meaningful meandering. (For years a favorite line in Manhattan avant-jazz circles was that Frisell had been “raised by deer,” and even his most slashing, electronics-driven work retains the gauzy textures and gentle dream logic that have become his trademarks.) But despite the newsmagazine kudos heaped on his Americana-inspired discs of the past decade, starting with Nashville in 1997, some of us can’t see the emperor’s new clothes–we long for the otherwordly, motive beauty of his earlier playing, both on his own albums and on the hundreds he’s recorded with genre benders like Tim Berne, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, and John Zorn....

The May-December collaboration between tenor saxist Eric Alexander and veteran pianist Harold Mabern, 32 years his senior, began more than a dozen years ago, and it remains one of the most fruitful relationships in mainstream jazz. (It probably helps that both spent their early 20s in Chicago, absorbing the city’s hard-charging, blues-inflected approach to improvisation.) With Mabern’s blocky chords and juggernaut swing as their foundation, Alexander’s solos explode out of the gate and never flag, piling up inventive melodies as they hurtle to the finish; he’s polished his playing over the years, and in the process he’s become one of the most consistently satisfying soloists on the instrument....

In Marshall Preheim’s ideal economy, there would be no Target, no Wal-Mart, no Gap–no purchases of products whose origins are unknown. “It’s always seemed like something important was lost every time I spent money on something in a big store,” he says. “I want to feel good about purchases I make–not just a few things from a craft store once a year but the thousands of items you buy over the course of a year....

While much of the country was officially mourning the death of Ronald Reagan last June 11, Carol Cook was out in the rain picking leaves from as many purple loosestrife plants as she could find. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a University of Minnesota extension publication, “A single purple loosestrife plant with multiple stems can produce between one and two million seeds that are easily dispersed along rivers and waterways....