Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to owner Greg O’Neill there were many reasons this spot made sense. “We might have ended up farther north, in someplace like Evanston,” he said, “but frankly, this was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. The Loop is exploding with many high-end residential buildings, then there’s the embedded Loop working population–over a quarter million in a quarter mile–and tourist hotels going up all over....

Neil Simon’s Pulitzer-winning 1991 comedy-drama, set in the 1940s, revolves around two precocious teenage boys whose father sends them to live with his battle-ax mother and neurotic, bitter, or impaired siblings while he takes a traveling sales job. Though director Catherine Davis and her able cast deliver Simon’s trademark quips and shtick with great timing and punch, they don’t rely on them too heavily–the usual mistake with Simon. Instead they plumb the play’s depths to expose each character’s wisdom, pain, and vulnerability....

It’s hard to imagine a public document as oddly self-contradictory as a Cook County property tax bill. They’re intended to be easy-to-understand and painstakingly accurate accounts of how the city and the county spend the tax dollars you send them. And yet they play a key role in covering up the real cost of Chicago’s tax increment financing districts, or TIFs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To truly appreciate the depths of deception you have to know a little something about the connection between TIFs and tax bills....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On display at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin, in October was a computer-controlled self-service milking system, introduced in the U.S. this year by the Swedish company DeLaval. Once trained to use the system, cows in need of milking simply walk one by one into a stainless-steel booth, where a laser-guided robotic arm attaches milking cups to their teats....

This is my own Girls Gone Wild story–one of the tamer ones! But I hope no one got video of it. A bunch of us had gone to a retro 80s concert–Poison, and Vince Neil from Motley Crue–all the hairbanger bands. Afterwards everyone was kinda lingering around outside, and my friends and I decided to blare some Poison for the crowd. We were standing up on the backseat of this Jeep and holding onto the bar and dancing....

Bob Djahanguiri, impresario behind celebrity-magnet boites of yore (Toulouse, Yvette), returns with Old Town Brasserie, a jazzy, boisterous nightspot specializing in classic French food with a few tweaks. Veteran chef Roland Liccioni came up in legendary European kitchens (the Parisian brasserie Bofinger and London’s La Gavroche) before conquering Chicago at Carlos’, Le Francais, and Les Nomades, and while this assignment might seem a step down from the high-end nouvelle cuisine he’s known for, it’s modest only in name and price....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally, a movie-star president I can live with. Last week Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter arrived at the Toronto film festival for the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Man From Plains, which documents the ex-president’s U.S. book tour to promote his hackle-raising Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006). Just before the screening, the Carters appeared at Ryerson Theater for an onstage interview with TVO talk show host Allan Gregg....

Friday 10 THE BRONX I think the dudes in the Bronx are only playing dumb. The first couple times you hear their 2003 self-titled LP, their blend of Murder City Devils swagger and Black Flag stomp sounds like it’d make for the best song on the sound track to the next Tony Hawk game. But if you keep listening you can hear them pulling a total Guns N’ Roses–you can’t quite tell if they’re playing hard-ass rock that’s catchier than the usual blur of shrieking and testosterone or if the songs are just glam pop dressed in street grime....

Friday 25 MISSING PERSONS Missing Persons’ Walking in L.A.: The Dance Mixes (Cleopatra) is a new record only in the sense that it must set one for most cynical marketing ploy. Actually, ploy is too kind: 10 of its 12 tracks are recycled from 1999’s Remixed Hits, as is the bulk of the cover art–apparently they’re as low on stock photos as they are on unreleased material. The B-52’s headline. a 8 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay & Lake Cook Rds....

Friday 28 The Essex Green headlines, Tapes ‘n Tapes play second, and Brighton, MA opens. 10 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, 773-278-6600 or 800-594-8499, $10 in advance, $12 at the door. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MANISHEVITZ Apart from some occasional touring, often with singer-songwriter Edith Frost, the local art-pop combo Manishevitz has kept a relatively low profile since the release of 2003’s minor masterpiece City Life....

“The myth we believed in was becoming reality,” radical activist Abbie Hoffman wrote in his 1980 autobiography, looking back on the 1969 Woodstock festival. “We were not alone. Acres of freaks. No cops. . . . The greatest musical gathering in history taught us we could be together.” Since 1989 the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company has sought a similar sense of community with this annual Woodstock anniversary celebration, a weekend-long marathon of experimental performance and schmoozing fueled by an anything-goes aesthetic and sleep deprivation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Gautama Siddartha, you may recall, decided the world was a place of unmitigated suffering and unhappiness, to be escaped at all costs, after he first encountered old, sick and poverty-stricken people. Only recently did a sharp American psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, say, ‘But hang on—did he ever get down from his gilded chariot and ask those people if they were unhappy?...

As the architect of the Chicago Underground collective during the 90s–heading bands ranging in size from a duo to the five-piece Chicago Underground Orchestra–cornetist Rob Mazurek accomplished the tricky task of attracting both radicals and conservatives. Often working with like-minded guitarist Jeff Parker, he kneads an almost quaint lyricism into modernist, even experimental investigations of harmony and form; he also does a spectacular job of blending natural and electronic sounds on records like Chicago Underground Quartet (Thrill Jockey), the last album he made before leaving Chicago for Brazil in 2001....

Chicago, once known for its filthy steel mills and meatpacking plants, has earned a reputation for cleanliness and environmentalism since Mayor Richard M. Daley vowed several years ago to turn it into the greenest city in the nation. Over the last two years alone, Daley’s won a string of environmental awards and accolades, and while the city hasn’t hit the top spot (awarded in most studies to Eugene or Portland, Oregon), he’s often called America’s greenest mayor....

My friend Jillana was one of four pregnant women who went to Cafe Boost last week looking for relief. She was sick of being pregnant. She’d been carrying twins for nine months, her ankles were swollen, her back hurt, she had indigestion, and she frequently had to endure the surprise attacks of eight fetal limbs on her lungs, pubic bone, and hips. She was eager, as she put it, to get the party out of her stomach....

I really love the Reader and (almost) all it encompasses. Since moving to Chicago five years ago, I have measured my time and my interests via the Reader and all the information it gives me about what’s going down with music, movies, the neighborhoods in Chicago, and current events, localized and globalized. It’s one of the best parts of my week, sitting down on Thursday nights and figuring out what I’ll be doing the next week....

Most people’s idea of a young female solo artist with a rabid fan base looks a lot like Avril Lavigne, not a fingerpicking wunderkind who doesn’t even sing. Kaki King’s guitar technique puts her someplace between Leo Kottke and Don Caballero’s Ian Williams, but though she rightfully earned praise for 2004’s Legs to Make Us Longer (Epic), major-label reshuffling left her in limbo. “I’m assuming I’m dropped, as everyone I knew at the label does not work there anymore and I have not heard from them in months,” she told me....

In Orson Welles’s play, actors expecting to stage King Lear instead rehearse Moby Dick. This isn’t much of a play within a play, however: we get only a hint of Shakespeare and the performers’ backstage personalities before the ensemble dives into Ahab’s ill-fated quest. In Theatre-Hikes’ inexpert production, only Thomas Edson McElroy as the single-minded protagonist stands out. The rest of G.J. Cederquist’s cast usually fall out of character almost as soon as lines are delivered....

When Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson started working on their documentary Deadline three years ago, they didn’t know that George Ryan would become the video’s central figure. Instead they were planning to focus on the history and repercussions of Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 Supreme Court case in which the majority ruled that the state’s arbitrary application of the death penalty qualified as cruel and unusual punishment “in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual....

In response to Liz Armstrong’s article “Citizen Ed” in last week’s Reader [June 3], I posted the following letter to Elisa Harkin’s Web site, which is affiliated with Edmar Marszewski, Matt, Heaven and Buddy galleries a few doors down, and Lumpen magazine. Please see their video clips of their black paint vandalism and blog comments at http://the-poop.yayhooray.com/blog/10480/ Ad-Blasters. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One person’s art is another’s garbage–it’s a matter of opinion....