Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grieving fans of the late Lo-Cal Locale might be excited to know that a new restaurant is moving in to punch their yogurt cards. Charlie Trotter today announced plans for his first new restaurant in Chicago since he opened his namesake spot in 1987 and fundamentally changed the restaurant scene in this town. He did open the takeout Trotter’s To Go on Fullerton in 2000, but this time the idea is much grander: Trotter will be responsible for all food and beverage operations at the Elysian Hotel, the planned luxury hotel and residence set to open in 2008 at 11 E....

Last weekend Wisconsin cheese makers swept the awards categories at the annual American Cheese Society competition in Portland, Oregon, taking home 70 prizes, including 16 blue ribbons in such fields as “blue-mold cheeses made from cow’s milk” and “cheddars aged longer than 49 months.” Wisconsin’s dominance shouldn’t come as a surprise–they’re not called cheeseheads for nothing. But as western states like California, which produced 2 billion pounds of cheese last year, give Wisconsin, with 2....

The Chinese New Year parade, which will ring in the Year of the Dog across Chinatown on Sunday, is boisterous and wildly popular. But there are ways of celebrating other than with fireworks. A number of Chinese culinary traditions, often hidden away in the home, are tied to wishes for the New Year: for example, long strings of uncut noodles represent long life, tangerines good fortune, lotus seeds fecundity. What follows is a survey of dishes available for the holiday at Chinese restaurants and bakeries....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s good news and bad news today for all the Jawbox fans out there. Idolator recently discovered that the band‘s out-of-print emocore classic For Your Own Special Sweetheart is now available for digital purchase at iTunes and eMusic, but there’s bigger and infinitely sadder news as well. J. Robbins — who played not only in Jawbox, but also hardcore pioneers Government Issue and the post-Jawbox project Burning Airlines — and his wife, Janet Morgan, who plays with him in the band Channels, recently found out that their infant son has type 1 spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that severely hinders the development of even the most basic voluntary motor functions....

If it weren’t for the slab of meat replacing the figure’s knee, Leslie Carlson’s Self-Portrait With Rib Steak would be a well-made nude to nod at and walk away from. But the choice cuts in this and a half dozen other slightly skeletal self-portraits at Gescheidle open the works up. Appropriating the dripped, muted earth tones spiked with chalk whites that Francis Bacon once used to depict anonymous muscular men or long-dead popes, this 24-year-old artist carefully flays an icon of art history, the female nude–reminding us that female subjects and artists (and viewers) are still often seen as pieces of meat....

Ennio Morricone More important, he’s one of the few film composers worth listening to outside the context of a movie: when’s the last time you yearned to hear a sound track CD by John Williams or Danny Elfman? The vast majority of films have a score or incidental music of some kind, but only a handful of visionaries like Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota have achieved legendary status by reinforcing and enhancing the vision of a filmmaker while also creating music that works without the visuals....

I had a couple college girlfriends here to visit, and we wanted to go dancing where we could have fun and not have people hitting on us. So after a night of barhopping we were in line here–about ten of us, including a group of gay guys we’d met at Sidetrack. This guy in front of us was about the same stature as Prince–about 5’1–and he had the same coloring. Somehow he got the idea that we wanted to see a little Prince action–I don’t remember if we asked to see his Little Red Corvette or what, but suddenly the guy decided to start stripping....

Trance The plot is well-known: members of a left-wing cadre calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnap newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. Within a few months the missing girl is calling herself Tania (after Che Guevara’s lover), declaring her allegiance to her captors’ vague revolutionary cause, sticking up a bank, and posing for photographs brandishing an automatic weapon. Most of the real SLA members appear in Trance (most of them were also dead within a year of the group’s founding), but Hearst is represented by the fictional surrogate Alice Galton....

I was cruising for sex online and made a date to meet up with two guys for anonymous play. When we arrived at the one guy’s apartment, he asked us if we would fuck him bareback. I said no, but the other guy said he would. The bottom then asked us if we were both negative, and we both answered yes. Here’s the problem: The other guy (not the bottom) had the appearance of someone taking HIV meds....

Drag City producer and head of staff Rian Murphy is usually sparing with compliments, but mention guitarist Emmett Kelly and the floodgates open. “Oh yeah, what a star that kid is,” Murphy says. “His feeling for the music is really deep, and his playing is–I don’t want to say mature beyond his years, but I’m constantly surprised at how polished and classic his sounds are.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Based on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, Clark Gesner and John Gordon’s 1967 musical comedy (retooled in the 90s by Michael Mayer and Andrew Lippa) loses something essential in translation. On the page, Schulz offsets the cuteness of his characters with a surprisingly mature sense of existential angst. But onstage, as often happens in shows with adults playing children, the characters’ neuroses are reduced to shtick and the whole thing comes across as just too relentlessly adorable....

Brett Neveu continues his explorations into issues of identity, violence, and dislocation in America, this time in an urban setting instead of his usual small-town milieu. The title reveals the plot–four people are indeed dispatched–but not the story, which concerns the frustrations and obsessions of those killed more than it does the motives of the nebbishy, chameleonic killer (played with an eerie calm by Lawrence MacGowan). Four tightly crafted scenes, each functioning as a one-act in itself, provide snapshots of the victims: a shut-in writer, a talkative executive, a pissed-off factory worker, and a middle-aged man in a down-at-the-heels hotel....

Metropolis Coffee Company To demonstrate, Metropolis co-owner Tony Dreyfuss pulls a fresh shot, decants it into a white porcelain cup, and pours in milk in a quick, thin stream, jiggling the pitcher as he goes. With a few shimmies of his wrist, he creates an intricately scaled pattern, with white tendrils delicate yet distinct against the caramel-colored coffee. If the customer drinks carefully (and doesn’t stir), the pattern will stay put all the way down to the last sip....

Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, written in 1786, is frequently referred to as the “perfect opera,” and rightly so. The music is absolutely glorious–not a single bad note. And the story of love, lust, jealousy, power, and deceit–Mozart’s first collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, based on Beaumarchais’ stage comedy–is both hilarious and moving, standard opera buffa transformed by the composer’s psychological sensitivity and genius for characterizing people’s actions and emotions in music....

No horn man gets deeper into a solo than Chris Potter. But his relentless improvisations go beyond the melodic and harmonic explorations we’ve come to expect from saxophonists: he also dissects, recombines, and resurrects rhythmic ideas with an authority that recalls Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter, two of the very best at rhythmic inventiveness. For my money, the 35-year-old Potter is one of the three or four best soloists of his generation; a key member of vibrant working ensembles led by Dave Douglas and Dave Holland, he regularly earns ovations that out-thunder those for his onstage colleagues....

All impressionists aim to isolate identifying characteristics and distort them to perversely satisfying extremes. Darrell Hammond’s a genius at it. Now in his 12th season on Saturday Night Live, Hammond has the somewhat dubious distinction of having the longest continuous tenure in SNL history. Perhaps the most gifted impressionist since Rich Little (with a sharper satirical bite) he’s known for his takes on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and much of the Bush cabinet (including an uncanny Dick Cheney) as well as Sean Connery, Donald Trump, and Chris Matthews....

If there’s a trumpeter out there more radical than this Boston improviser, it’s news to me. He can play relatively straightforward stuff, like the muscular free jazz he’s done with saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano, and like kindred spirits Franz Hautzinger, Axel Dorner, Mazen Kerbaj, and Birgit Ulher he’s pushed the instrument to all kinds of extremes–hyperabstract minimalist improv in Nmperign, electroacoustic sound fields with tape looper and computer musician Jason Lescalleet, and even brutal amplified noise in Heathen Shame....

I’m grateful that Sufjan Stevens’s success, if it hasn’t put the cool back in Christian indie rock, has at least taken a bit of shame out of being an eager Bible-study dork making orchestral records in your bedroom. Musicians who try to hide their Christianity are almost offensive, especially when compared to faithful servants like John Ringhofer, aka Half-Handed Cloud. A foot soldier in Sufjan’s Jesus-love mob–he plays trombone in the Illinoisemakers and records for Stevens’s Asthmatic Kitty label–Ringhofer sings about the Holy Ghost like most dudes sing about girls....

The Neptunes may be celebrities in their own right, but for the most part hip-hop producers stay behind the scenes. LA’s Madlib and Detroit’s Jay Dee have done inspired freelance work for Diverse, Vast Aire, Dudley Perkins, Busta Rhymes, the Pharcyde, and De La Soul, among others; Madlib is a member of the Lootpack and Jay Dee is in Slum Village. But they’re hardly household names. And their collaboration, under the name Jaylib, is just the two of them: on last year’s Champion Sound (Stones Throw) there are a few guest rappers, but for the most part Madlib and Jay Dee rhyme over each other’s beats....

The company returns to its roots with a program called “Cool Vibrations.” Robert Joffrey first toured with his troupe in 1956 with the express purpose of delivering American-style ballet to the masses. In 1973 he commissioned a piece from talented unknown Twyla Tharp, who used music by the Beach Boys. Deuce Coupe is the earliest of the three “pop” dances on this program–and a landmark in the world of ballet, putting the frug, the swim, and the monkey onstage....