Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Besides being God’s birthday, the Fourth of July is a big deal this year in that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to announce that they’ve found evidence of . . . something relating to the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that may or may not explain existence. It’s been called the “God particle,” actually, though its function is slightly more prosaic than that: the Higgs is the last piece in the standard model, the suite of theories that governs modern particle physics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First up is Michael Ruhlman, the Cleveland-based author who’s a model for aspiring food writers seeking to have an impact beyond pieces like “Ten Negroni Slushies You Must Guzzle Now.” Books like The French Laundry Cookbook (which he wrote much of, though it’s credited to Thomas Keller) and The Soul of a Chef helped spark our collective cultural interest in chefs, books like Charcuterie (which has a new edition) sparked a DIY cured-meats craze, and his other new book, Schmaltz, not only pays tribute to chicken fat as a miraculous substance, but blazed an e-book-to-dead-tree-book path that other top authors will doubtless follow....

Shanmugam Studio/Wikimedia Images Director Adoor Gopalakrishnan will introduce four of his films at the Logan Center for the Arts. Considering how rarely Indian art cinema is exhibited in Chicago, the partial retrospective of films by Adoor Gopalakrishnan screening tomorrow and Friday at the Logan Center for the Arts (as part of a three-day symposium on Indian cinema) constitutes a major event. All four films in this miniseries will be screened from vintage 35-millimeter prints; even more remarkable is that these screenings are free and that Gopalakrishnan will be in attendance for all of them....

The recent successes of such films as Pan’s Labyrinth, Volver, and The Lives of Others at multiplexes is a welcome sign that art-house ghettos aren’t the only places for foreign-language films anymore. Art houses, like multiplexes, tend to foster certain expectations about the movies we go to see in them, and sometimes we miss out on what a film has to offer as a consequence. Paul Verhoeven’s big-budget drama Black Book, which opened last week at the Music Box and is now also playing at some more commercial venues, and Jafar Panahi’s low-budget comedy Offside, which opens this week at the Music Box, both confound expectations....

While Mayor Daley and the city’s movers and shakers rally the citizenry behind their campaign to bring the Olympics here in 2016, a documentary by local filmmaker Phil Ranstrom depicts a side of the city that’s not likely to win many friends on the International Olympic Committee–unless they like bullies. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cheat You Fair: The Story of Maxwell Street, which debuted earlier this month at the Chicago International Documentary Festival, is divided into three parts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beauty Is Embarrassing, which plays this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, is the rare documentary about an artist who’s well-adjusted in both his private and public life. The subject, multimedia pop artist Wayne White, seems content exhibiting his work in galleries and diners, museums and grade schools; and given how prolific he is (he creates paintings, sculptures, and gallery installations and has worked in television), he has plenty of work to go around....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My first exposure to Dutes Miller was a piece he’d done with fellow artist and frequent collaborator Stan Shellabarger. It was a tintype, one of the earliest forms of photography, featuring the two men sitting side by side in a doorway. They stare rather seriously into the lens, as people tended to do back then, and with their long, grizzled beards, they look decidedly historical—like gold-rush-era prospectors....

Rouch (left) as depicted in the 1995 portrait Rouch in Reverse On Friday I posted the first part of my long interview with Gordon Quinn and Judy Hoffman, cofounder and board member, respectively, of the documentary production company Kartemquin Films. We set out to discuss the French ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch, whose work is playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center this month and who influenced Kartemquin’s output; however, our conversation expanded to include a range of subjects relating to documentary theory and practice....

JERRY SPRINGER–THE OPERA BAILIWICK REPERTORY INFO 773-883-1090 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s the concept behind Jerry Springer–The Opera, the controversial London hit that’s finally receiving its U.S. premiere in Chicago, Springer’s home base, in a solid, beautifully sung production at Bailiwick Repertory. British composer Richard Thomas and librettist Stewart Lee were intrigued by why anyone would watch Springer’s sleazy show, much less appear on it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My favorite crossword constructor, Ben Tausig, supplies puzzles to the Reader and other alt-weeklies. Tausig recently launched a Kickstarter project to continue funding another of his concerns: the American Values Club crossword, which Tausig edits and which the A.V. Club recently canceled. (Did anybody but me not know that “American Values” is what “A.V.” stood for?) For $10,000, Tausig hopes to keep the puzzle in business for at least one more year, and hopefully beyond; for your contribution of one dollar or more, you’ll receive the puzzle till the end of 2012....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As long as I’ve known Chicago reedist Ken Vandermark—more than two decades now—he’s always been extremely candid about the importance Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee has had on his own work. When he was just 17, Vandermark heard McPhee’s stunning 1977 solo album, Tenor, and was deeply moved. When McPhee—who performs Sunday in a duo with bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten during the closing night of this year’s Umbrella Music Festival—first performed in Chicago in February 1996, Vandermark had the chance to make a recording with his idol, a memory he relates in the liner notes for his recent Impressions of Po Music (Okka Disc), a fantastic nonet effort devoted to interpreting McPhee’s music....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Baseball’s All-Star Game began losing ground in 1959, the first of four straight seasons in which two games were played. The extra revenue was supposed to benefit the players’ pension fund, but a game that’s played simply to raise money is an exhibition game. The poor fans had thought up till then that the All-Star Game was played to establish league supremacy, or settle bragging rights, or something....

Last Year’s Ghost (482 Music), the debut of this quintet led by drummer Mike Reed, dropped this week after a three-year incubation. Alternating between short, mostly improvised pieces focused on texture and gestural interplay and fully realized tunes–from elegant ballads with long, lilting melodies to blistering free bop that recalls Chicago’s soulful jazz past–it’s a collection of raw beginnings and satisfying conclusions. Reed and bassist Josh Abrams lay down propulsive grooves, over which vibist Jason Adasiewicz floats spiky harmonic patterns; this gives alto saxophonist Greg Ward and cellist Tomeka Reid plenty to work with once they break out of their unison melodic lines and turn to improvising....

Much of the credit (or blame) for the country’s current ramen obsession can be laid at the door of New York’s Momofuku Noodle Bar. David Chang’s first restaurant—which was less famous for ramen than other things—opened in 2004, and its runaway success, along with that of his subsequent restaurants, inspired chefs across the land to add nontraditional twists to formerly humble pan-Asian dishes. Recently the New York food press has given the trend an execrable name—”Asian hipster cuisine....

Journalists are like rats, not only because we like to eat but also because powerful forces are trying to eradicate us. Ratatouille, an animated film about a cheffy rat and probably the most meaningful movie of all time for food nerds, resonated especially for me because the Reader, my home for more than a decade, underwent waves of heartbreaking downsizing this year. Sure, I identified with the movie’s food critic, Anton Ego—in fact, I dressed as him for Halloween—but I felt more for Remy the rodent, who was under constant threat yet comforted and sustained by his passion for cooking....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What happens when you collapse the boundaries between performance art, film, and theater? This is what filmmaker Jack Mayer and writer David Brent intend to explore with their new project, I Am a Rocket Scientist, premiering Saturday, March 24, at the Den Theater. It’s the second live-film event produced by Screen Door Productions, recently founded by Mayer—whose Web series Single Long is being developed by HBO—Brent, and Hannah Fenlon of Two Birds Casting....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s happening this weekend, and it may not be anything at all, is happening at the Chicago Cultural Center, which hosts a day of happenings inspired by Fluxus, the 1960s anti-art movement famous for its bizarre, anarchic “happenings.” George Maciunas coined the term, which is related to the Latin word for “to flow,” in 1961. In a review in the Reader in 1993, Fred Camper noted that Fluxus artists “worked in a wider variety of media than any other ‘movement’ I know of,” and to the extent that people still follow the movement, that’s true—in 2010 the Experimental Sound Studio hosted a Fluxus-inspired musical bike ride....

It’s been 80 years since the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany. It all seems pretty improbable now, that a political party whose main platform was eliminating Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesirables,” led by a shrill man with a toothbrush mustache, could attain, let alone maintain, absolute power, and do it so quickly—between 1928 and 1932, the Nazi constituency in the 500-member German parliament grew from 12 to 230....

friday1 Bryan Scary & the Shredding Tears The Shredding Tears (Black & Greene), the debut album from 23-year-old auteur Bryan Scary, succeeds either because of its laser-accurate reproduction of old Beatles, Kinks, and Bowie or despite it, I’m not sure. It feels a little cheap to laud Scary, who did everything except play drums here, for being a great mimic–with its deft melodies, expert arrangements, and arch campiness, The Shredding Tears is a pleasurable ride even if the scenery is a little too familiar....

friday22 FLESHTONES, HENTCHMEN New York indie/garage institutions the FLESHTONES have been going for 31 uninterrupted years now–apparently they knew how to keep themselves entertained during those dark decades when it seemed hardly anyone was paying attention. Sweat, a book about the band by Joe Bonomo, hits the shelves in September, and a documentary is said to be in the works; also forthcoming is a new record on Yep Roc, plus a tribute album aptly titled Vindicated!...