Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For most of his career trumpeter Dave Douglas has started new bands fairly regularly. That can probably be partly explained by the current economy of jazz, which makes it hard for any single group to get enough work to sustain itself—even bandleaders need multiple projects. But just as important is Douglas’s musical curiosity. He’s always been eager to use specific groups to explore specific ideas—scoring silent films, working with electronics, creating string-driven modern chamber jazz....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Virtually all tech journalism revolves around what expensive piece of crap you should buy next. Jim Coates’s column was about what to do when the thing you bought goes kerflooey and you actually want to fix it yourself instead of taking it to the Genius Bar or the Geek Squad. That’s the main reason I’m sad to see him go–there’s a proud tradition of DIY computer repair on the Internet (phrasing your dilemma correctly on Google will almost always lead to a solution), but Coates was the rare voice in the mainstream media willing to address defiantly unsexy topics like installing drivers and cleaning up file folders....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » City Council President Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake has proposed relaxing zoning restrictions on bars and restaurants looking to host shows and setting up a panel to deal with venues on a case-by-case basis, a much more flexible and intelligent system than the two proposed independent-promoter ordinances, which could’ve been applied to pretty much any instance of people gathering to watch live entertainment....

Here is the difference a few extra travel-expense dollars can make when it comes to how Chicago theater critics tackle big-ticket shows. “It looks like you’re at a show the same night in both cities,” he says, “but essentially with [the opening night of] a Broadway show you’ll be able to see any one of the three to five preceding performances, and everybody holds their review. So you can whip back, get to a Chicago show the same night [as opening night in New York]....

JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE | CONGO SQUARE THEATRE COMPANY WHEN Through 2/25: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM Radio Golf Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Goodman recently became the only theater in the country to have produced all ten of the plays in Wilson’s cycle. Now, as part of its current celebration of his work, it’s brought in Congo Square Theatre Company to perform Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in the Owen Theatre....

Matthew Joel Schwerin Brontosaurus It’s been almost four years since local art-pop group Brontosaurus put out their first record, but they can hardly say they’ve been on hiatus. The band never stopped—instead, Nicholas Kelley and Nicholas Papaleo spent that time tightening their grip on the jagged, math-rocky chamber pop they’ve crafted together since 2010. After the release of their debut, 2011’s minialbum Cold Comes to Claim, the pair pushed themselves to new levels of perfectionism, running over their songs until each and every piece locked into place....

The 19th annual Black Harvest Film Festival begins this weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center and runs through the end of August. Committed to “celebrating the stories, images, and history of the black experience and the African diaspora,” the fest focuses on the work of independent filmmakers, many based in Chicago. The festival kicks off Friday evening with “A Black Harvest Feast,” a gala screening of four family-friendly shorts: Martine Jean’s The Silent Treatment, Steven Caple Jr....

Reporting on the Cannes premiere of James Gray’s The Immigrant, Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York wrote, “Gray prefers a straight A to B narrative classicism that seems out of vogue, at least as far as the current American cinema is concerned, in its slow-build patience and delicacy.” Gray, a writer-director based in the New York, would probably agree with that assessment. In his interviews and DVD commentaries, Gray cites Greek tragedy, French realist painting, Dostoevsky novels, and verismo Italian operas of the late 19th century as perennial sources of inspiration....

Austin Gilkeson, writer of “middle-grade witch fiction,” almost cried on the bus because of: Ayiti Add this to your list of literary feats: Roxane Gay’s book Ayiti will break your heart with a single ledger listing for a $13.95 purchase at CVS. That’s a recommendation and a warning—this slim book of fiction and nonfiction about Haiti and the Haitian diaspora will get to you. I started reading it on the bus during my commute and the first story, “Motherfuckers,” made me laugh out loud, drawing dirty looks from my fellow passengers....

Melanie Schiff Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Melanie Schiff’s early photographs were inspired by the music she loved–the Jesus Lizard, Big Black, Sonic Youth. “There was such an emotional urgency to their songs,” Schiff says. “You hear a sad song and you feel like it’s your experience, and I wanted to make art like that, to make photos like that.” But her initial efforts were naively literal, and when she started grad school in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she made “melancholy” portraits of girls in their teens and 20s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next week in Omnivorous, I’ll review Avenues, post Graham Elliot Bowles, now under Curtis Duffy, former chef de cuisine at Alinea, a Trio vet, and (like Chef GEB) Trotter’s alum. Given my space limitations, writing about this one presents an extra challenge, because each course is announced with a long list of elements, in contrast to the standard terse, generalized menu descriptions....

Now that the Lollapalooza and Pitchfork lineups are official, Gossip Wolf is ready to tackle another big summer blowout—Riot Fest! In 2013 the punk carnival takes over Humboldt Park from Fri 9/13 to Sun 9/15, and this furry Nostradamus has some predictions about the bill: emo-pop saviors Fall Out Boy, Greg Ginn and Ron Reyes’s zombie version of Black Flag (not “Flag”—that’s with Keith Morris, Chuck Dukowski, and Bill Stevenson), goofball ska super­heroes and TV “stars” the Aquabats, punk-rock thesaurus Bad Religion, Pennsylvania posthardcore brawlers Title Fight, and American idiots Green Day....

Do you like to tackle challenges in a lively environment? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We are looking for a persuasive, charismatic leader. Personal magnetism, previously unimportant, will be essential now in building support, given a scarcity of contracts, grants, and jobs to dole out to supporters and aldermen. Position requires outstanding diplomatic ability. Chosen candidate will supervise a council which is expected to become less agreeable, and must field pointed questions from reporters, preferably without threatening to shoot them....

Yesterday, NPR commentator Bob Mondello floated a solution that would trim the bloated Academy Awards telecast “and strike a blow against sexism”—unsex the Oscars. Mondello: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seems a bit odd that Mondello’s solution for eliminating sexism in the Academy would be to cut one of the few Oscar categories that reliably awards women for their achievements in film. The Academy has never separated Best Director from Best Directrix—and in 82 years, a woman has never won in that category....

See chicagoreader.com for the complete text of these and other letters. david anderson “[Contemporary designers] think today’s newspapers must shimmer with the excitement of a Yahoo home page,” Miner writes, “but it’s their function of consolidation and reflection that makes them, to many of us, still [worthwhile]. The Internet pelts us with news; a good newspaper arranges it in our heads.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But that’s the problem, not the key to a solution....

Four years ago, at the annual meeting of Arts Alliance Illinois, keynote speaker Ben Cameron told the assembled leaders that cooperation, rather than competition, would have to be their strategy going forward—if they were to survive. If it doesn’t work, it won’t be for lack of planning. Creative Partners grew out of the frustration Lucky Plush artistic director Julia Rhoads was feeling three years ago, after a decade of “wearing all the hats” for her company....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Murdoch’s defenders say he’s a man who appreciates quality and won’t tamper with it. A former editor of London’s Sunday Times told the New York Times on May 3, “I think he’s learned quite a lot of lessons from the Times and the Sunday Times.” Murdoch bought those papers in 1981. Andrew Neil went on, “He gives his quality newspaper editors a freer hand....

Last year around this time I did what most scribblers do when they want to knock off early and settle down for a long winter’s nap. I picked out some of my favorite new—or new to me—restaurants of the past 12 months and packed them into a column. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mulefoot headcheese ravioli with whole-grain mustard pasta, cavolo nero, and pork consomme with lemon oil at the Whole Hog Dinner The Reader‘s Whole Hog Project mulefoot dinner was a meal for the ages—six incredibly delicious courses made from some very special pigs....

One of the redeemers in Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill’s short documentary All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill’s Redemption closes with a shot of a poor woman dragging her shopping cart, freighted with bulging plastic bags of cans and bottles, down Wall Street....

My family’s been in Chicago for a long time, but I’m the first and only Bacon to work for the Board of Education. My dad was a hat maker—he had a store on 47th Street, right off of King Drive. After he passed, my brother ran it. Tony Bacon is a 55-year-old south-side resident who works as a custodian for the Chicago Public Schools. —Ben Joravsky Best of Chicago voting is live now....