thursday29 Thursday29 Peeping TomWye Oak Friday30 Dan DeaconVijay IyerKad Bi Bio Bijelo DugmePeeping TomPoster ChildrenThao with the Get Down Stay Down Saturday31 ArriverWarsaw Village Band Sunday1 Debashish BhattacharyaPacifica Quartet Tuesday3 Marble Sheep Wednesday4 Ghostface KillahYasmin Levy WYE OAK Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack sometimes sparkled on their raw debut as Wye Oak, If Children, but on their second album, The Knot (Merge), the Baltimore indie-rock duo consistently shine. Wasner’s vocals have matured from merely airy to wistfully soulful, and the arrangements nudge her to the fore, so that compared to the first record there’s more breathing room between the exhilarating passages where she and Stack sing twirling double melodies—a smart restraint that makes them even more powerful when they do arrive....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frank (Emile Hirsch), a working-poor sad sack in Reno, Nevada, is struggling to get enough money so he and his brother (Stephen Dorff) might buy a different car and get out of town. His brother, Jerry, has accidentally killed a child with his car, and he’s afraid of going back to jail. Even their desperate situation—sleeping in their car and occasionally motels—is better than that....

Minami Minegishi Recently I read William Gibson’s Idoru for the first time, which is kind of weird considering how much I love William Gibson and the fact that the book’s been out for 15 years now, but when it was first published I was in the middle of a very stupid boycott of the author based on the fact that he’d decided to move his stories from a relatively far-off dystopian cyberpunk future to a time just a handful of years away....

HIP-HOP: Local nonprofit the Lost Childhoods uses hip-hop against youth violence Last week local rapper G.o.D. Jewels released “The Lost Childhoods,” a stark tune about growing up surrounded by violence. The track is part of an in-progress compilation mixtape—which also includes music from Dave Coresh, Prince Jericho, and the Boy Illinois—created in collaboration with a nonprofit called the Lost Childhoods, based in Englewood and Woodlawn. The mixtape, The Lost Childhoods: Never Forget Derrion Albert, drops Mon 9/24....

I kicked off a seven-day Thanksgiving binge with my second visit to Vera, the highly anticipated Spanish wine bar from former Carnivale husband-and-wife team Mark (chef) and Elizabeth (sommelier) Mendez. It was a prelude in stark contrast with the subsequent digestive tsunami of chili dogs, french fries, pepperoni bread, tater tots, beef jerky, cheese popcorn, deep-fried stuffing balls, sour-cream mashed potatoes, chocolate-pecan pie, bourbon, rye, more bourbon, Bloody Marys, and, of course, turkey....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Indignation is the table wine of journalism. It goes with everything, and the cheaper the meal the more of it you swig. NBC hits the indignation hard in its evening news show Dateline, which for the last three years has teamed up with a citizens’ group called Perverted Justice to produce the feature known as “To Catch a Predator....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t expect Daley to stay on the ballot,” boasted mayoral candidate William “Dock” Walls to the Sun-Times in December, after filing the first challenge to the mayor’s nominating petitions since 1989. Walls claimed that his supporters had found problems with up to 19,000 of Daley’s signatures, leaving him with fewer than the 12,500 required to stay on the ballot....

You’re probably reading this in hope of learning what the year in movies was like. Well, I’ll tell you: it was just like last year, only with different movies. In 2012 the big Oscar contenders included a fact-based political intrigue set in the late 70s (Argo), a period piece about slavery (Django Unchained), a screwball comedy about a mentally ill man and his wacky family (Silver Linings Playbook), and a historical drama set in the White House (Lincoln)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » True, for anyone who remembers the 2005 Sox, this year’s team did not look like championship contenders; there were holes, quite obvious to the fan, and therefore glaring to the opposition. True too, this year’s Sox were not built to play “Ozzieball,” not after GM Kenny Williams extended Jermaine Dye’s contract last year. Considering the Sox were already committed to Paul Konerko and Jim Thome, it left them with a slow (if sometimes powerful) middle of the lineup prone to double plays....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve talked to anyone about what’s happening in the Chicago rock underground right now, they’ve surely mentioned Zath. A supergroup of sorts, it brings together bassist Dan Browning (from neo-Krautrockers Cave), drummer-vocalist Seth Sher (of proggy acts Ga’an and Psychic Steel), and guitarist-vocalist Zack Weil (of noisy sludge band Cacaw), and since forming in 2010 it’s been kicking around town during gaps in its various members’ touring schedules....

Mike Sula Pierogi, Polak Eatery Another one for the ages. I’ve already rounded up the Reader‘s favorite restaurants of the year. And this is the time, as it ever was, when I attempt to account for every delicious thing I ate on the job—including a few things at my least favorite restaurants. Andrea Bauer Grilled chicken paprikash, Bohemian House (50) half slab, Bro-N-Law’s Bar-B-Que(51) bone marrow- beef tartare, (52) pork belly spaetzle, (53) grilled chicken paprikash, Bohemian House(54) seafood gumbo, Anita’s Gumbo(55) ribeye cap, (56) papaya salad, (57) cobia collar and clams cataplana, Mfk(58) masaka, (59) cucumber salad, Pita Puff(60) Devil in the White City, Craft Pizza(61) fried anchovies, (62) broccoli salad, (63) garlic schmaltz potatoes, Boltwood(64) quesadilla de pierna, (65) alfajores, Las Quecas(66) brioche French toast, Más(67) lamb skewer, (68) grilled pomfret, Lao Pi BBQ

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I see that there is no review in the Reader‘s voluminous archives of Dinesh D’Souza’s recent documentary, 2016: Obama’s America. This should either be taken as evidence of the liberal media conspiracy’s disdain for Dinesh D’Souza’s First Amendment right to have his shitty movie reviewed far and wide, or, more positively, as affirmation of the fact that our film writers have better taste (though, maybe, weaker stomachs) than people like (say for example) me....

From Mungiu’s latest feature, Beyond the Hills Last week I had the good fortune to take part in an e-mail exchange with Cristian Mungiu, the Palme d’Or-winning director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007). That film, perhaps the most celebrated to come out of Romania in the last decade, epitomizes what’s come to be known as the Romanian New Wave—a style of filmmaking marked by hyperrealistic acting and mise-en-scene, complicated long takes, and subtle social commentary....

The Chicago that Daniel Burnham confronted in 1909 still mirrored the one described by Rudyard Kipling back in the 1880s: “I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago. The other places do not count. . . . Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hugli, and its air is dirt.” He was also a great motivator....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been almost five years since I surveyed the city’s banh mi. Back then, when the availability of these miraculous products of French Indochinese colonization were mostly limited to opposite ends of Little Saigon, I fantasized an ideal world where the economical and delicious sandwiches could be had in every neighborhood. Since then little has changed, with the exception of Ravenswood’s Nhu Lan Bakery, which now sets the city standard and makes a sandwich worth risking your life for, and the occasional appearance of Ba Le sandwiches at Farmstand....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s some truth to this, and I would add “Guantanamo” and “torture.” But I think, while perceptive, it’s just a bit off for reasons I didn’t realize until last night. In short, one of the brilliant moves of the Obama campaign is to convince a not-trivial portion of the scare-quotes-middle-class that they are part of, or would become part of with some bad luck, the working poor, due to the imminent threat of layoffs or health-related disaster....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The closing of Charlie Trotter’s, which Trotter announced to diners (and the Sun-Times) on New Year’s Eve, has me thinking about a decade-old essay on high-end dining that Martha Bayne wrote for the Reader. As the (unexpected) result of a joint project, Bayne and a friend had about a thousand dollars to spend as they chose. Deciding to blow it at Trotter’s, Bayne wrote the piece as a reflection on what she calls her “$370 reality check....

So, you’ve read the Chicago Cultural Plan, right? You know, the one ordered up by Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s? Which made Chicago an enduring icon for arts advocates and city planners nationwide and beyond? Our very own Magna Carta of urban arts? Last week, after trekking through the dismal abandoned coffee shop that’s been greeting visitors on the Randolph Street side of the Cultural Center since the end of last year, I sat in on a “cultural mapping” presentation by professor Daniel Silver of the University of Toronto....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s almost easier to find foie gras in the 49th Ward than it is to find someone someone willing to go on record defending the slaughter of horses for human consumption. Now, on the heels of the Illinois House voting to shut down DeKalb slaughterhouse Cavel International, which exports horse meat to Europe, there’s an eloquent argument against the ban in a letter to the editor published in today’s Sun-Times....

Eric Hoffman and Gary Rudoren are both Annoyance Theatre alums, and Hoffman wrote for the ground zero of contemporary comedy, Mr. Show–superlegit showbiz credentials. But their new book, Comedy by the Numbers (McSweeney’s)–purportedly a self-help tome that’ll teach the reader how to be a comic–is really a withering deconstruction of stock-humor bits, topics, and practitioners, all alphabetized and numbered from #1 (“Animals Doing Things Humans Do”) to #169 (“Women”). Special scorn goes to the simply bad: Jeff Foxworthy, sitcoms, post-SNL movies, improv in general....