The 22nd edition of Viva! Chicago, billed as a salute to the bicentennials of Colombian and Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, runs Fri 9/17 and Sat 9/18 in a new location—after years at Grant Park, it’s moved a couple blocks north to Millennium Park (Michigan and Randolph). The festival features a mix of salsa, mariachi, son jarocho, banda, samba, Latin house, and other Spanish-language pop at four performance areas: Los Barrios (north promenade), Salon de Baile (south promenade), En Vivo (near Cloud Gate), and Pritzker Pavilion....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I bet most longtime fans (I’m one) were glad to see that, while the sold-out and very subculturally diverse crowd was hell-bent on living up to the most pernicious of Irish stereotypes, the only heartbreaking works of genius staggering took place in the audience, not onstage. Front man Shane MacGowan, who’s been at the top of the Underground Rock Death Pool since G....

The abiding myth of “Da Mare,” Richard J. Daley, is that he spent his entire life in Bridgeport, also home to the two mayors preceding him. But online census records tell a different story, about a period when Daley left his homeland to wander the south side. The 1910 census shows Michael Daley, a sheet metal worker, living with his wife, Lillian, and their eight-year-old son, Richard, on South Parnell, a few blocks west of Comiskey....

A Hijacking A Hijacking, which opens Friday at Music Box, deals with Somali pirates seizing a Danish shipping vessel in the Indian Ocean, and the ensuing ransom negotiation between the pirates and the shipping company. If that sounds familiar, you might be thinking of the documentary Stolen Seas, which screened at Facets Cinematheque in April and chronicles the 2008 hijacking of the CEC Future in the Gulf of Aden, which separates Somalia and Yemen....

From Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways, which plays tomorrow Starting tonight and continuing through the weekend, the Alliance Francaise will present several recent French-language films from around the globe. The first selection, The Weight of the Oath (aka Le Poids du Serpent) comes from Burkina Faso; it screens tonight at 6:30 PM with the film’s director, Daniel Sanou Kollo, in attendance. The event is free and open to the public, as is tomorrow night’s Chicago premiere of Laurence Anyways, the latest from the young Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan (Heartbeats)....

Peter Margasak: You’re from LA and you went to school at University of Michigan and then you went back to LA for grad school at CalArts—did you always write music like this or was this something that happened much later? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yeah, that was my major, but at CalArts, you can do a major in that and focus on tabla or something....

Mayana Chocolate mayanachocolate.net Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mayana Chocolate makes the best bonbons you probably never heard of. Private chef Daniel Herskovic started the sideline to create parting gifts for his catering customers, but the gemlike confections have become his passion. All-natural ingredients including 15-odd varieties of chocolate go into close to 30 different pieces ranging from the popular Passion Fruit hearts, airbrushed with vibrant red and yellow cocoa butter, to the many one- or two-layered squares (of ganache, nougat, marzipan, fruit pâte, etc) enrobed in chocolate and decorated with fine-lined multicolored patterns....

Following the unexpectedly far-ranging explosion in popularity of local teenage rapper and house arrestee Chief Keef, major labels and publishing houses have descended on the south-side hip-hop scene with a fervor that has at times felt like the grunge-years feeding frenzy in Seattle. Keef is primed to be its breakout MC, and given the way hip-hop works, it seems likely that a local producer will get blown up to superstar status as well....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And besides the beasts of the field and the fishes of the sea, yesterday offered what must be the biggest herd of media people I’ve ever seen assembled in one place. I was actually there hours earlier, for the chance to interview the principals ahead of time (watch for all that after the holiday), and when I got to Eataly at 9:30 AM it was a construction war zone—much drilling and hammering, trash piled here and there, city inspectors poking about....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » • Want to see more chocolate than you’ll ever see in any one place short of the Wonka factory? The Chicago Fine Chocolate & Dessert Show is the consumer part of a national dessert trade show taking place at Navy Pier this weekend; your $25 admission lets you see dozens of exhibitors (some of whom will offer samples), demos from the French Pastry School and various TV dessert shows, and a 1,000-pound chocolate sculpture of a blues musician by the irrepressible record setter chef Alain Roby of All Chocolate Kitchen in Geneva....

The first time I saw Tirra Lirra, in the fall of 2006, I tried to listen with an open mind, but what they were doing just sounded like noisy, self-indulgent guitar jams to me. Trouble was, I couldn’t tell whether I hated it because my relationship with front man Hank Henry is what I’d have to call “complicated” if I were friending him on Facebook—we used to be roommates and then had a girl-related falling-out—or because they were in fact kicking some real bullshit....

After Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, his music dominated my airspace for days. It seemed like all the car owners in town had come to some formal agreement that they must all blast Jackson’s songs from their radios, or else face some sort of soul-deficit tax. At 3:15 PM, Lazarus picks me up at the northwest corner of Ashland and Chicago with Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” blasting and a carful of random objects: orange flags that say “MJ,” temporary paint markers, dried apricots, bottled water....

For a thrilling moment, Northwestern grabbed the lead and the momentum last Sunday against the seventh-ranked Baylor Bears—one of the Wildcats’ biggest basketball matchups in years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At least it was something to cheer about, because the Baylor mishap was cause for more disappointment than your average 69-41 drubbing. For many of us, it brought back a familiar, sinking feeling that the Cats will never be ready for the Big Dance....

The 29th Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday, April 12, through Thursday, April 25. Tickets for most screenings are $11, $10 for members of the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago; a festival pass, good for 12 general admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members. Following are selected screenings, all at 600 N. Michigan; for a full schedule see latinoculturalcenter.org. Orange Honey A young soldier in 1950, working as personal secretary to a military judge of the Franco regime, is shaken when his boss orders the political execution of a young man who cared for the soldier’s sick mother....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even so, Sunday’s ceremony retiring jersey No. 31 for Ferguson Jenkins and Greg Maddux — two of the Cubs’ best pitchers ever, both of whom wore that number — was a joy, in part because it celebrated two greats who were for the most part quiet and understated. From the trumpet fanfare to the raising of the numbered flags in the outfield corners, it was pure pleasure, for the players as much as the fans, who showed up remarkably early on this Sunday....

Restaurant listings are culled from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 4,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are reviewed by staff, contributors, and (where noted) individual Reader Restaurant Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the Raters’ collective opinions are best expressed in the numbers. Complete searchable listings, Raters’ comments, and information on how to become a Rater are at chicagoreader....

There’s no denying the drama-nerd thrill of seeing Rick Cluchey in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Cluchey first performed the one-man one-act in 1977, under the direction of Beckett himself. He could completely stink up this Shattered Globe Theatre presentation and still impart a sacramental resonance to the evening, simply by virtue of his connection to the Great Man. But he sure doesn’t stink it up. Krapp is a cranky, disheveled, probably alcoholic old reprobate—a latter-day Ebenezer Scrooge, whose night of reckoning has come and gone without redemption....

friday23 saturday24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » the howling hex Though Neil Michael Hagerty seems reluctant to bill himself a solo artist–he spent the 90s in Royal Trux and since 2003 has fronted an ever-changing ensemble called the Howling Hex–he’s unmistakably a rock ‘n’ roll auteur. On some of his records his attention span seems shorter than my cat’s–on 1-2-3 (Drag City, 2006), a CD culled from three vinyl releases, Hagerty flits between dubbed-out country rock, Tex-Mex balladry, spoken word, and musique concrete....

Losing a talented chef is cause for concern, but Sepia couldn’t have found a better replacement for Kendal Duque than Andrew Zimmerman (Mod, Del Toro, NoMi). On my recent visit his subtly playful seasonal menu brought the familiar litany of “natural, organic, sustainable, local” to life in an appetizer of a gently poached and crisply fried duck egg, the essence of spring on a bed of sauteed asparagus, ramps, and morels....

Did you know there’s an “innocence industry” in Chicago? It’s a “conglomeration of defense lawyers, investigators, a major Chicago-based university (Northwestern), . . . media outlets,” and other assorted players. Its product is innocence—or at least the appearance of innocence—extracted from the convictions of men who may or may not be guilty. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In other words, what really happened in Paris, Illinois, remains a mystery....