Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Thursday night at Intuit, Drag City hosts a free event to celebrate the release of I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful, an album of a cappella vocal performances by Kentucky coal miner Nimrod Workman, who was born in 1895 and died in 1994. The recordings collected here were made by folklorist and musician Mike Seeger in 1982, and they’ve never been issued before–the only previous Workman releases I know of are two out-of-print albums, one on June Appal and the other on Rounder, and a 1975 film documentary called “To Fit My Own Category....

John Fedchock and onetime Chicagoan Paul McKee first met in 1984, when they were two-thirds of the trombone section in the Woody Herman Orchestra. Herman led a galvanic big band that never stopped evolving, thanks to his use of younger musicians and the new arrangements he encouraged them to write. Fedchock was the star arranger for that last edition of the Herman band, and not long after Herman’s death in ’87 he assembled a juggernaut orchestra of his own, the New York Big Band; its brand-new Up & Running (Reservoir) shimmers with his vibrant charts....

The Time Has Come Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh, Reader. I have counted on you for movie showtimes for over a decade. What has brought things to this pass? Parts of me feel betrayed, insulted by a short blurb that doesn’t do justice to the impact of this decision. Some parts lash out with criticism and sarcasm, others do their best to explain the trouble this will cause, and others plead: it’s just one page!...

One of the many great gags in Tales Designed to Thrizzle: Volume 1—comprising the first four issues of Michael Kupperman’s comic of the same name—is a three-panel strip featuring the Head, who is what his name suggests: a disembodied head. In the first panel, he declares, “Someday I will rule the world!” In the second, he admits, “But for now, I have been reduced to flipping burgers with my telekinetic powers!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last weekend Wisconsin played some great pound-ahead, Michigan-style football while the guys actually wearing the Michigan uniforms continued to be afflicted with the dropsies (FIVE turnovers!). Then came the second half. Some of us once suspected that the Wolverines still had a few athletes left on their defense, and they all showed up to shut the Badgers down and lead a stunning reversal of fortune....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vosges Haut-Chocolat still has a few spaces available at tomorrow night’s tasting pairing its new Zion Collection truffles with artisanal rums. The event is free and includes five truffles with pairings, tasting notes, gift bags, small bites from Ja’ Grill, and an open bar. When Susannah J. Felts profiled Vosges founder Katrina Markoff for the Reader back in 2005, Markoff told her that Bob Marley was the inspiration for her luxury chocolate company: “The way he used music to pass through his message–this peaceful-street-warrior, hit-’em-with-music concept?...

I am a 24-year-old male somnophiliac–that is, I’m turned on by the idea of having sex with a woman while she sleeps. So long as we have a healthy awake sex life, my wife says I can do whatever I like when she sleeps. The problem is that when I try to touch her in her sleep, she whimpers, turns away, and otherwise makes herself inaccessible. Only on two occasions has she been in a deep enough sleep–read: drunk/passed out–for me to take the liberties that she has OK’d....

The black-and-white morality and exaggerated pathos of melodrama can seem spoofish even when played straight. Bro Herrod and Barry Manilow’s eight-year off-Broadway run with their 1964 musical adaptation of W.H.S. Smith’s 1844 drama proves the form’s comic potential. However, Quest Theatre Ensemble’s production, directed by Andrew Park, sags under the weight of its silliness, unable to support all the self-indulgent ad-libs and excessive musical froth. (This was Manilow way before his prime–we’re talking lyrics like “Good is good and right is right / But evil’s not so good, right?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I used to make pie I spent a lot of time rolling out dough and thinking about little jokes that I thought my bosses at Hoosier Mama Pie Company should put on T-shirts: “Crimp my style,” for instance. “How we roll.” Et cetera—there were other, better ones, I swear. For a while my only shift was on Friday night (I worked for a couple other bakers at the time), making pie for the morning farmers’ market and a few cafes that the company sold to....

The Young Victoria Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee | Written by Julian Fellowes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curiously, the princess craze parallels a trend for grown-up movies about female royalty—dramas that focus less on tiaras and gowns than on the complex problems of women wielding power in a man’s world. Cate Blanchett vaulted into the top rank of stars with her flinty performance as Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and repeated the role in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No pitcher has ever struck out more batters in a game than Wood struck out that rainy afternoon in Wrigley Field. Sullivan wrote: “If not for Kevin Orie’s failure to glove a Ricky Gutierrez grounder leading off the third, which was ruled a hit, Wood might have had a no-hitter to boot.” Yes, I thought when I read that, but he probably wouldn’t have had 20 strikeouts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Corrections House, the experimental industrial metal powerhouse featuring Mike IX Williams of Eyehategod and Scott Kelly of Neurosis—as well as local heavy metal staples Sanford Parker and Bruce Lamont—are just about ready to drop their debut LP, Last City Zero, which is due out on Neurot Recordings on October 29th. The band has previewed a track from the highly anticipated album, “Bullets and Graves,” and it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since Trader Joe’s replaced the inexpensive but wonderful whole bean New Mexican Piñon Coffee with the company’s ground version, I’ve all but stopped going to Trader Joe’s. Now, what was once an occasional purchase of premium brands such as Intelligentsia or Metropolis has become a pricey weekly habit. I don’t know exactly what went wrong with the promotion, but my friend tells me she had to get rid of hundreds of cases of the stuff, which retails for $9....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I haven’t been able to think about “mentoring” anyone with a straight face since the 80s, when I first heard Seattle’s Mentors, the grand Illuminated Masters who continue to rule my extremely potty-mouthed inner-12-year-old. (Had I actually heard “Four-F Club” when I was 12, those 4-H meetings would have been a lot more entertaining.) The Mentors were awful—really, really fucking awful—and they gloried in it more than any other sucky band in a legion of sucky bands....

Paul Hagen The baseball writers just put their foot down. This year they didn’t vote anyone into the Hall of Fame. Retired players whose magnificent careers are stained by performance-enhancing drugs didn’t come close to getting in. And players with lesser numbers but sturdier reputations for playing the game the right way didn’t make it either. As MLB.com’s Had Bodley, a voter, puts it: ““I think a strong message was sent about those players who have been connected somewhat to steroids,and I think the players that we thought were going to get elected probably got caught in the undertow of all that....

World Water Crisis Forum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The idea came about in one frenzied week last November, when Dunn, Felsen, and a handful of others worked 16-hour days and pulled a couple of all-nighters at UrbanLab to prepare for a contest sponsored by the History Channel to promote its Engineering an Empire series. The channel gave select architects in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles seven days to come up with a design for their city 100 years from now, something that “like the marvels of past civilizations, would have the staying power to endure for centuries to come....

Nowhere does New York City’s phenomenal melting-pot aspect shine through more than in its plentiful, cat-filled bodegas, where the simple act of ducking in to buy a bottle of water can easily turn into a crash course in a far-off country’s pop culture, snack food preferences, and/or religious practices. Astoria resident Gary Sullivan figured out a while ago that New York’s bodegas offered a far different perspective on the actual listening habits of people around the globe than what the world music section at the record store had to offer—one that’s generally funkier and funner, if more indebted to Western pop styles and therefore less “authentic....

Brilliant Corners of Popular Amusements debuted last year with a lineup that offered plenty of entertainment for kids of all ages, as the saying goes. The festival returns this weekend, bringing circus spectacle, comedy, and an excellent, diverse musical lineup to the Riverfront Theater. On Friday music starts at 7 PM with gothy synth-pop singer Zola Jesus, who warms up for John Cale of Velvet Underground fame (see Artist on Artist)....

With an eye on the coming global conference on climate in Copenhagen, Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco has called a “major organizing meeting” of concerned media outlets—among them the Atlantic, Wired, ProPublica, Grist, and Slate. “Our intention is to take advantage of each of our respective strengths and report on what we think is the most important story of our times,” writes Steven Katz, interim CEO of Mother Jones, e-mailing me from the coast....

FitzGerald’s American Music Festival celebrates its 32nd year this weekend and into next week, with three stages of folk, country, blues, soul, rock, and more—bands will play inside the club, in its SideBar room, and on an outdoor tent stage. The festival runs for four days, from Fri 6/29 through Tue 7/3 and skipping Mon 7/2. Doors open at 4:30 PM on Friday, and that evening the club will host Sons of Fathers (two sets), Garland Jeffreys, and headliner Robbie Fulks playing as the Everly Brothers....