Gabriel Wiesen and James Nuccio, owners of Beavers Coffee & Donuts are busting out their party hats for: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Summer music festivals Me and Jim are huge fans of electronic dance music, and music festivals in general, going back to our days as drummers in high school, and, more recently, our previous jobs in nightlife hospitality. We have traveled the country attending electronic dance music festivals like Ultra in Miami, Electric Zoo in New York City, and Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, and are very excited about some upcoming festivals that have been organized in Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But just to clarify one point with TIFs: they don’t work quite the way the article says. “TIFs are Mayor Richard Daley’s favorite tool to spur development by cutting taxes for developers, business owners and other beneficiaries. In essence, taxes on a specified neighborhood are frozen for more than 20 years, saving developers and property owners millions of dollars as the properties increase in value....

DEAD PILE XIII Pocket Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jeremy is an undercover investigator for a nameless animal-rights nonprofit, sent to a dairy outfit in southern Indiana on an anonymous tip about cruel treatment of the cows there. His insufferable superior in Chicago, Davey, warns him that “your being black is a liability,” but Jeremy’s race doesn’t much figure into the story: he gets hired and starts mixing with the rest of the hands pretty quickly....

“Elevator” The boys in TV Ghost, probably the coolest thing to ever come out of Lafayette, Indiana, have gone through a really interesting sonic shift over the past few years. The band, which was started when most of the members were still in high school, played high-octane, guitar heavy, Cramps-flavored punk rock on their 2009 debut Cold Fish, big on noisy guitar solos and reverb-drenched vocals. As time went on, the band relaxed and spaced out a little bit, which ultimately brings us to today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Elevator,” a preview from their upcoming In the Red release, Disconnect....

EXTREMEN BIK BENT BRAAM (SELF-RELEASED) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bik Bent Braam has existed for more than 20 years, evolving over that time into one of the most polished bands trafficking in what’s now a familiar Dutch style: a pastiche of jazz, pop, music hall, and avant-garde, laced with humor both broad and subtle. Extremen, released on Braam’s own label, documents a concert from this past February, but in so doing provides only the roughest of guidelines for the music his audience will hear in Chicago—and therein lies the tale....

Since the mid-80s Joe Henry has been one of America’s most thoughtful singer-songwriters, and while his earliest work was often called alt-country, over time his sound has grown to encompass the whole of American music. He’s also developed into an accomplished producer who specializes in framing veterans (Bettye LaVette, Allen Toussaint, Mose Allison, Solomon Burke) in musical contexts that rebooted their careers. Henry is interviewed here by Steve Dawson, one of Chicago’s most talented singers-songwriters, who performs in the bands Stump the Host and Dolly Varden and, as a solo artist, has surveyed a range of Americana nearly as broad as Henry has....

It’s billed as a Parisian-style dive bar with food, but that seems to cheapen the planning apparent in every detail at Maude’s Liquor Bar, the new project from Brendan Sodikoff (Gilt Bar, Lettuce Entertain You, Per Se, the French Laundry) and executive chef Jeff Pikus (Gilt Bar, Alinea). It feels more like a New York brasserie than anything else—I was constantly reminded of Balthazar. And while the concept, a modern American homage to Paris, is nothing new, Maude’s take on it is fresh and smart....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Considering that he plays guitar in Brooklyn’s Antibalas it should come as no surprise that Marcos Garcia refracts the cross-generational, pan-stylistic sounds of his solo project Chico Mann through the prism of Afrobeat. “Harmonía,” the opening track on his recent Analog Drift (Wax Poetics), serves as well as any of its tunes as a model for his approach: hypnotic post-Fela organ riffs, brittle funk guitar, primitive beatbox rhythms, synthetic bass ostinatos, soulful but scrappy Spanish-language singing, and a countermelody that seems cribbed from Sheila E....

“I have an unorthodox request for the ingredient,” said Jason Cevallos, who tends bar at the Office, the private lounge in the basement of the Aviary. Instead of an ingredient per se, Cevallos wanted to challenge David Hermach, a barkeep at Clark Street Ale House, with what might be called the essence of a cocktail—specifically, the Dirty Streisand, a drink that Cevallos said “has never been perfected, but has been attempted numerous times....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though I disagree with Dave Kehr’s 1981 assessment of Thief (reprinted in this week’s Reader), I found it instructive when revisiting the film at the Music Box on Saturday. “[Michael] Mann’s observations are trite, derivative, and frequently sentimental,” wrote Kehr in his capsule review, adding that “the visual style is strictly small screen.” I can understand how he came to these conclusions when the movie first came out....

Italian writer-director Emanuele Crialese is best known for the art-house piffle Respiro (2002), a sun-kissed fairy tale that didn’t prepare me for the weight and solidity of this historical drama about a Sicilian peasant family immigrating to the U.S. The folkloric tone that seemed so pretentious in the earlier movie is powerfully effective here, as Crialese conveys the dark superstitions of the Old World and the family’s absurd fantasies about the new one (lakes of fresh milk, vegetables as big as people)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m feeling a little silly. I wrote a hard-hitting column last month chiding a new Tribune on-line venture called Triblocal.com for its tireless coverage of Mark Pera’s campaign for Congress. The reporter, “citizen contributor” Patrick Corcoran, turned out to be Pera’s news flack. I then got an e-mail pointing out what I’d missed: if I’d stuck my nose in a little deeper I’d have found out that a bona fide Triblocal....

On the evening of September 18, 2003, about six months after the start of the war in Iraq, an American soldier shot and killed a Bengal tiger at the city zoo in Baghdad. The Army was hosting a barbecue designed to boost morale, and the zoo was chosen as the setting even though, thanks to war and looting, it had become what one reporter described as a “decrepit collection of dirty cages and sad-looking animals....

Re: “Basketball controversies: In the name of protecting kids, there’s a movement to take their sports equipment away” by Mick Dumke and Kevin Warwick, September 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When you do not allow an outlet for kids, students to play basketball, you’re allowing gang violence to win. Basketball gives kids something to do. Taking it away for reasons like possible drug dealing/gang recruitment sends the message to gang members that they hold the power in this town....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, who lives part-time in Chicago, has a new novel out. Skagboys (Norton) is a prequel to his best-selling 1993 debut, Trainspotting. Here’s an edited transcript of a recent phone chat.JL: About Skagboys: Why revisit these characters 20 years later? Were they just kind of stuck in your head? They had more to say?IW: Yeah, I mean there was a lot of mileage in them....

And the Woman in the Middle . . . Approaching 100 Percent White Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They espouse to be made up of volunteers ‘from all walks of life,’ but at least 39 of their 43 DJs are white men and women between 20 and 40ish years of age. Four didn’t have pics at their bio pages, so I can’t really give an exact number, but it approaches 100 percent white....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist Sarah Cahill (pictured) has made the performance and promotion of contemporary compositions one of her calling cards. She’s hosted several weekly radio programs in the Bay Area devoted to new classical music, and she’s written extensively about the subject for magazines and papers including the Village Voice, East Bay Express, and San Francisco Chronicle. But her most convincing advocacy comes from her playing: gorgeous, sensitive readings of pieces written by a who’s who of 20th-century music....

Two Thursdays ago it seemed like the only thing the music-critic blogosphere wanted to talk about was Lana Del Rey. That was partly because Del Rey had played an exclusive “secret show” the night before at the Glasslands in Brooklyn. It also probably had a lot to do with the fact that, as my friend Maura Johnston at the Village Voice pointed out, it was a rainy day in New York, and the weather was “keeping everyone cooped up and unable to go out to lunch....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paradoxically though, almost everyone works in demolition, gangs roving up and down the river, lighting out for whatever serendipitous employment territory they can find. No country for old men here—for “nostalgics,” as one character calls them, living on memories of a world past vanishing. But yuan, the paper currency—always time for those, every denomination a picture of some natural wonder or other threatened with extinction....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What with their being rotting corpses and all, you wouldn’t think zombies would have very nice knockers, would you? In the Walking Dead-themed burlesque show Boobs of the Dead, the virus that reanimates the dead actually makes them sexier than they were when they were alive—fishnets, bustiers, and all. It’s way more fun than watching Glenn and Maggie do it in a prison watchtower....