David Schneider, owner of the new Wicker Park restaurant Taxim, knows it won’t be easy to change entrenched ideas about what a Greek restaurant should be in this town. “I’ve had people actually get in here and say, ‘You need more blue and white. This place doesn’t feel Greek enough,’” he says. “Likewise, there’s an orthodoxy about how to make a dish.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Schneider knows that this fundamental shift in Greek cuisine can’t be hung on just one chef....

As you’ve probably heard, a big Picasso show opened this month at the Art Institute, celebrating the “special century-long relationship” between the “preeminent artist of the 20th century” (as the catalog puts it) and our town. “Picasso and Chicago” showcases about 200 of the 400 works owned by the Art Institute, and 50 more from other local collections, and there are related “Picasso Effect” mini exhibits throughout the museum, along with lectures, music and dance performances, and film....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Twenty years ago ska-loving punks the world over were still in mourning over Operation Ivy’s breakup when word got around that Op Ivy guitarist Tim “Lint” Armstrong and bassist Matt Freeman had started a new band called Rancid. Though preexisting Op Ivy fans would make up most of the initial audience for the group’s debut album when it was released the next year, Rancid would go on to become one of the most commercially successful punk bands to retain more than a modicum of credibility in the scene....

Twilight Sad On Sunday the Twilight Sad performs its debut in full at the Empty Bottle, a promising show that falls somewhere between “too soon” and “what really?” on the nostalgia spectrum. The Scottish shoegaze outfit’s fantastic first album, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, came out seven years ago, and so little time has passed since then that I’m not inclined to approach this performance like it’s a time machine....

Q&A Do you have special memories of Chicago? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your music was recently featured in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married—an old tune, “America,” and another written for the film, “Up to Our Nex”—and you appear onscreen as well. What’s it like to be in two roles in the same work? Which do you like better? How did you end up in the film?...

In late 2007 Alec Duffy, artistic director of the New York theater company Hoi Polloi, won a songwriting contest held by Sufjan Stevens and was awarded exclusive rights to a Sufjan tune, “The Lonely Man of Winter,” that had never been released or publicly performed. Duffy was entitled to do whatever he wanted with the song—press it as a single, upload it to the Internet, even license it to the highest bidder....

thursday30 Thursday30 GoatwhoreMekons Friday31 Weasel Walter Saturday1 Baby TeethBrokencydeGucci ManeSerpentcultTV Pow Sunday2 Jay Electronica Tuesday4 Casiokids Mike Reed’s People, Places, & Things Wednesday5 Lisa De La Salle, Olga Kern, Joyce YangMike Reed’s People, Places, & ThingsWand MEKONS In “Perfect Mirror,” the song that closes their most recent album, Natural (Quarterstick), the Mekons invoke a looming mountain, unchanging and unconcerned with human affairs, as they ponder ancient pagan ceremonies that have lost their meaning....

When I show up at the Wicker Park apartment Adam Gil and Daniel Perzan share with two other guys, Super Mario Kart for the SNES is paused on the TV. Gil and Perzan, half of the band Yawn, have just climbed out of a cluttered basement whose walls are covered in creepy, fading murals of biblical scenes, a space they’ve partially converted into a rehearsal room and recording studio. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Detroit entrepreneur Marc Siwak is throwing a bone—a festering, disembodied femur, perhaps—to students of postcolonialism and critical race theory everywhere with his proposal to “revitalize” the economically depressed city of Detroit, Michigan, by installing in it a 100- or 200-acre theme park organized around the theme of “zombies.” It will be called Z World Detroit. The gist is that white people with paranoid fantasies of the black ghetto—sorry, “international zombie-survivalist fans”—would enter a walled-off part of the inner city sometime after nightfall, and spend the evening practicing a little exposure therapy in the form of being chased around by “out-of-work actors” pretending to be the undead....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been a huge fan of the Toronto singer-songwriter Doug Paisley since stumbling upon his terrific eponymous 2009 debut. He’s gotten better and better with time, and with his forthcoming new album, Strong Feelings (due on January 21 from No Quarter), he’s reached yet another peak. His easygoing delivery and melodic sweetness hark back to 70s folk rock—I have no problem imagining him in the company of folks as disparate as Gordon Lightfoot, Michael Hurley, and Mickey Newbury, among others—but Paisley has his own warm sound....

Will Burns, a candidate for alderman in Chicago’s Fourth Ward, is not a flashy politician. Short and stocky, with a boyish face and a sharp wit, he dons conservative suits and shuttles between campaign events in a beat-up 2003 Impala. His voice is firm and brassy but not booming. If Burns, who’s 37, didn’t represent Illinois’s 26th house district, a job he’s held for three years, he might be running a social service agency or teaching grad students political theory....

Julia Thiel A lot of Zubrowka cocktail I used to live just up the street from Rite Liquors, a mildly sketchy Polish bar/liquor store near Division and Ashland that I developed a certain affection for over time. It had an odd sort of charm helped along by friendly bartenders, one of whom introduced me to Zubrowka, or bison grass vodka. It’s a slightly herbal (and, yes, grassy-tasting) liquor distilled from rye that’s been made in Poland since the 16th century, and has a complex history in this country that the Wall Street Journal detailed in a 2011 article....

Alexi Front A snifter of American Muscle Maybe for you double IPAs are to craft beer what Chuck Norris jokes are to the Internet—weird macho nonsense that was only halfway entertaining to begin with and has definitely overstayed its welcome. (“There used to be a street named after Chuck Norris, but it was changed because nobody crosses Chuck Norris and lives,” for instance. Or “Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door....

Looking back on the year in movies beats the hell out of looking back on the year in money. By mid-December, according to the New York Times, 2.8 million Americans had lost their jobs in 2008, and the Federal Reserve was predicting that by the end of the year home foreclosures would total 2.25 million. Some 46 million of us have no health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 28 million are relying on food stamps—an all-time high—and the U....

However great Julie Christie might be, she’s not generally regarded as a tragedienne. Yet after seeing this wonderful adaptation of Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” I began to think of Christie’s roles in Petulia (1968) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) as way stations toward this career-defining performance. She plays a stylish woman in a successful 44-year marriage who struggles to keep her dignity after finding herself afflicted with Alzheimer’s....

Fausto Fernos was hoping for a really big present this Christmas. For nearly two years, with the help of his all-but-legal husband, Marc Felion, Fernos has been podcasting the gaycentric Feast of Fools talk show an hour a day, five days a week. Created in the couple’s Edgewater condo, each podcast is accompanied by chatty program notes, penned by Fernos and posted on the FOF Web site (feastoffools.net). In November Fernos was selected from a field of hundreds by Gay Bloggies, an American Idol-style competition, as one of the dozen best gay bloggers on the Web....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune Company is compared (and not favorably) to Donald Rumsfeld and told to — like Rumsfeld — go away in an editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review. It asserts that the best thing the troubled company can do for the newspapers it owns is to get rid of them. “Good editors will cut costs when it is part of a sensible business plan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last December trumpeter Dave Douglas had a rather audacious idea, one that with time might catch on with more and more musicians. Booked for a five-night run with his quintet at New York’s Jazz Standard, Douglas decided that he and Mike Friedman, his partner in the Chicago-based Greenleaf Music, should record the entire stand and make all ten sets of music (two each evening) available as downloads....

Dancer-choreographer Ayako Kato set herself a huge challenge with Dear BACH—Goldberg Variations, a 50-minute solo now receiving its U.S. premiere as part of an evening titled “Existencia Esencia.” Kato’s dancing is so eloquent that it easily justifies her temerity in taking on Johann Sebastian’s mathematically complex Goldberg Variations. Though Kato also performs Dear BACH to Gustav Leonhardt’s harpsichord version of the Variations, the piece comes across with particular power when done to the brilliantly idiosyncratic 1981 recording by pianist Glenn Gould, who can be heard crooning as he plays....

French director Patrick Cazals will attend this screening of his excellent video documentaries Sergei Paradjanov, the Rebel (2004, 52 min.) and Rouben Mamoulian: The Golden Age of Broadway and Hollywood (2006, 63 min.), which look at two very different directors born in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. The Paradjanov portrait skimps on the more conventional early features, but it’s priceless for its interviews with the eccentric director (shot during production of his last feature, Ashik Kerib) and its sampling of the collages he produced during his long prison terms....