Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That double CD includes a dynamic, hard-charging recording of 63 Moons of Jupiter recorded in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2009 with guest reedist Roscoe Mitchell joined by Mazurek and 13 other players. Mazurek put together ESO for a proposal made by former Department of Cultural Affairs programmer Mike Orlove in 2005—the group made its debut that year as part of the city’s Made in Chicago series....

Two days before New Year’s Eve the Aragon was swarming with security guards, merch-table workers, and various flavors of roadie and support personnel—all part of the infrastructure for a three-day year-end concert blowout from Umphrey’s McGee. They’ve come a long way from their beginnings on the inglorious South Bend music scene of 1997. “We started just for fun and free beer,” says founding guitarist Brendan Bayliss. “We were getting paid in beer and we thought it was awesome....

Spacemen 3 veteran Sonic Boom–Peter Kember to his mum–may have stopped releasing rock records on a regular basis, but he certainly hasn’t retreated. He divides most of his attention between two ongoing concerns: New Atlantis Studios, where he produces and mixes groups like Dean & Britta and keeps his enviable arsenal of vintage synths and esoteric noisemakers, and the band-slash-solo project Experimental Audio Research (E.A.R.), which has at points featured Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine and Eddie Prevost of AMM....

QI’m a 28-year-old guy who was broken up with via text by a girl I had been dating for two months. She is dealing with the loss of a family member and some other personal issues, and she sent me this message while out of state for a week or so. Two months is a short time, I realize, and we never discussed the nature of our arrangement. But we spent a few nights a week together and agreed that we had something special....

The Tribune‘s John McCormick has himself a nice assignment. He’s responsible for the editorials that every few days suggest yet another offbeat location for the Children’s Museum. Yes, there’s the perfunctory sneer at the “Grant Park land grab.” But if not quite a dead horse, the argument against defiling a sacred vista is too lame to make it around the track against the opposition of not only the mayor and the Children’s Museum’s other powerful allies but even Lois Wille, Grant Park’s biographer and the Tribune‘s former editorial boss....

Restaurants offering both dine-in and carryout are denoted by a s Bistro 110 A three-course prix fixe menu with choice of butternut squash soup or frisee salad with bacon, goat cheese, and pumpkin-seed vinaigrette; roast turkey or rainbow trout; and shortbread with pumpkin gelato or apple-raisin strudel with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. A la carte items are also available. $32.95, $12.95 for kids 12 and under. Noon-8 PM, 110 E....

To observe that Valentine’s Day is a crass, stupid, bourgeois, tacky, irrelevant, hypercommercial, saccharine atrocity of a holiday, only taken seriously by maudlin, sentimental nitwits with horrible taste in life, is to indulge oneself in—and not to put too fine a point on any of this—a desperately boring cliche. It’s nowadays possible to simply throw out one loaded-down workhorse of an epithet, “Hallmark!,” and put the issue to pasture. The resistance movement isn’t much more inspiring; people who’d rather not, don’t, and just get plastered with their friends....

QI am writing about a friend. By all appearances, he is straight. However, on more than one occasion, he has gotten drunk and tried to hook up with a transvestite or a person who could have been one. In one instance, he went to a club and was approached by a really masculine-seeming girl who proceeded to give him head. My friend, in his drunken state, reached into her pants and felt for a pussy only after she started giving him head....

The cover of the album Avalon I was going to post a different recent song by Swedish techno artist Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, but in searching for the file on Soundcloud I came across this remix and had to post. The other night I was waiting on a friend at Bucktown bar the Charleston when Roxy Music’s “Avalon” came on. The song’s yawning keyboards, snare-rim cracks, trickling guitar, and female backup vocals sound like they belong in an interstitial Karate Kid scene....

Don’t get me wrong: winning a writing award this week from the James Beard Foundation for my humble Reader cover story on the cultural history of mince pie was an honor and a thrill, as would have been simply attending the “Oscars of food” on somebody else’s dime. But in a fair and balanced universe, the award probably would have gone to someone who was at least aware of the awards prior to being nominated (ideally my Reader colleague Mike Sula, who was a finalist as well)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Festival had 14 prizes in all, gave a total of 30,000 Euros to many of the winning filmmakers, and concluded with a ceremony that lasted well over two and a half hours. Part of what made the event interesting was the same default position that sustained me through the 64 shorts I saw: the notion that at a festival as genuinely international as this one, a certain education was possible, however limited, in how people in other parts of the world were living and thinking—all of which provides a potential context for better understanding some of the choices involved, conscious or otherwise, in how Americans live and think....

Copresented by British music magazine the Wire and the Empty Bottle, Adventures in Modern Music began Wed 9/8 and overlaps with the inaugural Chicago version of the electronic-music festival Sonar, earning it the appellation “Edition Sonar.” As in years past, most of the shows are at the Bottle, but a few happen elsewhere: the fest opened with a concert by the Rhys Chatham Trio, John Wiese, and Bill Orcutt at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Wed 9/8, and on Thu 9/9 psychedelic doom-metal masters Sleep headline a much-anticipated date at the Logan Square Auditorium (2539 N....

In the late 1960s, Stephen Kaltenbach was among a group of New York-based artists who founded the movement eventually called conceptualism. It became widely influential, in part because its parameters were so liquid: in its antimuseum, anticommodity stance, conceptualism privileged ideas over objects, words over images, communal sharing over individual ownership. It was a perfect fit for the era’s burgeoning counterculture. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new exhibit at Bert Green Fine Art surveys Kaltenbach’s work since 1965....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It seems sadly characteristic of the mainstream reviewing of film books in general and those about Orson Welles in particular that nonspecialists routinely take precedence over specialists–and that biographers who forgo original research for the sake of speculation or invention, and even admit to doing this, can be deemed superior to actual scholars, at least if their biases match those of the reviewers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But what troubled Mitchell more — she found it “appalling” — is that Wade’s speech Friday was disrupted. Someone shouted, “I want to speak in the name of my people,” and was then pummeled. “Frankly, it was embarrassing that an African head of state was subjected to the chaotic situation,” wrote Mitchell, as if the matter came down just to Wade’s feelings....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s clearly my problem, not the movies’. The current wave of Mexican art cinema displays great creativity in its consideration of painful subject matter—their formal ingenuity seems to proclaim, “No tragedy can subdue the power of art.” Constant in these films is a palpable sense of the director’s exhilaration. You can feel it in the extended Steadicam shots of Heli, the emphatically big-screen compositions of Workers, or in the way Quemada-Diez seems to discover his characters in the mannerisms of his nonprofessional actors....

Julia Borcherts is cofounder of Nerds at Heart. “We could call ourselves Nerds at Heart and throw a party called Dating for Nerds,” she said. I’d had event-planning experience as a Reading Under the Influence cohost, so I started devising activities to ratchet down the “nerves” and “potential rejection” quotients. We chose Guthries Tavern in Lakeview because they had an amazing wall of board games and an enclosed back porch that they were willing to loan us for the night....

Miles Harvey miscalculated when he decided to make himself a character in his own play. At the invitation of Hallie Gordon, who runs Steppenwolf Theatre’s Steppenwolf for Young Adults program, Harvey and seven of his DePaul University students set about creating a documentary-style theater piece on the subject of youth violence—that is, kids killing kids—in Chicago. The finished work is narrated by a Harvey doppelganger (Mark Ulrich): a white, male, middle-aged, middle-class English professor working on a documentary-style theater piece....

Miles Raymer, Reader staff writer, is obsessed with . . . Trouble, 431 Days mixtape On my right shoulder there’s an angel who tries to make me feel bad for enjoying music that promotes a broad spectrum of interpersonal violence, performed by a guy who wears his gang affiliations and prison stint for aggravated assault with sneering pride and couldn’t give less of a shit about my liberal guilt. But it’s hard to hear that angel over the devil on my left, who’s screaming about how fun it would be to turn this up to 11 and reenact the hammer-fight scene from Oldboy....

THIEF RIVER SIDE PROJECT THEATRE INFO 773-973-2150 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What these players of power politics don’t seem to understand is that when one celebrity calls another a faggot, the hateful message filters down to real people in real-life America. Things get a little more miserable and confusing for kids wrestling with their sexuality. For every out-and-proud Ellen DeGeneres or Neil Patrick Harris there’s a Tim Hardaway proclaiming that homosexuality “shouldn’t be in the world” or a self-hating Ted Haggard declaring himself “completely heterosexual” after three weeks of counseling....