Andrea Bauer Egerton and Aukerman at this year’s Riot Fest Back in 2010, Stephen Egerton of the Descendents and All recorded The Seven Degrees of Stephen Egerton, a solo album that saw him handling all instruments himself, with all the vocals covered by a rotating cast of singers from some of the biggest bands in pop-punk’s past and present. Without surprise, the best contribution comes from Descendents front man Milo Aukerman, who sings on today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “She’s Got Everything....

I swear, half the job of reporting on the city’s tax increment financing schemes is learning how to read between the lines in the propaganda the city issues about them. “In the spirit of creating a truly new company, MillerCoors had to select a location for their new headquarters,” the overview goes on. Company leaders didn’t want to stay in Milwaukee (home to Miller) or Denver (home to Coors) because “it was felt that location in either city would suggest that one of the partners had a controlling interest in the new company....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Transforming Chicago into a fashion capital was a pet project of Daley’s over the last several years, part and parcel of his plan to burnish the city’s image across the globe. He created the Fashion Advisory Council, made up of movers and shakers in the fashion community, and appointed Melissa Gamble as the first-ever Director of Fashion Arts & Events to oversee initiatives such as Fashion Focus Chicago....

In this “living room vaudeville” show, members of a de facto dysfunctional family–a caricatured wimpy boy, sexy woman, and commanding man in formal attire–inhabit a setting that’s more fun house than home. With the help of these regulars and weekly guests, writer-directors Andy Miarra and Mary Scruggs offer sketch comedy, improv, magic, and music (sometimes played straight); the result suggests bored comedy veterans getting lost in their libidos. The three talented, charismatic leads amuse themselves but craft characters and relationships too ambiguous to anchor the theatrics, and the material’s driven more by fears and lusts than laughs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best thriller I’ve seen so far this year is Marcin Wrona’s Polish drama The Christening, about two old friends who once worked for the same brutal crime boss but are now about to part ways in the most unpleasant fashion. It screens Sunday and Thursday night at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the European Union Film Festival, along with Andre Techine’s Unforgivable....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For me, the most fascinating part of the 70-millimeter print of Tron that the Music Box screened this weekend was the distinct look of the actors’ faces and hands. As I learned later from the movie’s IMDB trivia page, the “computer world” sequences were shot on black-and-white 65-millimeter film, printed on high-contrast Kodalith sheet film, and then shone through with colored light before effects teams added the pioneering CGI effects frame by frame....

It’s been clear for more than a year that the Park District’s plan to give a private school prime-time control over a corner of Lincoln Park is a bad deal for the public. Under the contract’s terms—revealed in the lawsuit—the Park District will kick in as much as $250,000 to install lights for the new soccer field. It will also keep the field in “broom clean condition” while “maintaining, repairing and replacing the landscaping, fencing and other related improvements....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since the Arcade Fire popped off there have been a lot of bands straining to achieve the kind of majestic-but-humble, emotionally cathartic transcendental vibe that gets your music placed in Spike Jonze-ish indie movies and Levi’s commercials, i.e., the indie equivalent of a gold record. On “Magnetic Love,” LA’s Raw Geronimo gets there with a minimum of visible effort by simply making a neat pile of references to girl groups and 50s prom slow jams and infusing them with a spirit that’s half hippie psychedelic and half 70s art punk, and then letting front woman Laena Geronimo (the daughter of a Romanian singer-songwriter and Devo drummer Alan Myers) do her thing on top of it....

Walking due east on the 59th street border of the University of Chicago campus, the life of the mind can be found in many forms. Upon passing the Gothic stylings of the Arley D. Cathey Learning Center and hearing the bells of Rockefeller Chapel proclaiming their tonal humanism, you may encounter a battle between two medieval knights. If this all appears anachronistic, then, congratulations, you do not attend the University of Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re not familiar with Pusha T, well, you haven’t really been listening to pop/rap radio for the last two years. But if Pusha T’s voice sounds familiar and you used to listen to hip-hop pretty regularly, you might recognize him as one half of Clipse, the sibling duo famous for the radio hits “Grindin’” and “When the Last Time,” the 2006 album Hell Hath No Fury, and numerous appearances on pop songs where the presence of two brothers rapping about coke dealing seems a little out of place....

They only serve it once a week and for half the year, but Publican Quality Meats has one of the ten best burgers in Chicago: a slightly charred yet juicy beef patty topped with American cheese, spicy dill relish, balsamic red onions, mustard, “special sauce,” and gem lettuce. Just as significant as the patty and the toppings is the bun, a powdery, soft bread blanket that evades sogginess and perfectly ensconces the burger....

Farrar Straus and Giroux Janet Malcolm is probably best known for the opening salvo of her book The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” This has no doubt inspired a great deal of soul-searching in journalism-ethics classes, but it gives an erroneous impression of Malcolm. Janet Malcolm is not (usually) the sort of journalist who poses as the scourge of God....

Joravsky for Mayor Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After I read “The Beginning and End of My Independent Political Career” (and finished laughing), I began to wonder how many others like me had cast a write-in vote for Ben Joravsky in the 2007 mayoral election. I started searching the Web for records of all the write-ins and hit a lot of dead ends. I finally ended up on David Orr’s Web site [davidorr....

Kafka on the Shore Steppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Galati tells it, the story is by turns baffling and insubstantial. In alternating scenes, two heroes set out on separate journeys that eventually intersect: Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old boy running away from his Tokyo home, and Nakata, a gentle older man who was left mentally impaired by a mysterious accident in grade school during World War II....

ELEGY ssss Directed by Isabel Coixet adapted by Nicholas Meyer from a novella by Philip Roth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Elegy, adapted from Philip Roth’s novella The Dying Animal, gives Ben Kingsley one of the best roles of his career: David Kepesh, a Columbia University professor and cultural commentator who, appearing on Charlie Rose’s late-night talk show in the opening scene, excoriates the Puritans for crippling American mores and expresses regret that he ever wed....

The Reader’s Guide to the Nonmusic attractions on-site include the Flatstock 17 Poster Convention, a record fair organized by the Chicago Independent Radio Project, and the DEPART-ment store, where mostly local vendors sell handcrafted clothes, jewelry, and more. 6:00 Mission of Burma Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During indie rock’s 90s heyday, Lou Barlow seemed to hover over the genre like some sort of mythological archetype or patron saint—the solipsistic sad sack a lot of dudes aspired perversely to be, filling tape after tape with four-tracked misery....

Painter Leon Golub at work in the documentary Golub (1988), which Blumenthal codirected and edited Jerry Blumenthal, founding partner of the Chicago documentary production house Kartemquin Films, passed away on Thursday. He had been involved with the company from the production of its first film, Home for Life, in 1966. Over the next four decades he would codirect almost a dozen projects for Kartemquin—among them The Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976), The Last Pullman Car (1983), and Golub (1988)—and serve as editor, sound recordist, or consultant on numerous others....

There are lots of things it’s good to have more than one of, like words to live by and gloves. But MPAACT is out to demonstrate yet again that talented artists can shine individually. The lineup for the winter edition of the company’s late-night, Afrocentric Solo Jams series goes like this: First, a panel made up of Solo Jams artists considers “The State of the Spoken Word—Chicago and Beyond” (Wed 1/30, 7 PM, free)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the top on my “must find” list for a couple months now has been a basic shirtdress–inspired by a glimpse of a woman downtown wearing a beige version with nude heels. It’s simple, it’s sophisticated, it’s perfect for work and then some. But it must be a law of the universe that when you know what you want, you can’t find it....

If the Bodies of Work Festival succeeds in its mission, the arts community in Chicago will start thinking about artists and audiences with disabilities. Not think of them in a whole new way. Just be aware of their existence. “We want people to think about disability outside the tired cliche of the inspirational, tragic, overcoming narrative,” Sandahl says. “Disability art and culture is identity-based. It’s about different sources of creativity rather than something to overcome....