Presented by the Society for Arts, the Polish Film Festival in America runs Friday, November 6, through Sunday, November 22, with screenings this week at Beverly Arts Center, Facets Cinematheque, Pickwick, River East 21, and Society for Arts. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $13, $12 for students, and $9 for seniors; documentary screenings are $10 for all, and a festival pass, good for seven screenings, is $70. For more information, a complete schedule, and ticket purchases, call 773-486-9612 or go to pffamerica....

Richard Thompson accomplished so much in his first 15 years of recording–he invented English folk rock with Fairport Convention and made the genre’s best albums with his first wife, Linda–that the solo career he’s pursued for the past 25 seems anticlimactic by comparison; rather than making up new rules as he goes, he’s now simply following the rules he invented. Still, he hasn’t lost his chops. Thompson’s thrilling guitar vocabulary is a composite of rockabilly twang, bagpipe drone, Django Reinhardt’s fluency, and John Coltrane’s intensity....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the moment there are two songs in the lower half of the Hot 100 by a previously unknown 20-year-old rapper from the Bay Area named Sage the Gemini. His name faintly screams “no-fun conscious rapper,” but he’s actually working in the proud tradition of California party rap that includes both the Bay’s long-running hyphy scene and LA’s more recent ratchet music phenomenon....

Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla (aka James Yancey) passed away February 10, 2006, just three days after he turned 32 and Stones Throw released his solo album Donuts. Dilla had been suffering from a rare blood disorder called TTP as well as lupus, and he famously made most of Donuts while confined to a bed in LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. A sample-based rap album without any rapping, some at first described Donuts as merely a novel effort....

Bars Kitty O’Shea’s In a city that’s lousy with nostalgic Irish pub reproductions, the Hilton Chicago’s entry is something of a monument to the form, featuring actual brogue-spitting staffers in Gaelic football jerseys; lots of wood, marble, brass, and memorabilia; and expensive industrial-hotel-kitchen renditions of the usual suspects: corned beef and cabbage, shepherd’s pie, lamb stew, etc. There’s live music nightly and a popular $15 Saint Paddy’s Day blowout, but even if you haven’t been here before, you’ve been here before....

You can’t get away, but you don’t have central air conditioning. Or a pool. Or a private beach, or a hot tub, or a cook. And you definitely don’t have a masseuse. But they do. —Heather Kenny Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Drake For years, the Drake was the ne plus ultra of Chicago hotel experiences. Its gloried past can be evoked by taking tea in the Palm Court, bellying up to the bar in the Cape Cod Room (where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio’s carved initials can still be seen), or having a martini in the dim, old-fashioned atmosphere of the Coq d’Or, which was issued one of the first city liquor licenses at the end of Prohibition....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The centennial of Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece The Rite of Spring has been celebrated throughout 2013, but Chicagoans will get the opportunity to take in one of the more unusual and provocative treatments of the ballet score when the Bad Plus perform their interpretation—which they call “On Sacred Ground: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,” partly admitting the danger of a jazz-oriented trio tackling such an iconic work of modern classical music—Friday night at the Logan Center for the Arts on the campus of the University of Chicago....

Tywin Lannister A week limited to basic cable can drive a fellow to desperate measures, and in my case this meant watching hour upon hour of the History Channel. To be fair, I was multitasking—pitting cherries for a pie while staring slack-jawed at the inception of the American century as rendered in The Men Who Built America, a six-hour-long miniseries that’s both risible and hypnotic. The MWBA are Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, and Henry Ford....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What are the odds? Today I came across a story about a penitent thief in Portland, Oregon, who on Wednesday returned the bike he (or she) had stolen to its owner, along with an apology note and $10 to pay for a new lock. The chances of that must be one in a million, I thought. Then I saw that on the very same day, all the way across the country in Hoboken, New Jersey, another thief returned a bike he’d stolen to the police....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How Radler fared depends on who you read. If that’s Peter Worthington in the Toronto Sun, you’re reading that “such self-immolation of a star witness” had never before been seen by veteran court observers. You’re reading it’s unlikely there’s anyone following the trial “who thinks Radler is capable of not lying.” (You’re also reading that “no one gives a damn about the other [three] co-defendants,” and there’s no disputing that....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Art Institute of Chicago announced today that Daniel Walker—not the former Illinois governor but a big-time art scholar—will be its (vanity title warning: take a breath) Pritzker Chair and Curator of Asian Art and its Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles. Got that? In a statement, James Cuno—AIC’s president and Eloise Martin director—said that Walker’s experience at major museums and his distinguished scholarship “make him the ideal leader of two curatorial departments....

My first thought was: Edzo’s Burger Shop is to burgers as Hot Doug’s is to encased meat. And in fact Eddie Lakin purposely patterned his Evanston burger hut after Doug Sohn’s renowned hot dog stand in certain respects—his cruelly limited hours, for example. But where Sohn is an innovator, Lakin’s genius is in going back to the basics. His hamburger, ground daily and unmistakably fresh, is available in two forms: a thin griddled patty or a nice, fat charburger....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not surprisingly, Next felt the urge to show up every PDR in town, and theirs—poker-facedly named the Room at Next—is the latest and most elaborate expression of ideas Grant Achatz has been kicking around for a while about synesthesia—in this case, the blending of taste with the other senses involved in our experience of food. The showpiece of the ten-seat room is a cascading colored-LED sculpture arching over the table, like the Hollywood Bowl crossed with one of those car stereos that glows different colors with the beat, under which you will dine on a ten-course menu served nowhere else by new Aviary chef Andrew Brochu, plus cocktail pairings by Aviary mixologist Charles Joly, your own dedicated servers, and a private washroom....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The anti-illegal immigration group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC has announced a new round of federal candidate endorsements, and included among the candidates are local Republicans Rep. Peter Roskam of the Sixth District (parts of Cook and DuPage counties) and Jesse Jackson Jr.’s GOP challenger, Isaac Hayes. “Illegal immigration is a top issue in the minds of voters and it relates to many other issues such as taxation, crime, terrorism, jobs, education, and the economy,” says ALIPAC president William Gheen in a press release about the endorsements....

As an adjunct professor at Medill back in the early 90s, Susy Schultz and a colleague organized a program they called “Racism and Sexism From Sources—How Do You Handle It?” Schultz was one of five women at the Sun-Times who began meeting for lunch about once a month to talk things over: family issues for one, newsroom assignments for another. “Were they saying ‘Cindy, go cover that’ or was it ‘Joe, go cover that’?...

Who needs friends when you’ve got Budweiser? William Knoedelseder’s recent book Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer covers a lot of ground: the Busch family dynasty and the antics of its members, the company’s importance in Saint Louis and its struggle to become (and then remain) the biggest brewer in the U.S.—and, relatedly, Anheuser-Busch’s commitment to quality. Of all the revelations in the book, it’s that last part that surprised me the most....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The proposed ordinance–which would hike fares to help boost the earnings of cabbies, many of whom are struggling to cover the surging cost of gas–was introduced by 40th Ward alderman Patrick O’Connor, but O’Connor wasn’t there to advocate for the measure. Committee members Ray Suarez, Pat Dowell, Anthony Beale, James Balcer, Virginia Rugai, Ike Carothers, Brian Doherty, Eugene Schulter, and Brendan Reilly–whose downtown ward almost certainly has the most cab traffic–were no-shows as well....

Chicago Craft Beer Week, organized by the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild and now in its fourth year, exists first and foremost to expose new people to the great beer made in Chicago—and even the hardest of hard-core beer nerds could probably use a refresher course. It’s not just Goose Island, Two Brothers, Metropolitan, Half Acre, Revolution, Haymarket, and Rock Bottom anymore—just in the past year or so, a burgeoning crowd of new players has crashed the party, among them Pipeworks, Solemn Oath, 18th Street, Off Color, Virtue Cider, Spiteful, Begyle, Flesk, Atlas, DryHop, 4 Paws, Lake Effect, Tighthead, the Ale Syndicate, Temperance, and Tolchez....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Pilobolus “Mining Pilobolus’s roots in comedy, Rushes creates a surreal world featuring creeping figures, a mysterious suitcase, and flashing dream images—an ear unlocked with a key, a butterfly caught in a web, a chair with bat wings,” writes Laura Molzahn. “Its gentle whimsy is light-years removed from the almost sadistic physical comedy of Walklyndon, also on the bill....

MARZENA ABRAHAMIK Corrections House This Mon 12/8, half-local, experimental-industrial-metal “supergroup” Corrections House play at Cobra Lounge. The band has been on tour for the past week and have just released a live record taken from a performance in Los Angeles titled Writing History in Advance. Last week the band—which features members of Eyehategod, Neurosis, and Yakuza—debuted a new song online, which was exciting news considering how much I loved their debut LP, 2013’s Last City Zero....