Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are still quite a few Oscar-bait movies due out this year: Django Unchained, the latest pop-culture mindfuck from Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds); The Great Gatsby, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, directed by Baz Luhrman (Moulin Rouge!); Hyde Park on Hudson, with Bill Murray as FDR; Killing Them Softly, the latest collaboration from Brad Pitt and director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford); Les Miserables, the long-awaited screen version of the Broadway musical, directed by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech); Not Fade Away, the big-screen debut of Sopranos creator David Chase; and Silver Linings Playbook, directed by David O....

Von Freeman Pavilion Fast CitizensNoon This mostly local sextet has an unusual strategy for creative renewal, but there’s no arguing with the results. It’s maintained the same personnel for ten years, surviving even the 2005 departure of reedist Aram Shelton for Oakland, California, but on each album (three so far) a different member leads the band. Last year’s Gather (Delmark), with cellist and tenor guitarist Fred Lonberg-Holm at the helm, is their best yet....

thursday15 Thursday15 Lou BarlowJemina PearlKurt RosenwinkelTune-Yards Friday16 Rhett MillerMeshell NdgeocelloKurt Rosenwinkel Saturday17 Dethklok, ConvergeFaustKurt RosenwinkelShaky Hands Sunday18 Kurt RosenwinkelBrad ShepikWilco Monday19 SatyriconWilco Tuesday20 Faust Wednesday21 Sonic Chicken 4 JEMINA PEARL With her menacing look and her infinite cred—her debut album, Break It Up, just came out on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label—Jemina Pearl is as punk as teen pop gets. As front woman of Nashville’s Be Your Own Pet she was quickly hailed as an ex post facto riot-girl baddie of sorts, but now she’s 22 and a new Brooklynite, and according to her blog she just suffered through her first fashion week....

friday9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » cERIK M Since his earliest pieces 15 years ago, which roughly followed a path carved out by the great sound artist Christian Marclay, this French turntablist has continually expanded his sonic vocabulary. Most of his recorded output has been collaborative: teaming up with an international list of electroacoustic improvisers, including Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Jerome Noetinger, Voice Crack, and Gunter Muller, he’s tended to deploy his electronic noises as part of a single massed sound rather than as one side of a give-and-take conversation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Quigley, who commissioned a report (PDF) critical of Mayor Daley’s TIF program, is being intentionally circumspect about his role in the ongoing behind-the-scenes struggle between the state’s most powerful elected officials. Here’s what going on. For the last several years Blagojevich has held his tongue while Daley and schools CEO Arne Duncan rip the state for not providing more money for Chicago’s public schoools....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spectacle may be an odd word to describe productions as evidently cheap as Yilmaz Güney’s, which abound with slapdash editing and bare-bones sets. Yet the films I saw at Doc Films’s Güney series this Saturday afternoon—Bride of the Earth (1968) and The Hungry Wolves (1969)—conveyed a mythic sense of landscape and story, often using one to reinforce the other....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Another front-page headline, again quoting police superintendent Phil Cline: “‘He’s tarnished our image worse than anybody else in the history of the department.’” That about Anthony Abbate, next to a still from the video that has him allegedly knocking a bartender at Jesse’s Short Stop Inn to the floor and beating her. And across the bottom of page one: “Carol Marin: What city needs to do to clean up this mess....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Sunday, mobile restaurateur Matt Maroni cedes his kitchen to Lockwood‘s Phillip Foss, another chef who dreams of food trucks. For one day only, Foss and his wife, Kenni, will use Maroni’s north-side Gaztro-Wagon storefront (5973 N. Clark) to test several concepts from their newly formed Foss Family Food Trucks. Homemade doughnuts are for sale from 8 AM on, and a brunch menu served from 10 AM to 2 PM includes the “golden brick”—an “oozing egg in crispy brick pastry”—as well as brioche French toast and a tomato-and-cheese omelet....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last fall, when Bailiwick Repertory landed a Joseph Jefferson best production award for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the occasion was bittersweet: artistic director David Zak noted that the award was a “bookend,” marking the conclusion of the company’s years in its Belmont Avenue home. But the financial difficulty that turned Bailiwick homeless hasn’t wiped it out. This week Bailiwick announced its first post-Belmont production, Bombs Away–a new musical by Sally Deering and Larry Bortnicker, the team behind Bailiwick’s hit Alfred Kinsey spoof Dr....

Between putting in face time at the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium and plumbing the depths of his historic cookbook collection, the southern Indiana native’s kitchen scholarship keeps Chicago relevant in the wider movement to resurrect the lost food traditions of the south. Yes, he buys, butchers, and preserves more locally than most, but his menus meander all over the south, from the Low County to Appalachia to Lake Pontchartrain. A self-described history geek inspired by old roadside inns of the south, his Family Meal series has wandered from a creole Lenten dinner to a Cajun country ramble, through the heritage grains of the south to dinner as it might have been served in 1840 in a Kentucky tavern....

Every rap DJ and producer who works on mix tapes and Internet-giveaway tracks needs a “drop,” a sonic signature that alerts listeners to his or her presence on a song. Drops are essentially in-song advertisements, and a lot of them are prosaic, along the lines of some dude saying a DJ’s name in his best tough-guy voice. But some folks have made the drop an art form in and of itself....

What can those changes possibly be? Newspaperdeathwatch.com has no idea, but it’s excited anyway. “Platinum Equity would not have bought the Union-Tribune,” it exclaims, “unless the partners believed that the business was undervalued. That’s another indication that perhaps the market has hit bottom. The big question is what changes the partners believe they have to make to increase the value of the asset. That’s going to be the really interesting question....

There was something new at Wrigley Field as this season started. Kosuke Fukudome had taken over in right field and the fans in the bleachers were welcoming the Cubs first player from Japan by wearing head scarves and other accoutrements with Japanese characters. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not as if I’d expected some sort of Zen garden, not even with the lovely new field Wrigley installed over the winter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Una and Ray, the principal characters in this unremittingly intense 80-minute one-act by Scottish playwright David Harrower, are birds with broken wings—psychologically crippled by an episode that left both their lives in tatters. She’s 27, he’s 56, and they’ve had a brief affair—about 15 years earlier, when he was 40 and she was 12. They haven’t seen each other since Ray was sent to prison for statutory rape (“blackbird” is British slang for “jailbird”)....

Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote that F.W. Murnau’s Faust “integrates its dazzling special effects so seamlessly that they’re indistinguishable from the film’s narrative, poetry, and, above all, metaphysics.” The same could be said of this awesome sci-fi spectacle by Alfonso Cuaron, which took several years to make but still feels spontaneous in its action and character development. An astronaut (George Clooney) and a medical engineer (Sandra Bullock) are stranded in outer space after an accident separates them from their spacecraft....

Last week Curtis Duffy of Avenues challenged John des Rosiers of Inovasi to come up with a recipe using geraniums. Des Rosiers tweeted his response: “Geraniums in december? @curtisduffy you’re an ass! No worries. Found a blooming plant at the dry cleaners across from inovasi! It’s on!!” It’s actually more common for the plant’s leaves to be used, usually to flavor sweets such as cakes, jellies, ice cream, and lemonade. Des Rosiers took the complete opposite tack, making pesto with the flowers and using it as part of a composed savory dish....

Maddie Meyer, Getty Images Ditka has lots of opinions. The other day I came across an old Mike Royko column that reminded me the Republican Party started hating Hillary Clinton even before her husband was elected president. On Tuesday NFL commissioner Roger Goodell suspended the Minnesota Vikings’ Adrian Peterson for the rest of the season, and perhaps longer, for abusing his four-year-old son and not wishing he hadn’t. The Tribune‘s David Haugh reported, “Peterson acknowledged punishing the boy with a stick badly enough to leave marks on his legs, ankles and genitals....

George Stiles, Paul Leigh, and Peter Raby’s musical version of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 swashbuckler, directed by David H. Bell, boasts impressive vocals, gorgeous costumes, flashy duels, and emotionally precise acting. Broadway and Stratford Festival veterans Juan Chioran, Aaron Ramey, and Steven Jeffrey Ross play the title trio–members of the king’s elite guard in 17th-century France–and Kevin Massey is D’Artagnan, the bumpkin who joins their ranks. But the show’s virtues can’t quite overcome the brutality, misogyny, and sheer stupidity underlying the famous “all for one/one for all” ethos....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Face tattoos are rare. If a tattoo artist wanted that, I’d do it. If it was someone else, we’re gonna talk. I’m not your dad and not your therapist, but I’m gonna talk to you. You can’t get a job at Taco Bell looking like that....

Amy Creyer, photographer behind Chicagostreetstyle.com, is marveling at: Jellies Blame it on my astrology sign. As a Pisces, I’ve always found myself drawn to aquatic environments. Of all the incredible cultural institutions that make Chicago one of the world’s most influential cities, none is more special to me than the Shedd Aquarium. This year I even took the day off work to celebrate my 26th birthday at the Shedd....