Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of my favorite stories about the time I spent hanging out in Detroit is about the time I was riding in a friend’s car and we flagrantly blew a red light doing about 65 or so right in front of a cop and he didn’t do a damn thing. Police in Detroit generally don’t give a shit about you unless you are shooting people or setting something fairly large on fire....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dead bodies in movies creep me out. Or make that dead bodies played by live actors, since CGI corpses, freeze-frame stiffs, dearly departeds the other characters talk about or cry over that never appear on-screen, because some wise, observant director/cinematographer/film editor has judiciously cut them out of the frame, etc, I can deal with well enough. It’s the stiffs that phenomenologically aren’t that set the eyes darting and the skin crawling, that create tension for at least one viewer—like “O no, not another chest cavity subliminally heaving again....

This Swagger Entertainment production (not to be confused with the “Laughing Out Loud” fund-raiser at Park West next month) promises three hours of stand-up from headliner D.L. Hughley plus Tony Roberts, CoCoa Brown, Lil Rel, and Shawn Morgan. Hughley, one of the four comedians in Spike Lee’s hit documentary The Original Kings of Comedy, recently hosted Weekends at the DL on Comedy Central and plays a star sketch comedian/Yale grad on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As for the food at Travelle—which is under the care of executive chef Tim Graham, formerly of Tru and other Lettuce Entertain You spots—modernism offers no particular direction, and he admits they tried a number of menu concepts before settling on one that focuses on the coastal Mediterranean, including the often overlooked eastern Mediterranean countries, from Greece to Bulgaria to Turkey....

Beeswax Written and Directed by Andrew Bujalski Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whenever an artistic trend generates so much adoring press a backlash can’t be far behind, and in this case it arrived in the form of a devastating piece by Amy Taubin for the November-December 2007 issue of Film Comment. Mumblecore, she declared, “never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding....

Al Primo Canto I’d had a memorable meal on a stormy night at the Edgebrook location of this Brazilian churrascaria and galeteria, so I was surprised and dismayed by the middling quality of the “endless feast” on offer at the new place, housed in the former Le Lan. For $29.95, you get starters, sides, three pastas, and three meats, including the marinated grilled young chicken that gives the restaurant its name....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » COO Randy Michaels, whose background’s in radio, and not radio of any distinction, held a conference call with investors and media reporters on June 5 and made two striking statements. The first was that the company intended to shrink the news hole at its papers to bring the news-content-to-ads ratio to 50-50 (industry-wide it’s usually closer to 60-40). The second was that output as measured in column inches would weigh heavily in the decisions about which staff to boot....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wrote about her way back when–in 1990, to be exact, when a poem of hers won a local award, and I didn’t think a whole lot of the poem until I heard her take the floor at the Green Mill and put it over like nobody’s business. She was a mere entertainment reporter at the Sun-Times then, but she won the National Poetry Slam four times and took a big writing job at the Boston Globe, her instructions being to make language sing in the Globe the way it sung in the smoky clubs she performed in....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nashville singer Raul Malo, who first made his name as front man for Music City outcats the Mavericks, rolls into town Wednesday for a gig at Joe’s. On his solo records Malo has consistently nailed a retro feel, and unlike many artists treading similar turf, he doesn’t come off as a creatively bankrupt hack exploiting other people’s nostalgia to make a buck....

Miles and I not only share space in the Reader pretty much every week, we’re also friends—friends with a long history (since the 90s!) of ruthlessly mocking each other’s tastes. Using IM as our forum, we discussed and debated some of our top albums and songs of 2008 and hazarded a few predictions about what 2009 might hold—a two-critic roundtable that makes Sound Opinions look like a Brownie troop meeting....

The Wednesday food section disappeared this week from the Sun-Times. It’s gone for good. In its place is Taste, a wan eight-page insert that has the good grace to admit on its first page that it’s “produced by the advertising department.” Inside are a few ads—the big one being a two-page spread for Treasure Island—a few recipes, and a wine column. The problem with content produced by ad departments is that you can’t take it at face value....

Last month I read the strangest book: Frank Bill’s novel Donnybrook, which follows a bunch of crusty backwoods reprobates on their way to the titular event, a sort of Hunger Games-style throw-down in southern Indiana. Not that long to begin with, Donnybrook would’ve been shorter but for the characters needing to stop every few minutes for a scene of brutal, disgusting, almost comically graphic violence, out of which one or two people would emerge to dust off, pop an eye back in its socket, smoke an unfiltered cigarette, and sally forth....

From the communist-nightmare sequence of The Tragedy of Man Even out of context, The Tragedy of Man, a Hungarian animated epic opening tonight at Facets Multimedia, is pretty stunning. In my short review, I compare it to such cult classics as Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet and Ralph Bakshi’s Heavy Traffic; and like those films, it marries artisanal, hand-drawn animation with heady, adult ideas. (If it weren’t nearly three hours long, it would make a great midnight movie....

thursday21 Thursday21 Charles Bradley Low Pak Danilo Perez Friday22 Black Lips Chancha Via Circuito Eleventh Dream Day KEN Mode Danilo Perez TV on the Radio Canceled Saturday23 Jacques Demierre & Vincent Barras Martha’s Vineyard Ferries Steve Ignorant Sunday24 Booker Brown Tuesday26 Wednesday27 Gobble Gobble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » PAK New York multi-instrumentalist and one-man jazz-prog maelstrom Ron Anderson has been leading PAK for more than a decade now, but it’s far from his only project (he recently reactivated the Molecules and has an occasional playdate with his Japanese soulmates Ruins), and even a player of his boundless energy can only juggle so many swords and flaming torches at once....

thursday30 Thursday30 Eric “Guitar” Davis Friday24 NobunnyIke Reilly Assassination Saturday1 Chuck BerryHot Machines Sunday2 CastevetEyegouger, Johnny Vomit Monday3 Extraordinary Popular Delusions Wednesday5 MikadoWeasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, and Peter Evans friday31 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » NOBUNNY When he puts on his scuzzy, sweat-bedraggled rabbit mask, Justin Champlin undergoes a transformation worthy of Bruce Banner—he becomes Nobunny, the demented bandleader at a modern-day bubblegum-punk sock hop, mooning all the Negative Nancys and Debbie Downers of the world....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem is that in urban areas like Chicago composting essentially has to be done at your home. At times there have been a privately run programs, but no system is in place for the large-scale collection of food waste. (It’s a little easier to deal with landscape waste, though collection of that in Chicago is about as erratic as commodities recycling....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago International Film Festival continues through next Thursday, and this week’s issue includes reviews of several new films: Carancho, an Argentinean thriller starring Ricardo Darin (The Secret in Their Eyes); Fair Game, with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame; Hereafter, the latest from Clint Eastwood; The Housemaid, a caustic South Korean thriller by Im Sang-soo (The President’s Last Bang); The Minutemen, a documentary on the eponymous immigration vigilantes; and Trust, with Clive Owen and Catherine Keener as the parents of a girl victimized by an online predator....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At 6:30, the forum’s scheduled start time, challenger Pat Dowell was sitting by herself at the candidates’ table, facing a restless audience of more than 200 people. By 6:40 she was in the lobby conferring with her staff and event organizers. At 6:45 one of the organizers stepped to the podium. “One of the candidates has a conflict and sent a surrogate,” he said....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe I just have my dander up because I’m 3/4 of the way through Robert Caro’s The Power Broker*, and “a strain of graft that gets things done rather than just lining pockets” basically describes the entire second half of the book, but wondering “wouldn’t it be nice if we had a dictatorial mayor… but an awesome one” kind of flies in the face of thousands of years of history and understanding about human nature....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since his departure Haaker Flaten has released music pretty steadily, beginning with The Year of the Boar (Jazzland), from the quintet he formed with Chicagoans Jeff Parker, Frank Rosaly, and Dave Rempis–the fifth member, violinist Ola Kvernberg, was a holdover from the Oslo version of the group. Cut live during a European tour in 2007, it makes clear that Haaker Flaten shares a key quality with his Chicago counterparts–driving, insatiable energy....