“To me, a terrorist is one who attempts to create malleable fear in a population through random acts of mayhem; someone who uses his own amoral unpredictability to magnify the power he is attempting to exert in an effort to create change. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Someone who bombs an abortion clinic or animal-research facility, say, in the middle of the night is not a terrorist, by this definition, because the purpose is not to prompt employees or clients to fear for their safety....

I’ve been championing this Minnesota band ever since they first crept onto the folk-rock scene–back when front man Ryan Pfeiffer claimed his songs were actually written by a mythical Captain Jack Yonder–and they’ve only gotten better since. Their new fourth album, Good-Bye, Woland! (Strange Midge), was recorded in Tucson with Craig Schumacher, whose resume–Calexico, Robyn Hitchcock, Iron & Wine, Neko Case–also happens to make for a good recommended-if-you-like list. Good-Bye is another collection of sleek, delicate, string-laden songs with grim and ghostly imagery that at times is laid on a bit thick: “Ode to a Trucker 9” feels like “Ghost Riders in the Sky” played by a stoned Handsome Family....

Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen traveled the unlikeliest of paths to form the unlikeliest of acts—the first and only black and white comedy team in the history of show business. They agreed it wasn’t a bad idea, and it wasn’t long before the duo was performing around Chicago, then all over the country. In Playboy clubs and prisons, in restaurants and nightclubs, in jazz clubs and on the chitlin’ circuit. With their fresh take on race relations, they thought—no, they knew—they were going to make it big....

Visual Art Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Greenleaf Art Center GAC, a vast, sky-lit warren of artists’ studios, also offers programs, exhibits, and classes for the public. Its main gallery is its concourse, a 170-foot-long hallway flanked by 40 private studios. It also contains a communal studio, classrooms, and a small commercial print shop. Denis and Kathleen Paluch started the center in 1990 in a building across the street....

Ethan Iverson, best known as a founding member of the pomo trio the Bad Plus, is not only one hell of a pianist but one of the most lucid, thoughtful, and studious jazz writers on the planet. He has a knack for making egghead obsession and technical analysis clear, interesting, enlightening, even entertaining. Through his excellent blog, Do the Math, he’s offered in-depth interviews with some of jazz’s most important living practitioners as well as probing essays that get to the heart of some of the music’s most dynamic artists....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you can see by the above photo, my workspace is a disaster area. It is the downtown Detroit of workspaces. I’m currently working on imposing some desktop order, which means doing something about the many unorganized piles of CDs all over the place. Which means listening to a lot of CDs–because unless it’s, say, something as dire-looking as a collection of Disney Christmas songs, I give every promo disc I get at least a cursory spin....

No, “Cover Band” isn’t a Led Zep tribute concert. In celebration of the Chicago Moving Company’s 40th anniversary, founder and artistic director Nana Shineflug asked five Chicago choreographers to put their own spins—no restrictions—on five of her works. Matthew Hollis (aka “Mattrick Swayze”) chose Shineflug’s 1992 Nancy in the Dustpan, an autobiographical solo about romantic illusions. He changed only about four lines of Shineflug’s extensive text, he says—replacing her Buddhist chant, for instance, with his own mantra about push-ups....

A local arts activist threw his hat in the ring for the job of head honcho at the National Endowment for the Arts last week. Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Barbara Gaines, perhaps? Jazz trumpeter Orbert Davis? No—the candidate is Michael Dorf, an attorney with degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia University’s law school who got his start on the staff of Representative Sidney Yates 30 years ago, when Yates chaired the House appropriations subcommittee....

The Pot Problem During our appropriations hearings, Senator Grotberg held the agency’s budget captive, going over all travel expenses for the year trying (unsuccessfully) to find some unnecessary or extravagant spending. (This caused the Committee Chairman to joke, “What? Another fun-filled weekend in Des Moines?”) Finally I was able to get the necessary federal agencies to not only approve a research project, but to provide the marijuana. I flew to Washington and picked up a silver canister labeled “400 Marijuana Cigarettes/U....

A shot from Beyonce’s debut film, Life Is but a Dream Earlier this week HBO released the trailer for pop singer Beyonce’s upcoming directorial debut, Life Is but a Dream, a documentary about her life and career. While the release of a new movie trailer isn’t generally something to get excited about, this particular trailer represents the arrival of a film that’s a complete product of its day and age—something unique to an era in which daily life is slowly but surely moving away from a physical reality and closer toward a digital, image-based reality....

It’s old but welcome news that former Goose Island “innovation brewer” John Laffler and former Two Brothers brewer Dave Bleitner are launching an operation of their own called Off Color Brewing. They’ve been scheming since 2009, and in late February they finally assembled their 20-barrel brew house in a warehouse space near Armitage and Pulaski. Laffler and Bleitner hope to install fermentation tanks late this month and begin filling kegs by the end of April, and they’ll be bottling two year-round beers in four- and six-packs of 12-ounce bottles....

Earlier this month at the Metropolitan Planning Council’s big annual luncheon at the Hyatt Regency, Americas at Google president and keynote speaker Margo Georgiadis (former COO of Groupon) said the Google of the future will be an indispensable personal assistant, not only answering our questions, but anticipating them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daniel Burnham’s plan for Chicago is the one that laid out the gorgeous part of our Paris on the Prairie....

Correction: The original version of our Best Bet item on “Afterimage” omitted and confused information relating to the main exhibit and its three satellite shows. In the Imagist spirit, the exhibits highlight links between high and low art, comic books and tchotchkes, as well as the aesthetics of heterogeneous agglomeration. But they also emphasize a great gift the Imagists gave Chicago: a vision of art as the product not of isolated genius but of communities—friends and colleagues, the dead and living, curators, artists, and everyone else—creating a joyful mess together....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to cofounder Jeffrey Vander Clute, quoted in an announcement from the Reynolds Institute, “CircLabs has planned a suite of services, this first of which is code-named Circulate. Software development on Circulate is underway, and we anticipate launching the service during the second half of this year.” The announcement, citing Vander Clute, says “CircLabs is engaged in conversations with a variety of potential strategic partners....

Curious Theatre Branch sends audiences to the outermost orbit of the Chicago fringe yet again with its 24th annual Rhinofest. Convening at Prop Thtr, the monthlong event offers 32 shows by new and established experimentalists. Here are some highlights: Curious previews some of this year’s entries at an opening gala, Full Moon Vaudeville (Sat 1/12, 8 PM); then the festivities kick off in earnest starting January 18. Opening-night attractions include The Carter Family Family Show (1/18-2/15: Fri 7 PM)—the Neo-Futurists’ three-part portrait of a country-music dynasty—and a double bill from Sweetback Productions, pairing R....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In any case, what’s got me going is Andrew Tracy’s take-no-prisoners assault (in the winter issue of Cinema Scope magazine) on what he calls “the mostly uncritical canonization of The Departed” and, more important, of its fulsomely lionized director. “Do we really need Martin Scorsese?” is Tracy’s first shot across the bow: “Good filmmakers naturally inspire proprietary feelings, but Scorsese has become less a going concern than a public trust....

Q I’m from the other side of the country, but I’m sitting in my lover’s San Francisco apartment wondering what I’m doing. I flew out here to spend five glorious days with her. We connect sexually (she’s a dom stone-butch top, I’m a queer femme sub), we connect intellectually, and we make each other laugh. I’m head over heels for her and for this city. AStart with the cliches—”Age is just a number,” “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” “Someone’s gotta change your diapers”—and finish with a grace note: You love her, and you want to be with her, and you hope you’ll always be close, whatever she ultimately decides....

Although his older half brother Femi has been widely celebrated as the heir to Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s mighty throne, 25-year-old Seun actually seems better equipped for the job. Femi softened Afrobeat’s hard edges, polishing the arrangements and cutting the jams to radio-friendly size, but Seun keeps the music raw. He looks uncannily like his father–shirtless, lithe muscles rippling on his lean frame, he commands the stage with a frenetic energy–and he sings in gruff voice as deep as his dad’s....

Eric Prahl’s Transformers take up about half of his guest room—and that’s only some of them. A good part of the collection, which he estimates tops 1,000 Transformers, he still keeps in a closet. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he and his wife moved in together, Prahl says, she suggested that he display more of them in different places in the house. But he doesn’t want to end up like Steve Carell’s character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, so he has a rule: “They have one place and they don’t go outside that room....

Oprah Winfrey loves the turkey burgers at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago restaurant in Palm Beach and thinks everyone should “experience” them. So last week Lo, a blogger whose pseudonym is an acronym that stands for Living Oprah, spent an evening sauteing Granny Smith apples, fresh parsley, and celery and blending the mixture with $28 worth of organic turkey meat. “Usually our dinners take about 30 minutes to make,” she says. This one took three hours....