Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Described on the menu as “Ishidai, shiso leaf, preserved lemon, heart of palm,” it was a gorgeous cylinder of firm, buttery fish constructed around a vegetal bite of minty shiso, topped with a disc of heart of palm, sea trout roe, and a leaf of red ribbon sorrel. It was expertly paired with a glass of clean, crisp Hakkaisan Junmai Ginjo from Niigata prefecture....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Released in 2003, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has vaulted to the top of the bottom rank, challenging Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 From Outer Space for the title of worst movie ever made and, even more impressive, dislodging the venerable Rocky Horror Picture Show as America’s most popular audience-participation ritual. I’m not about to watch The Room again—ever—so I’ll just quote from my original review: “Wiseau stars as an eerily placid and good-natured banker whose live-in girlfriend is secretly getting it on with his best friend, though the filmmaker often strikes out in different directions, only to bump into the wall and come back....

Gloria Barrios’s search for answers brought her to the gates of Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, on October 3. Her 27-year-old daughter, Blanca Luna, had been found stabbed to death there seven months earlier. Barrios still didn’t know what exactly had happened to her daughter, and the air force had ignored her demands to see the autopsy report, photos, and other evidence in the case. So she’d come to see what she could find out herself....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week I attended a pisco tasting put on by Pisco Control, which is launching its new Control C pisco in the U.S. with a tour called “A Million Rays of Sunshine” (definitely a bastardization of the original quote, though it does sound nice). In attendance was Claudia Olmedo, who literally wrote the book on Chilean pisco: 40 Grados, which covers pisco history, production, styles, and tasting, as well as including a guide to about 30 Chilean piscos, cocktail recipes, and pisco pairings (with both chocolate and cigars)....

On top of 25 tons of smoked pork, this weekend’s Ribfest Chicago also has two stages of rock ‘n’ roll, blues, country, and more. Founded in 1999 as a way for barbecue masters in and around Chicago to compete for the “best ribs” crown, the fest has expanded into a three-day affair, and this year its two stages are sponsored by Bud Light and your friends here at the Reader. Music on Fri 6/8 begins at 5 PM, and the Bud Light Stage (4000 N....

Charlie Habegger is not your casual coffee drinker. An Oakland, California, native who moved to Chicago by way of France, Habegger was “raised by disciples of Peet’s” and from an early age has held a firm belief that coffee is a necessary comfort. That conviction was further cemented when Habegger hopped across the pond, discovered espresso culture, and heard his calling like a whispered siren’s song. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Asian monster movie comes screeching and stomping into the 21st century with this entertaining, culturally loaded popcorn thriller from South Korea. Bubbling through it is a deep resentment of American hubris: years after a complacent U.S. Army surgeon (Scott Wilson) orders poison dumped into the Han River, a giant sea beast comes raging ashore in Seoul, leaving in its wake a virus the U.S. wants to combat with a secret chemical weapon called agent yellow....

Thursday22 Renato Borghetti, Boris MalkovskyThrow Down Your Hammer and Sing Friday23 Terry Adams Rock & Roll QuartetGrant Park Orchestra and ChorusJuana Molina Saturday24 Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusStruck By Lightning Monday26 Bomba EstereoDavid Dondero Tuesday27 Zizek Club Summer Tour Wednesday28 Natacha AtlasEngines Borghetti headlines and Malkovsky opens. 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Michigan and Randolph, 312-742-1168. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THROW DOWN YOUR HAMMER AND SING Jersey City trumpeter Nate Wooley is one of the instrument’s most versatile and daring players....

When Scott Silberstein’s fledgling HMS Media shot a half-hour documentary about River North Chicago Dance Company back in 1993, it was a turning point for both organizations. Initially aired on WTTW, the documentary, Reality of a Dreamer, was picked up for national broadcast by PBS. Suddenly, River North artistic director Frank Chaves recalls, the little four-year-old troupe was on the dance-world map: “Our phones were ringing off the hook, and all the touring started....

Before the main title of Abderrahmane Sissako’s startling new feature appears, an elderly farmer arrives at a hearing that’s being held in a shared backyard in a poor section of Bamako, the capital of Mali. He’s there to testify, but when he steps up to the microphone he’s told politely to remove his hat and wait his turn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s on trial in this backyard court is globalization, particularly the high-interest loans of such organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the pressure they put on governments to cut costs by privatizing or ending social services and firing workers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune transcript has Burris making it clear to the brother of the then-governor: “I’m very much interested in, in trying to replace Obama,” and then fretting about appearances. Burris says, “I’m a high-profile person….I’m trying to figure out how in the hell, and since you called me I will be honest with you….And I’m trying to figure out how to deal with this and still be in the consideration for the appointment…....

Honey Owens has been part of the experimental-music scene in Portland, Oregon, for more than a decade now, but she isn’t too well-known outside it for anything besides her stints in Jackie-O Motherfucker. Blood Is Clean (Kranky), her debut under the name Valet-, could easily change that. She chops quiet drones and blasts of noise into bite-size pieces that owe as much to IDM as they do to burnout blues. The title track perfectly captures Owens’s subtle ferocity: she sings with a creepy sort of sangfroid, like a Stepford wife waxing mystic, as a train whistle blows in the distance and another layer of vocals rises up to ooh along....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Granted, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to be busting down the movie publicist’s door asking who designed Katie’s trousers, but celebrity spottings are still valuable currency for emerging designers. Exciting News: some clothing pieces from the frei spring 2009 collection will be featured in the new movie Katie Holmes is currently filming in New York called “The Extra Man....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m waiting for meta-media-critic Bill Wyman to explain how knowing this makes the world a better place. Or, failing that, for such a vociferous critic of the media’s vapidity and absurdity and the liberal blogosphere’s “intellectual dishonesty,” to get his nose out of John Edwards’s jock and write about politics in some other context. For the record, as an early Edwards supporter I’m sympathetic to people who are pissed that he’d run with this big a skeleton in his closet; if he’d won, he could have put the party’s chances at risk during an important election....

Apparently, Scarface is more than just inspiration for countless tall Ts and dorm-room posters. Brian De Palma’s 1983 gangster epic is the focus of debate at the eleventh installment of the Columbia College Department of Film and Video’s “Cinema Slapdown” series, which takes place this Thursday from 6 to 10 PM. Each slapdown features a screening, followed by a spirited discussion over whether the film was a bold work of cinematic genius or, uh, not a bold work of cinematic genius....

Dr. Egg and the Man with No Ear Redmoon Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Only there’s no embrace of medical technology here. Science is the enemy, as in some of our most enduring horror stories, perhaps most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Though the notion that those who covet the powers of the gods will be horrendously punished predates the birth of the scientific method—consider Icarus....

One night nearly a month ago, Cameron Chapleau and Jaboukie Young-White, college students and roommates, were hanging out in their sparsely furnished apartment in the South Loop doing what they usually do when they’re bored: coming up with names for porno movies. Within an hour, they had three responses. Within a couple of days, they had ten. Some hopefuls sent head shots. Others sent dick shots. One sent dick shots from several angles, a photo of his body with his face blurred out, and a video of himself saying “Yeah, baby!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s ESPN thankful for this holiday season? Not only does the network get to force Tim Tebow and his insufferable hype train down our collective gullets (I’m looking at you Skip Bayless), but thanks to a rash of injured quarterbacks, they’ve again started beating the decomposing corpse that is Brett Favre’s football career. According to what Deadspin labels as the “lamest scoop ever,” Favre would talk to the Bears if they gave him a ring....

You think New Year’s Day is just for black-eyed peas, bad hangovers, and college football? Wrong, dear reader. Fuck a Rose Bowl and turn on your radio instead. Beginning at 8 AM, the dusties experts at V103 (“The Only Station the World Steps To”) are sweetening up the airwaves with sexy sound treats not to be missed. It’s like a restorative booze-binge cure for your ears. Featuring mixes from station staples Maurice “Ice” Culpepper and DJ Eric “ET” Taylor, “Steppin’ Into 2011” will feature 18 consecutive hours of soulful, silky steppers music!...

Last month Jean-Yves Thibaudet was one of the headliners at the Cartagena International Music Festival, offering an outstanding performance of Saint-Saens’s Second Piano Concerto. He gave the dramatic Bach-like opening a bold, rich sound and played the first movement’s lyrical passages soulfully, the virtuosic sections with bravura. And though the piano had a stiff, difficult action, he maintained the necessary lightness of the second movement at an impressively brisk tempo and kept up the speed through the third....