In July the newly merged beer giant MillerCoors announced that it was moving its corporate operations from Milwaukee and Denver to Chicago, which it had narrowly selected over Dallas. Mayor Daley was jubilant. “The company’s decision to locate its headquarters here strengthens our reputation as a world-class city in which to conduct business and confirms that Chicago is a great place to live, work, and raise a family.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

My wife and I chose the SPARKLEHORSE cover of Daniel Johnston’s “Go” as the processional at our wedding. The air trembled with Mark Linkous’s deep whisper, and the majestic pace of the piano measured our steps perfectly. Johnston and Sparklehorse make an excellent match: the band’s White Album sound suits Johnston’s simple songwriting, which owes a lot to the Beatles’ melodic sensibility. Between the 2001 Sparklehorse album It’s a Wonderful Life and its follow-up, last year’s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Capitol), Linkous lent his talents as a producer and writer to Johnston’s Fear Yourself and contributed “Go” to the tribute-album half of the double-CD Johnston set Discovered Covered....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the more bracing qualities about The Swimmer (1968), which I finally saw yesterday at the Music Box, is that the film grants every actor—no matter how famous or how long he or she appears onscreen—a certain gravity normally reserved for movie stars. This adds greatly to the movie’s feeling of unease. Popular films condition us to regard certain characters as important by hinting at the cultural significance of the actors who play them....

Glen Berger has written the anti-Brigadoon. In this sardonic fable about heartsore Scottish tinker Tom and the child (not his) left behind by his one true love, Berger doesn’t truck with wee magic kingdoms. Instead he conjures a sobering world of poverty, despair, and endless grief–a world that still manages to be riotously funny at times. To pass the time until the lad’s mother returns, Tom recounts a long-running saga about the fictional town of Brood, which is filled with eccentrics, among them an agoraphobic lighthouse keeper, a grave-robbing grave digger, and a pair of besotted young lovers....

James Finn Garner, author of Honk Honk, My Darling: A “Rex Koko, Private Clown” Mystery, is keeping abreast of: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Besser’s show, Improv4Humans, features guest stars (like Horatio Sanz and Kevin Dorff) and works like a three-person improv set, even taking suggestions over Twitter. During the football season, Walsh produces The Bear Down Podcast. A labor of love for the fan and homesick actor, the show’s not just for gridiron fans....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gay representation in cinema was at its most immediate during new queer cinema, a term coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in 1992 to define a surging independent film movement centered on gay themes and gay filmmakers. The most politically charged contributions to new queer cinema were directly in step with the poststructuralist ideas surrounding queer theory, particularly in the way they posited sexual and gender divisions as socially relativist and subject to change with cultural shifts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Tuesday the City Council’s finance and police & fire committees held a joint meeting to hear the chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority testify about “the fate of all officers involved in settlement cases of police brutality,” as the resolution calling for the meeting put it. Turns out, nothing is happening to these officers, at least not in a systematic way....

Drugstore Cowboy In this week’s paper J.R. Jones has a review of Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary of William S. Burroughs, the aptly titled Burroughs: The Movie, which is enjoying a brief run at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week. As the review notes, the film has been out of circulation for a while, but Burroughs has been a prominent fixture in film for decades. Though he’s obviously best known as a key member of the Beat literary scene, the writer had plenty of strong ideas about cinema....

Danny Brown is Old. Last week Danny Brown released today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Kush Coma,” on his Soundcloud. It’s a track off of his upcoming LP, Old, which drops in August, and it’s actually not the complete version of the song—the one on the album is set to feature an appearance from A$AP Rocky. The absence of Rocky doesn’t hurt this track in any way, though—Brown is the kind of rapper who can cram ten songs’ worth of personality into one track....

The Most Influential Article the Reader Ever Published “We learned to live with a petty tyranny that brokered black interests to the consistent disadvantage of blacks and prevented coalitions across class and race – blacks were only blacks. Poles were only Poles.” To beat Epton, Harold Washington didn’t need a lot of the white vote, but he needed some, and it wasn’t clear he’d get it. Washington’s race spoke for itself: Epton went after his character....

Tap dance is one of those deceptive “folksy” forms that people sometimes underestimate. But watching a rehearsal by BAM!, founded by CHRP artistic director Lane Alexander, I could see that the rhythms, difficult as they are to produce, aren’t the whole picture: there’s also the aural dynamic of each phrase and all the phrases put together, the movement around the stage, and the dancers’ interaction. As part of “Windy City Rhythms,” a celebration of National Tap Dance Day, BAM!...

Gates of Hades Chicago winter is upon us and we’re back to scraping snow off our cars and wearing winter coats in our practice spaces; it’s not even that cold yet, but my brain has gone into hibernation or some sort of post-holiday food coma . . . and it seems I have a particularly brutal case of writer’s block, so I asked my “special friend” for advice on what to write for this episode of band life....

You know how it is. Day of the Dead rolls around every year and there’s not a stinkbug to be found anywhere in the city. On the following Monday all your friends back home in Guerrero are heading to Taxco for Dia de Jumil, to trudge up the hill and poke under rocks and logs to collect as many jumiles as they can. It’s not just a party you’re missing. It’s been so long since you’ve popped any of the cinnamon-scented, iodine-rich critters that you can feel your thyroid swelling like a balloon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A guest post from Reader contributor David Hammond: In a ten-mile area around Bridgeview, there are more than 70,000 folks of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian descent. To meet growing demand for homeland favorites, this suburb has spawned a range of restaurants, groceries, and bakeries catering to a Middle Eastern clientele. I and a few others recently motored down there to get our kebab on at Al Bawadi Grill....

Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis seems content to stay in the shadow of his famous musical family; although he’s an established producer who’s guided sessions for Jeff “Tain” Watts, Terence Blanchard, and Harry Connick Jr., he’s released only two albums as a leader since his 1992 debut. The recent Minions Dominion (Troubadour Jass), released in September but recorded in 2002, doesn’t offer any real surprises–Marsalis sticks to the 60s postbop model his older brothers found fame with in the 80s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good thing they didn’t have kitchen sinks back in the 18th century, else Gore Verbinski would undoubtedly have thrown one into his latest anthropological investigation of vanished Jolly Roger culture, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Not that Verbinski doesn’t come close, though even with all the desperation flailing, you’d hardly expect an homage to Eric Rohmer (not to mention the alternate Sax–how else to account for Chow Yun-fat‘s anachronistic yellow-peril turn?...

Over the years Mayor Daley has proven to be a master at blaming the city’s budget woes on someone or something other than himself. Usually it’s the federal or state government, but this time around he has an even bigger bogeyman to blame: it’s the economy, stupid. And what does he intend to do about it? Apparently he’s hoping to spend his way out of the doldrums, via the Olympics. “The way out of a recession is infrastructure spending,” he said....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Throughout the Cold War, America negotiated with — and talked to — the Soviet Union and its satellites. When Mao initially took over China, America didn’t come to Taiwan’s aid in the hopes that it could negotiate with him, as it did with Tito. And of course, even despite China’s support of America’s enemies in Korea and Vietnam, Nixon shrewdly reached out to China to play the communist states against one another....

Margaret Morris’s Laying of Hands has the passion of youth and at least some of the wisdom of age. In this accomplished hour-long dance for five, she aims to look at healing, but her starting point is violence. Morris, a 2005 Columbia College grad who received a Chicago Dancemakers Forum grant to create the piece, isn’t afraid to use straightforward movement–and it’s shocking early on when one dancer starts slapping another all over her body, not hard but fast, like swift cracks of a whip....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The result is Forno Rosso Pizzeria Napoletana, the wood-fired pizza restaurant Nitti opened in early July along a northwest-side Italian strip probably best known for the Italian deli Riviera. He’s currently in the process of becoming only the third Neapolitan pizza restaurant in the Chicago area to be certified authentic by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, after Spacca Napoli and (here’s a trivia answer sure to stump the foodies in your life) Parkers’ Restaurant & Bar in Downers Grove....