Julia Thiel Christmas beers (plus Lagunitas Brown Shugga) and winter beers [Update: eight more local Christmas beers] So while there’s no official definition of a Christmas or winter beer, the OCB’s opinion is that they usually use dark malts and often include spices. Which doesn’t explain the existence of light, unspiced wheat beers and IPAs that fall under the winter/Christmas/holiday/celebration beer umbrella. Speaking of that umbrella, even determining what beers fall into the category is dicey....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “After whittling the list to the 10 cities with the highest rankings, pollster Zogby International conducted interviews with adult residents of those cities, asking them to describe the quality of life and the creative atmosphere of their environment. Then, adhering to a perhaps less than entirely scientific methodology, the cities were ranked.” “Although the Big Apple outperformed the Windy City on several criteria (including its number of Community and Housing Awards—received for design excellence in residence building and community planning—and its overall collection of 17 AIA awards for innovative architecture), Peter Schubert, RMJM Hillier design director, says Chicago’s position as a bright-green city tipped the scales....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the day of the shooting at Crane Prep, I noted that it’s had a troubled history over the past couple decades. Today the Sun-Times has outstanding coverage of the incident, noting that the school is a crossroads for students from four housing projects dominated by five different gangs. The fight broke out over a hat adorned with a watch, called a Buck Fifty (in reference to the price, i....

Several of the journalists cast questioning looks at each other. One decided to ask for clarification: Does that mean the mayor would support an ordinance like this? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Granted, all but about a half hour of the two-hour council meeting had been taken up by speeches honoring local Olympic athletes and the heroic deeds of police officers and firefighters, with the last 30 minutes reserved for aye votes on bonds, zoning amendments, traffic regulations, and the like....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I mean, we’re two weeks into this [current menu],” he explains. “We’re going to start the dialogue—Chef [Achatz] is out of town, Nick [Kokonas] is starting the outline right now. We all have our ideas, and none of our ideas are the same. I think I’m the only one without any ideas.” “I had a good run with it,” Beran says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marisa Monte will turn 45 this summer, and she’s nearly alone among singers her age in that she’s not merely a nostalgia act—the durability, adventurousness, and sophistication of her music make her one of Brazil’s greatest artists of the past two decades. Last week Blue Note released O Que Você Quer Saber de Verdade, her first new album in six years (she released two excellent albums simultaneously in 2006) and her eighth overall, ninth if you count her collaboration with Carlinhos Brown and Arnaldo Antunes, Tribalistas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Sula has witnessed slaughter before (and not just that of squirrels). Four years ago, near the conclusion of the Reader‘s Whole Hog Project, he transported three restive mulefoot pigs to a small-scale slaughterhouse, where they were treated “with as much care and respect as possible under the circumstances,” he writes. For this week’s Food & Drink column he joined Rob Levitt of the Butcher & Larder on a trip up to Bare Knuckle Farm, in northern Michigan, where they’d witness farmer Jess Piskor shoot a pig and assist him in butchering it....

The world is full of maestros and their muses, but one Chicago couple puts a new spin on the time-honored pairing by taking turns at both roles: they inspire and aid each other in a continuous loop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They approach each project from very different perspectives. “She comes from the creative role of dreaming things up. I come from the practical side of the process—making it,” says Dunham with a laugh....

Constellation is off to a fantastic start—though I don’t know that anyone expected otherwise of a partnership between venerable performing-arts facility Links Hall and Pitchfork Music Festival producer Mike Reed, who’s also longtime coprogrammer of the Hungry Brain’s Sunday Transmission series. Since opening its doors in April the venue has hosted a superb array of cutting-­edge jazz, experimental, pop, and contemporary classical music (Reader writer Peter Margasak programs some of the latter), as well as adventurous dancers and performers such as Ayako Kato and Going Dutch....

Michael Gebert Kevin Hickey at the Duck Inn One of the things that was most striking about a preview event a couple of weeks ago at Kevin Hickey’s the Duck Inn in Bridgeport was simply that everyone wasn’t 28 years old. That’s rare for preview events, and no doubt rare for Rockit Ranch, the restaurant group headed by media personality Billy Dec, which has mainly opened busy bars in River North (including Bottlefork, which Hickey initially consulted on)....

Big-kid Legos For the still-toy-obsessed man-child on your shopping list, the local deviants behind Citizen Brick offer a custom-printed Lego building set replicating the strip club experience. As a disclaimer on its website states, Citizen Brick isn’t affiliated with the Lego brand; the creations are merely built out of the same familiar blocks and designed for those yellow humanlike creatures to get seriously weird in. While they sell minifigures (“Da Coach” is obviously Ditka) and accessories (a bong labeled “paraphernalia”), the Center for the Performing Arts set comes with four figures (three of which are scantily clad), a stage with a stripper pole, and a DJ booth, among other things, and it’s rigged with working LED lights....

The last time the TIF-funded deal at Montrose and Clarendon reared its ugly not-so-little head was on a sweltering day in June, when everyone involved would have been better off watching the NBA finals. Well guess what? The foreseeable future is now the past. The deal is back. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d love to tell you Alderman Cappleman’s take on the miraculous revival of this plan, but after I called his office I wound up talking to Tressa Feher, his chief of staff....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My column this week begins with a visit to an el station where a guy paid $200 a week by the Tribune hands out copies of RedEye from 6 to 10 AM. He told me he gives away a few hundred every day, while “seven or eight” people pass him carrying the Sun-Times. I happened to go by his station one evening this week, and apparently he hadn’t made it to work that morning — sealed bundles of RedEye sat in a stack by the station door....

The bakers across the counter from me rolled their cracker dough into perfect squares. Mine looked like somebody had thrown up shoe leather. Cracker The first cracker dough I learned was lean and simple: flour, salt, fennel, and water, rolled thin and baked hot. By a series of improbable events I’d wound up a pastry assistant at Cue, a restaurant in Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. I had no experience, so the first assignments were tedious....

September War Is Only Half the Story: The Aftermath Project Photos by Kathryn Cook, Paula Luttringer, Asim Rafiqui, and Andrew Stanbridge aThrough 1/9: Mon-Fri 9-5, Roosevelt Univ. Gage Gallery, 18 S. Michigan. 312-341-6458. Finding Beauty Paintings and drawings by Lee Godie, who sold her work on the streets of downtown Chicago from 1968 to 1992. aThrough 1/3: Tue-Sat 11-5 (Thu till 7:30). Those with a painting by or a story about Godie are invited to share it at 3 PM; reception 5-8 PM....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s Food & Drink, Mike Sula reviews Storefront Company, a newish contemporary American restaurant in the Flat Iron Arts Building, where chef Bryan Moscatello has been given free rein under the motto “farm cuisine, modern cooking.” What might that amount to? A whole lot of farm-sourced canapes and small plates, for one, from foie gras bombes to “The Whole Hog,” a $28 tray of bites like cornflake-crusted fried pork liver paired with a finger of breakfast sausage, pork loin on Japanese eggplant, and a crepe stuffed with shredded rib meat and offal....

Babylon A.D. TK Different as they are in tone and execution (Children of Men is an art-house number chockablock with topflight acting talent like Julianne Moore and Michael Caine, Babylon A.D. is a Vin Diesel vehicle full of ho-hum pyrotechnics and CGI-enhanced derring-do), they’ve indeed got more in common than art direction conforming to industry standards set by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner over a quarter century ago. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Well, I am under 30. And I am overwhelmingly self-absorbed, narcissistic, and juvenile. So he’s got me dead to rights there. But, being narcissistic, I also don’t think I lack the intellectual wherewithal to challenge Lazare: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which would be… what’s the word… dumb. Unless you wanted to get out of covering advertising. Is this a cry for help?...

Back when the daily papers of our great cities went at it tusk on tusk as the trees shook and the earth bounced, the squabbles of the mites in the grassroots were scarcely worth anyone’s notice. But the world’s changed, and the mastodons aren’t nearly so frisky. Ron Roenigk, publisher of the Inside-Booster, has never had a pot to piss in; Patrick Boylan describes his wellesparkbulldog.com as an “effort of love” requiring him and his wife to take freelance assignments to get by....

The Chef: Andres Padilla (Topolobampo) The Challenger: Carl Shelton (Boka) The red, fleshy comb that sits atop a rooster’s head is used in the mating process (to indicate health to the female) and to cool the rooster when it’s hot out; blood circulates through the comb and wattles to help the bird lose heat. What it’s not often used for is eating—at least in this country. Cock’s combs have traditionally been served as a garnish in France, and they’re a main ingredient in finanziera, a winter stew that’s a specialty of the Piedmont region of Italy (its ingredients also include rooster testicles and wattles, as well as veal sweetbreads, marsala, and vegetables)....