Glammy garage A little more a year ago the Smith Westerns dropped their self-titled debut album on HoZac, a mix of straight-ahead garage rock and swoony, slightly fey stoner pop that sounded like T. Rex reincarnated as a lo-fi basement band fronted by a snotty teenager—basically they’d replaced Marc Bolan’s space-wizard trippiness with brash adolescent energy. Six months later another local band, Mickey, put out a single on HoZac that fused the confrontational punk of the Functional Blackouts (the previous group of front man Mark McKenzie) with the swaggering bubblegum of the Sweet (the band you might know from “Ballroom Blitz” or a ton of even better songs)....

The “blogging nerds” of Blerds.com–a collective of 12 Chicago-based comedians and video maker Jordan Vogt-Roberts–include some of the city’s craftiest stand-ups, and tonight’s lineup provides an excellent cross section of the group. Pat Brice is like a fledgling rock singer: he can be rough around the edges, but when he gains control of his delivery, the payoff is worth the awkwardness. Sean Flannery’s straight-man looks belie his biting sarcasm. C.J. Sullivan, one of the most consistently funny locals, likes to skewer idiots and drunks–and himself....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Don Jon, his debut feature as writer-director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt ponders one of the oldest questions in movies: How do you convey habitual action on film? Moving images are naturally suited for the present tense, though soon after their invention filmmakers developed ways to speak in past tense: flashbacks, or superimpositions that visualize a character’s memories. Alain Resnais innovated a “future conditional” tense for movies in such works as La Guerre est Finie (1966), illustrating what might happen based on characters’ speculations....

No complaints from yours truly about annual year-end lists: for “best” films (though actually I’d call ’em “favorites”: like, what do I know about best?–no personalized access to “absolute” levels of excellence, whatever that implies, no internal database that even remotely approximates the many, many options available), books, the arts, whatever … even pop music, which I know next to nothing about: viva Monica, Jessica, Peter, Miles, et al. So it’s more a matter of sponging up what intrepid writers throw out there, comparing notes and following connotative leads, or sometimes just plain dissing (“Omigod no, he can’t be listing that!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jackson got his start as a musician back in 1929, playing with the great barrelhouse pianist Albert Ammons, and over the decades he played with Jimmie Noone, Roy Eldridge, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Benny Carter, James P. Johnson, and many others too numerous to mention. His career was nearly 80 years long, but he didn’t make many records under his own name in that time–his last, I Is What I Is, was released in 2005 by Pinnacle....

Good authors can not only set a scene anywhere (in the wake of a tornado, on the top of Mount Olympus) but also intrigue readers wherever they happen to be—which is why there’s one quintessential bathroom book in the roundup that follows. What further binds this group is that they’re Chicagoans—or, in the case of Kate Southwood, a Chicago-born expat who created a fictional world in southern Illinois all the way from her adopted home: Oslo, Norway....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The stage is decorated with Billy Connolly’s trademark image of himself as Leonardo da Vinci’s ideal man, so it’s a bit of a shock when he shows up, wearing the same striped jester’s pants as in the image but looking so . . . old. At 68, the Scottish comic has earned his sags, creaks, and unruly nose hairs and embraces them with a great, profane glee....

The Chef: Meg Colleran Sahs (Terzo Piano) The Challenger: Sarah Grueneberg (Spiaggia) The Ingredient: Colatura Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Anchovies have a lot of oil, so that oiliness creates a lot of flavor. I think that really comes through in the anchovy sauce,” chef Meg Colleran Sahs said. It’s similar to the fish sauce that many people are familiar with from Asian cuisine, but milder and more complex in flavor, according to Sahs....

This month’s issue of Chicago Magazine highlights six big ideas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Great big ideas have been foisted on Chicago every so often. Some worked well (reversing the Chicago River, Daniel Burnham’s city planning) and some not so well (most of what the Chicago Housing Authority did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s; Groupon). Lately, tackling big ideas in new and unexpected ways has become a profession in the city....

[Plus: The Regional Taqueria: Fifteen recommended storefronts] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many people make the mistake of thinking that flour-tortilla-bundled burritos are a Tex-Mex or Californian phenomenon. But the burrito originated in Chihuahua, where, as in much of northern Mexico, Spanish colonialists introduced cattle ranching and wheat crops, and flour tortillas came to enjoy almost as much popularity as those made from corn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » September 1993, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s a shimmering Indian summer Sunday afternoon and I’m walking alone across the Schenley Park Bridge, above what readers of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh will recognize as the Cloud Factory. I’ve just left a writers’ conference at the University of Pittsburgh where literary lions like Tobias Wolfe and Joyce Carol Oates have held forth, and I’m headed for WRCT at Carnegie Mellon University to talk about it on a friend’s radio magazine....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Photographer Gerry Edwards was denied unemployment benefits at a March hearing; he’d been fired in December by KGAN TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after another photographer sent his bosses a picture of him urinating behind a cemetery monument while he waited to cover an army funeral. According to the Des Moines Register, Edwards maintained he’d behaved appropriately: “If I went in my pants, that would be really unprofessional....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We won’t know about the White Sox until Monday’s season opener, but manager Ozzie Guillen returned in midseason form when his team worked out at White Sox Park Sunday. In spite of the Sox’ major-league-worst 10-22 record in exhibitions this spring, Guillen maintained he didn’t call the workout for the players — “My guys don’t need this,” he said — but for the media, “the great Chicago media....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know the tempting reaction is total revulsion, but Jane Hirt clearly isn’t as stupid (or as behind the curve) as cover stories on dudes who shave below the neck would suggest. As I’ve argued before, RedEye is structurally brilliant–it’s an actual, total commuter paper, not just a daily newspaper that’s convenient to handle on the bus. It’s a true structural innovation that will only seem more revolutionary over time....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “This is a chance for the city to strut its stuff on a world stage” is probably something that somebody once said with reference to Chicago’s failed bid to host the 2016 Olympics, but now here, in Crain’s Chicago Business, is a representative of something called Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc. saying it about Plan B (or Plan C, maybe, since the G8 bailed): NATO!...

Courtesy of Crying’s Facebook page Crying (the band) On Saturday Bottom Lounge showcases a great array of groups who play fourth-wave emo, pop-punk, and, um, chiptune. Well, Crying is the only band on the bill that plays chiptune—the New York state three-piece cuts their sharp, occasionally prickly video-game synths with robust pop-punk guitars and sullen vocals that fit right in with emo’s second and fourth waves. Next week Crying drops a full-length compilation, Get Olde/Second Wind, on primo Boston indie label Run For Cover....

John Logan made his bones in Chicago during the mid-1980s, with two plays about sensational real-life crimes—a Leopold-and-Loeb drama, Never the Sinner, and Hauptmann, which looks at the case against convicted Lindbergh baby-napper Bruno Hauptmann. A decade later Logan was in Hollywood, beginning a career that would have him writing movies like Any Given Sunday and The Aviator for directors like Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The sci-fi thriller Sunshine reunites versatile British director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Millions) with screenwriter Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald, both of whom last collaborated with him on 28 Days Later . . . . That film was one of those lucky instances when a gifted filmmaker comes to a genre fresh and brings to it such powerful ideas that he leaves his thumbprint (as Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining)....

Mary Zimmerman was drawing heat for her stage version of The Jungle Book even before it hit the Goodman Theatre stage. First off, Chicago magazine’s Catey Sullivan noted that the material in the show derives originally from a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling, the Victorian-era Nobel laureate anathematized now as a leading apologist for Western imperialism and its racist underpinnings. Worse, Zimmerman’s more immediate source is Disney’s 1967 animated Jungle Book, which some consider racist in its own right—exhibit A being “I Want to Be Like You,” a jazzy number sung by a bunch of apes, including an orangutan named King Louie, whose style veers uncomfortably close to that of Louis Armstrong (though the voice on the soundtrack actually belongs to Italian-American Louis Prima)....

Noah Haidle is the current king of theatrical quirk, having taken the title fair and square from his former playwriting teacher Christopher Durang. Haidle’s 2005 Rag and Bone concerns brothers who develop a trade in human hearts: they steal the cardiac muscles of sensitive people—a pediatrician who loves kids, a public defender who takes on the neediest clients, a poet—and sell them to the rich and emotionally numb. In Vigils, which premiered at Goodman Theatre in 2006, a widow keeps her dead husband’s soul in the hope chest beside her bed....