Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My favorite thing about The World’s End, which opened in wide release on Friday, is how it seems to be engineered for multiple viewings. A little over halfway into the film, I realized that the name of each bar the main characters visit alludes to some event that occurs there. (I won’t provide any examples here so as not to spoil the fun for readers who haven’t seen the movie....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back when I was cutting my teeth on American auteurs, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) was probably the film that confused me most. I’d seen just about everything in Budd Boetticher‘s celebrated Ranown cycle, the series of low-budget westerns with Randolph Scott on which his reputation largely rests, and didn’t quite know what to make of this anomalous black-and-white gangster melodrama....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve enjoyed a lot of the music that Bay Area group Xiu Xiu has made over the years, though “enjoy” might not be the appropriate verb. Group leader Jamie Stewart has always seemed intent on making you uncomfortable—he uses dissonant arrangements and harsh textures, ugly and unexpurgated subject matter, and a vocal style that often suggests someone hysterical and distraught caterwauling from a skyscraper window ledge....

Electronic musician Rjyan Kidwell began his career under the name Cex, delivering a wild combination of stream-of-consciousness rap and experimental dance music to an early-aughts audience that was in the midst of an infatuation with the edgy club-oriented sounds gathered under the umbrella term “electroclash.” But following his first blush of fame he began exploring far more esoteric methods and philosophies that are considerably less compatible with partying. His new album, Prosperity (released through his longtime label home Tigerbeat6), comes with a lengthy manifesto about the nature of indie fame in the Pitchfork era and its relation to the ongoing global economic meltdown....

Local “pop-up” barbecue operation Brimstone BBQ, run by Arman Mabry and Mike Tsoulos of the band Rabid Rabbit and their friend Stacey Egan, has been active since March 2012, turning up at the Hideout, Star Lounge, and the Continental, among other places. I’ve been a fan of Mabry’s backyard barbecuing for more than ten years—we were in a band together in 2001—so when I heard he’d scaled up, I had to check it out....

Tired of huge rooms full of grubby layabouts sitting on color-clashing vintage furniture gazing into MacBook Matrix portals? Not to mention establishments that serve overpriced, muddy coffee to said layabouts and let them sit there all day? The first indication that Wicker Park’s cozy Caffé Streets is nothing like those others is its obvious emphasis on design, with cleverly carved, oblong shapes mounted to the ceiling. The patterned wood is replicated in its boxy booths, stools, and tables, all of which create clean and symmetrical lines....

Season of Concern 312-332-0518 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May 1985, the Biscotto-Miller Fund was launched with a benefit performance, Arts Against AIDS (which I coproduced) at Second City. Named for stage manager Tom Biscotto and actor J. Pat Miller—whose deaths had driven home AIDS’s terrible implications for the local theater community—the fund’s purpose was to get money for medical care, food, housing, and other basic needs to Chicago theater artists with the disease....

At any time of the day or night, Bob Seger is playing on a radio station somewhere in the continental United States. In Chicago, I once heard “Night Moves” three times in the span of one hour. Whether it’s on the airwaves—where you’re almost as likely to find “The Fire Down Below,” “Hollywood Nights,” or “Against the Wind“—or in more than a decade’s worth of Chevy commercials (“Like a Rock“) or, thanks to Risky Business, in pretty much every scene anywhere that involves somebody dancing around a living room in his underwear (“Old Time Rock and Roll“), Bob Seger is an inescapable part of the pop cultural landscape....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Writing about another Brown program for the Reader several years ago, Fred Camper praised Confederation Park, “a pastiche of places across Canada where Brown has lived” as a “reflective, even somber film . . . [whose] real subject is the limits of knowledge.” On a similar note, Memorial Land depicts roughly a dozen people who have constructed monuments to the victims of September 11, 2001 (most of them with their own money) but seems to be getting at something more abstract....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you haven’t read it, you’re the last one in Chicago . . . it being Chandra Ram’s epic account of the opening and early days of arguably our most influential modern restaurant, Blackbird, at Plate Online. My favorite bit (which I had heard before but has always been kind of kept quiet) is that back in 1998 the restaurant was nearly given the hilariously new wave-y name Menue (see, it’s like menu, and new!...

This sixth annual monthlong event, sponsored by the Instituto Cervantes, is flooding the city with talent from Spain and elsewhere. At 7:30 PM on Thursday, February 1, dancer David Perez Almagro–the 22-year-old winner of the 2006 Young Flamenco of Andalucia Prize–performs at the Cultural Center with an expert singer, guitarist, and second dancer from El Cante de las Minas, in La Union, Spain. In a preview Almagro demonstrated admirable control and attention to detail, then at the end of the hour broke into some of the most joyful, abandoned dancing I’ve seen....

Corporate burrito slingers Chipotle host the first Cultivate Festival—”a celebration of where food comes from and the people who make it”—in Lincoln Park on Sat 10/1. Music begins at 12:15 PM, and the impressive daylong lineup, headliner first, is Calexico, Mayer Hawthorne & the County, White Rabbits, the Rural Alberta Advantage, and the Cave Singers. Much of the fest (two tents’ worth!) is dedicated to presentations by accomplished chefs, including Michael Chiarello and Amanda Freitag of Food Network fame and local culinary heroes like Paul Kahan (Blackbird, Big Star), Paul Virant (Vie), and Tony Mantuano (Spiaggia)....

Hip-hop isn’t a genre many people associate with austere beauty and ominous tranquility, but Dalek’s brand-new fourth album, Abandoned Language (Ipecac), positively glistens with both. On Absence and From the Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots the group seemed driven by a sort of restless and ravenous need to absorb as many compelling sounds as possible–most notably distorted guitars, massed into gritty clouds or luminous choruses–and then spit them back out in a dizzying array of recombined shapes....

The copyright page of Evan Mandery’s first novel, Dreaming of Gwen Stefani (Ig Publishing), lists the following Library of Congress categories: 1. College dropouts. 2. Cookery (Frankfurters). 3. Stefani, Gwen, 1969. To which could reasonably be added: 4. Life, the meaning of. The college dropout and dreamer of Gwen Stefani is Mortimer Taylor Coleridge, an exceptionally skilled veteran hot dog slinger at a fictional famed NYC wiener joint called Papaya Queen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » State law may not require that Rod Blagojevich step down when he hasn’t been convicted of anything–or even when he has–but the pressure on him to do so is already soaring. Every politician who can get anybody to listen has called on him to quit, starting with his lieutenant governor, Pat Quinn. Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, who so recently was campaigning for the early release of our last governor-turned-convict, asked state legislative leaders to remove the governor’s power to fill the Senate seat, and they said they’ll comply....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently spoke to Tom Balanoff, president of the union’s Illinois state council, about the congressional campaign, Chicago’s rookie aldermen, and the union’s relationship with the always looming figure of Richard M. Daley. MD: So you essentially want to take the 2007 Chicago model and apply it to Congress? You’re solidly behind Barack Obama, but his health care plan has been criticized for not being universal....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » • Striking fear in one’s heart: The Food Network announced that it will tape the first-ever Food Network Awards on February 23 at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival for airing in April. Emeril will be the MC (of course) and all the other regulars of the Food Network fambly will also be presenters. Presenters of what, though?...

Whenever I find myself wondering why the restaurant industry in a polyethnic city such as ours doesn’t serve a particular population—where are all the Maltese eating anyway?—I’m usually forgetting about the caterers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month, on the second and final afternoon of the Custer’s Last Stand arts festival in Evanston, Chris and Jane Reed had run out of chicken and pork satay, the peanut-sauced meat skewers common all over southeast Asia....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In late September Vibe reported that Top Dawg Entertainment—aka the home of Kendrick Lamar and his Black Hippy cohorts Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock—signed Tennessee rapper Isaiah Rashad. Rumors that Rashad had inked a deal with TDE began circulating online over the summer, and occasionally I’d stumble upon blog posts that fed into the hype around the MC and the supposed deal without shedding much light on the actual guy—Pigeons & Planes, for example, published a bare-bones slideshow that didn’t go much deeper than mentioning his social network accounts and music taste....

Though this Kinshasa-based ensemble has released an album called Congotronics (Crammed Discs), its link to electronic music is tenuous at best. Konono No. 1’s songs are as good as any techno for nonstop dancing, but they’re rooted in Bazombo tribal tradition. The band, formed nearly 30 years ago, shouts call-and-response chants over galloping rhythms played on drums, hubcaps, handheld percussion, and three thumb pianos locally called likembes. Only the Hendrixian distortion on the likembes–the by-product of a homemade amplification system that incorporates salvaged car parts–sounds at all electronic....