Late last month, with nonprofit endowments down by a third or more, donors despondent over their own losses, and ticket sales starting to go soft, more than 400 arts administrators gathered in GAR Hall at the Cultural Center for a meeting intended to steady their nerves. In a follow-up panel, Collaboraction’s Anthony Moseley declared that “it’s time to dissolve the imaginary line between business and the arts.” Collaboraction, with a $500,000 annual budget, made $13,000 on corporate parties and events in the second half of last year, he said....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s column I come down pretty hard on the Tribune, not an unusual thing for me to be doing. Sometimes I wonder if I have a lifelong animus against the Tribune that goes back to the days when I was a dashing young reporter at the Sun-Times and we were certain we had it all over the fusty old Tribune when it came to street smarts, imagination, panache, and getting high on the pure adrenaline rush of knocking your socks off with a story....

Broad lawns. Fine old homes. Children who go into the world and make their mark. It sounds like either heaven or satire. Or like Kirkwood, Missouri, my hometown. An old friend who’s lived all his life in the Saint Louis area but never in Kirkwood cast a cold eye on my hometown. “Not only is the last strand of Kirkwood’s leafy innocence destroyed, but I have the sense that this case will eventually rock the foundation of all suburban white America....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Editor-at-large Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher observes that troubled companies such as the Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group have decided to stop filing those arcane but revealing financial reports such as the SC 13D and the 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s a trend Fitzgerald doesn’t like much, but he expects it to continue....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But any credit Salon deserved for publishing real reporting instead of a hatchet job or a swoon got drastically diminished when some errant editor described the early Obama as “uppity” in the story’s subhead. (That racially charged adjective has since been changed to “smug.”) McClelland on 2000: “I got my first sight of Obama early that winter, at a church in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ethio-jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke returned to action recently with the release of Sketches of Ethiopia (Jazz Village), an impressive outing—cut with some of London’s best improvisers—that embraces “jazz” as more than just flavoring. It’s his first album with international distribution. His backing band here is dubbed the Steps Ahead Band, which thankfully has nothing to do with Michael Brecker’s fusion band of the same name—this one includes folks like bassist John Edwards, trumpeter Byron Wallen, and pianist Alexander Hawkins....

It’s a pretty packed weekend for shows and, as Miles Raymer wrote yesterday, Sunday offers a particularly strong list of options—the Lemonheads, People’s Temple, and Loudness. But if for some reason none of those bands strikes your fancy, I’d suggest heading to Ultra Lounge to check out Son Step, an experimental Philly indie foursome that’s so keen on using complex polyrhythm percussion arrangements it gives some of the band’s songs a shot of postpunk adrenaline....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve all been lucky. It’s not only the divine we find necessary if we’re to live in a state of something better than hopeless consternation. To make sense of the world, we need to feel on top of things. We need to think we know what’s going on. We need reliable sources of certified truth. And we’ve had them....

It’s a remix Last weekend Atlanta rapper and Outkast member Big Boi posted a remix of Frank Ocean’s “Pink Matter” on his Soundcloud page. The track first appeared on the R&B crooner’s excellent Channel Orange, and the original includes a contribution from Big Boi’s beloved old rap buddy, Andre 3000; the two haven’t made a proper Outkast album since 2006’s Idlewild soundtrack. And because both members of Outkast appear on Big Boi’s “Pink Matter” remix, many folks cast it as a kinda-sorta Outkast reunion, much to Andre’s chagrin....

Rad Chic-A-Go-Go hostess and Tiny Bones drummer Mia Park is one of Chicago’s sweetest, perkiest rock ‘n’ roll citizens. She’s so sweet it makes Gossip Wolf’s big teeth hurt. So who better to represent Santa to millions of Americans for Sears stores nationwide? Miss Mia has already passed initial auditions and is currently one of the most viewed entrants in the chain’s “Be the Santa” contest website. If she makes it as a finalist, she could be chosen as one of five Santas to be paid $50,000 and featured prominently in Sears holiday ad campaigns....

Back in 2010, when Gossip Wolf first covered Shame That Tune—which calls itself “America’s Favorite Comedy Musical Game Show”—we never figured it’d reach episode 50! But this oddball onstage entertainment, hosted by Reader contributor Brian Costello and pianist Abraham Levitan, will celebrate that milestone at the Hideout on Fri 11/14. And the years haven’t dimmed the Shame That Tune gang’s ambition. Levitan tells us, “Parody piano numbers about pants shitting are clearly poised to dominate the Top 40 over the next decade....

I’ve been listening to Wilco ever since 89X in Detroit started spinning “Box Full of Letters” in 1995, but even then I was an Uncle Tupelo hard-liner—as far as I was concerned, Jeff Tweedy’s new project was just a decent band with a couple good songs. In the intervening years Wilco has evolved, into a respected and somewhat auteurist rock group, then into a high-powered collective dabbling in fairly far-out experimentation while retaining enough mainstream appeal to fill huge venues....

I went to what turned out to be a hotly contested rivalry game between the White Sox and the Cubs, and a retirement party broke out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The game, a 3-2 Sox victory Friday in the first of a three-game set this weekend at Wrigley Field, was overshadowed by Kerry Wood’s final appearance. Wood had already informed the Cubs brass that he wanted to retire, that his body no longer was able to recover quickly enough to make him an effective reliever on a day-to-day basis, but that he didn’t want to go out on his last appearance, which ended with him disgustedly tossing his hat and glove into the stands behind the Cubs’ dugout....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One comes from Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor writing in the Canada Free Press, a publication whose other causes include promoting hatejock Michael Savage for president. Ball remembers the 70s media scare about global cooling and quotes Lowell Ponte, who back then called global cooling “the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years....

THE LUCKY ONES sss Directed by Neil BURGER Written by BURGER AND DIRK WITTENBORN With RACHEL MCADAMS, TIM ROBBINS, AND MICHAEL PEÑA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thirty years later, after the Vietnam war had bitterly divided the country, Hollywood began to address the veterans who’d come home from southeast Asia, and when the 1979 Oscars rolled around, two of the most heavily nominated movies were Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter....

Since I read so haphazardly, I didn’t really keep a list of the books I read this year. But here are a few that stuck with me. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy needs to go at the top of this list because, since the three volumes add up to 1,400 pages, it was the book (or collection of books) I spent the most time with....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The greatest bargain of this year’s European Union Film Festival, the Jeonju Digital Project program screening on Sunday and Wednesday showcases three important filmmakers for the price of one. The annual project, launched by the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2000, commissions prominent filmmakers to produce works on digital video. This may not seem as novel today as it did 11 years ago, as digital cinema has proliferated so widely that it threatens to take over film altogether (certain recent movies, like The Social Network and Hugo, have exploited this development brilliantly)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes it’s tough to keep track of the networks of connections musicians cultivate. Late last year a CD called Home (Hush) by a fellow named Peter Broderick turned up in my mailbox. I gave it a quick listen and liked what I heard, but I didn’t get back to it till I saw that he was coming to Chicago–he plays Saturday night at Schubas....

By the time the Sun-Times brought me to Chicago in 1970 and I learned the names of CJR‘s defiant founders, Dorfman had resigned from Chicago’s American to run the monthly Review full-time. He and I have just gone back over this distant history, and he’s explained to me that it wasn’t the convention-week coverage itself that was so troubling, but what was published a week later, “when the papers backtracked on everything....

Dear readers: Two excellent writers stepped in to answer the Savage Love Letter of the Day while I was on vacation, and I wanted to share two of their responses in the column this week. (The SLLOTD appears daily—cough, cough—on Slog, the Stranger‘s blog, and is blasted out to folks who have the Savage Love app.) First up is Daniel Bergner. He’s the award-winning author of four books of nonfiction. His newest book is What Do Women Want?...