Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sonat Birnecker Hart and Robert Bimecker, founders of the new Koval Distillery in Ravenswood, lead a tasting of all ten of their spirits, including vodka, grain spirits, and several liqueurs. The event coincides with the first week of Eat Local/Drink Local Night at In Fine Spirits: on Thursdays this summer cocktails there will be special menu items made with farmers’ market ingredients, Koval spirits, and Metropolitan beer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next week Milestone Film & Video will release a special DVD edition of On the Bowery (1957), Lionel Rogosin’s landmark film about skid row in Manhattan; check out our long review of the film and the documentary The Perfect Team, which chronicles the film’s innovative and demanding production. We’ve also got a recommended review of Rampart, a modern LAPD drama by Oren Moverman, and new capsules for Declaration of War, a French drama about the parents of a cancer-stricken boy; In Darkness, a true story of the Holocaust in Poland, directed by Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden); London River, a racial drama set in the wake of the 2005 terror bombings in the UK, directed by Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory, Outside the Law); Safe House, a Denzel Washington thriller in the Tony Scott vein; The Story of Lover’s Rock, a documentary about the eponymous British reggae label; This Means War, a comedy about dueling CIA agents by Charlie’s Angels director McG; and The Vow, a romance with Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s issue we have Critic’s Choice boxes for My Dog Tulip, a feature-length animation adapted from the 1956 memoir by British author J.R. Ackerley, and Secret Sunshine, a South Korean drama by Lee Chang-dong (Oasis). Also check out our new reviews of Country Strong, a Nashville melodrama starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw; Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a low-budget urban musical that marks the feature writing and directing debut of Damien Chazelle; The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, a documentary about the venerable Yiddish folk outfit; The Legend of Pale Male, about the red-tailed hawk that acquired an ardent following in Manhattan’s Central Park; My Uncle, the restored English-language version of Jacques Tati’s 1958 comedy classic Mon Oncle; and Season of the Witch, a medieval thriller starring Nicolas Cage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of them ran in the Sun-Times November 10 under the charmless but eye-catching headline, “Getting busted with a hooker may get more expensive.” The paper reported that the Cook County Board is considering a new ordinance that would add stiff civil penalties to the slap on the wrist now meted out to anyone guilty of the crime of soliciting a prostitute....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve been reading my 12 O’Clock Tracks regularly, you’ve probably gathered that I love pop music—and that I’ll most likely love it even more if it’s from Ohio. Of all the Guided by Voices-worshiping indie-pop bands on the Ohio scene, the best known (and one of my all-time favorites) has to be Columbus’s Times New Viking. They channel their stripped-down, sub-lo-fi pop genius into nonstop bummer ballads, brimming with simple instrumentation and almost-flat harmonies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » M.I.C member I.L Will is one of many folks I spoke with for my new B Side cover story on bopping, the Chicago-bred dance that’s become a phenomenon, and even though I wasn’t able to include a quote from the MC in the piece he provided me with some good perspective on the west side scene. I.L Will also made a hell of a song for folks to bop to called “Repeat,” and it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

“Dreaming of Giants” On Wednesday night at the Burlington, local blog/podcast/zine/record label Notes & Bolts celebrated its one-year anniversary with a party that featured performances from Oscillator Bug, Architecture, and Chandeliers. The label has put out a remarkable amount of material over its brief year-long run, including records and tapes from Disappears, Verma, Bigcolour, and Plastic Crimewave. They’re currently running a flexi-disc series, releasing singles from local acts on floppy, square, vinyl discs—a nearly-forgotten media that’s recently been brought back by labels like Castle Face and Rotted Tooth....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lamont “Bim” Thomas is an institution in underground Cleveland punk. He’s played drums in the Bassholes, and still does in This Moment in Black History and scuzz-psych collective Puffy Areolas (a band I mentioned in my “best live music of 2011” roundup). Over the summer Bim released an LP of one-man-band recordings under the name Obnox. I’m Bleeding Now, out on Smog Veil, was limited to 500 copies and flew under most folks’ radar....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Writing about Andrzej Wajda’s Walesa, Man of Hope in this week’s issue, J.R. Jones posits that “in this era of worldwide video communication, the idea of national cinema has begun to lose its meaning.” I wouldn’t disagree, though I’d add that one can still detect a clear national sensibility in the recent cinematic output of Mexico, Uruguay, and South Korea....

VARIOUS ARTISTS Founded in 1969 as an outgrowth of an annual Berlin festival called the Total Music Meeting (which began the previous year), FMP was always a modest operation, with a tiny staff and little hope of remaining solvent without state arts grants, but it has no equal when it comes to representing the development and aesthetic range of European free jazz. Arising in the mid- to late 60s, primarily in the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, European free jazz was distinct from its stateside predecessor, and inspired many musicians to revolt against the emulation of American idioms, a practice that had been the norm for decades....

Last week, as Damien Hirst’s end run around the gallery system—an auction of more than 200 of his latest so-called artworks at Sotheby’s in London—had many in the international art world quaking in their Guccis, a much smaller experiment with a potentially bigger local impact was taking place in Chicago. For the first time in her 30 years in the business, auctioneer Leslie Hindman was putting a group of pieces on the block in a distinct category she called Made in Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When her father died, German artist Kerstin Honeit learned that she had nine half-siblings strewn across East and West Berlin. Unprepared to make overtures to a family she’d never known, Honeit sought a connection by inhabiting their identities and space. In a series of photographs called “Becoming 10,” Honeit transforms herself into these sibling strangers, wearing a wig and trucker cap to become her working-class brother, and a camel-hair coat and heels to play an elegant older sister....

This time a year ago, Toni Preckwinkle was one of 50 aldermen, and her sphere was the Fourth Ward and its more than 50,000 residents. Now, as Cook County Board president, she directs a government with a $3 billion budget in a sprawling area home to 5.2 million—the nation’s second-most-populous county after Los Angeles County. In the waning days of the Stroger administration, his deputy chief of staff, Carla Oglesby, was indicted on charges that she funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in county contracts to companies owned by her or her associates....

Picture Balata Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sabreen is one of nine kids between the ages of 11 and 18 who’ve spent the last year working with Picture Balata, a Chicago-based organization that teaches them to use cameras to document life in the camp. Earlier this month she and two other participants, 15-year-old Hadil and 16-year-old Taha, talked about their experiences at the opening of an exhibition of their photography at Acme Art Works....

The puppet-friendly peeps at local cable-access dance party Chic-a-Go-Go and D.C. kiddie music show Pancake Mountain are in cahoots to shoot a full-length movie around town this summer—in fact, Gossip Wolf saw ’em filming at Pitchfork. Chic-a-Go-Go honcho (and Reader contributor) Jake Austen tells us that the film, tentatively titled The Gorilla of Grant Park, is a “Scooby Doo-type mystery” about a “gorilla that’s threatening to destroy the world’s biggest music festival....

White Noise Royal George Theatre center But this new show, behind which Whoopi Goldberg has put her cash and cachet, recovers from its ridiculously miscalculated opening. To some extent, at least. Written by Matte O’Brien, with music and lyrics by Joe Shane and twin brothers Robert and Steven Morris, White Noise is problematic in many, many ways. One thing it isn’t, though, is a Mel Brooks-style joke—inadvertent or otherwise. In fact, it’s so serious that the press kit comes with a study guide on hate speech, prepared by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The stills and tanks of Metropolitan Brewing function as the set for Beer, a musical from the Neo-Futurists. After getting drunk, a ten-year-old boy passes out and ends up in a dreamland he can’t escape until he learns how to brew beer. He’s helped by his buddy Puke and life-size marionettes Water, Grain, Yeast, and Hops, who “must defend the principles of microbrewing from Bud Miller and the people of Milweiser....

You’d think Richard Mell would have learned his lesson the last time he pushed a family member to the head of the line. That was back in the summer of 1991, when the 33rd Ward alderman let his fellow northwest-side power brokers know that his daughter Patti had a husband, Rod Blagojevich, who’d be running for state rep whether they liked it or not. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this point the list is as close to exactly how I want it as it’s going to get. Spotify’s library has a lot of pretty huge gaps. There aren’t a lot of mixtapes on it, so I couldn’t include anything from either of Action Bronson’s extremely rewarding album-length releases of the year, or Charli XCX’s “Forgiveness”, and I had to put Jeremih’s “773 Love” on there instead of the superior “Fuck U All the Time” because that’s the only song from his amazing Late Nights with Jeremih mixtape that Spotify has....

When last we looked in on the tumultuous marriage of Sun-Times Media and the Chicago Newspaper Guild, the union—in either sense of the word—was hanging by a thread. It was October of 2009, and an investment group led by financier James Tyree had just snatched the bankrupt company from the jaws of death. The guild did its bit by agreeing to draconian terms that let Tyree abolish any work rule he thought stood in the way of survival....