Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this spring Rob Lopata, Peter Engler, and I led food writer John T. Edge on a barnstorming tour of southwest-side Mexican joints while he was in town for the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Camp Chicago. We were headed for birria at some point, but on a whim our very first stop was Birrieria Zaragoza, which was new to all of us (though Engler had spotted it earlier, of course)....

Bertolt Brecht’s ironic reworking of Christopher Marlowe’s bloody tragedy–about a 14th-century English monarch whose devotion to a young male commoner leads to civil war–focuses on the conflict between the state, represented by the noblemen who rebel against the king, and individual will, embodied in Edward’s refusal to abdicate even when his cause is lost and he faces torture and death. It’s high-stakes, politically charged material. But in Elizabeth Christine Tanner’s earnest but uninspired staging for the Bohemian Theatre Ensemble, raw passion plays as sentimental romance, and the horrors Edward endures register as mere discomforts....

Interpol bassist Carlos D has announced his departure from the band. It’s been suggested that he’s leaving to focus on his “film career,” but word on the street is he’s going to dedicate his time to getting his Mexican ska band with Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, Torta Reform, off the ground. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Former Hole drummer Patty Schemel performed this past weekend in LA with a one-off all-star band featuring Annabella Lwin from Bow Wow Wow and Kathy Valentine and Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go’s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s see … it’s probably Bud Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome (1959) in my number one slot (for the minimalist desolation, a hardscrabble dry run for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, all broken waste and laconic cowboy palaver), then Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) at two (for the austere classicism—horse, rider, sky, mountains, piney breaks—with sudden pointillist spurts of color, e....

At any given moment there will be a song in heavy rotation that will capture all that is good and right about the current musical zeitgeist. Right now there are a number of qualified candidates for the position, although I personally think Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” (which, yes, I’m aware I mention in this column almost weekly) and “New Slaves” from Kanye’s Yeezus (which recently appeared at number 56 on the Hot 100 despite the fact that it hasn’t been promoted as an official single) are the strongest ones, since they capture the collapsing of genres and time periods that is one of the most exciting things about pop music right now....

I started listening to music on the radio and TV, and bought soul and blues records, as a pre-teen in 1961. I wanted to be a musician, singer, and sax player but let my shyness stop me. I got very heavy into blues, jazz, and soul 45 and LP collecting in high school and college, and read many blues books and magazines. After driving to Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend 1970 in a blizzard, I went to the legendary Theresa’s Tavern at 4501 S....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the couple of months that I’ve actually been serious about my Twitter grind I’ve only come across a couple of music-related ones that are actually interesting. By far the best has been ?uestlove’s. People always refer to him as “?uestlove from the Roots,” but he’s just as active in his production work and DJing as he is drumming....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba A build-your-own Bloody Mary bar, cava cocktails, and brunch tapas like caramelized banana waffles, goat cheese crepes, and strawberry and cream panini, plus complimentary churros and fresh-squeezed OJ. Wear your pajamas to get a gift certificate in the amount of the price of your meal. 10 AM-3 PM, 2024 N. Halsted, 773-935-5000. Dunlays This “hangover brunch” includes blue cheese and chips, wild mushroom risotto fritters, oatmeal pancakes, burgers, and breakfast burritos, plus the “award-winning Dunlays Bloody Mary....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Its been ages since I’ve returned to Tampopo, Daniel Choe and family’s homey little Japanese restaurant on the Lincoln Avenue stretch of Koreatown. The place is so welcoming, budget friendly, and consistently delicious that I can’t explain why I’ve stayed away so long. The meal we put together was perfect relief to the cold, snowy mess outside–tempura green beans, goma ae, age dashi tofu, natto maki, chicken katsu, broiled squid with ginger sauce (ika shoga yuki)....

Second City E.T.C. highlights some of the city’s defining flaws–the unfinished Dan Ryan, the E. coli-infested lake–in “We Are Chicago,” the opening song of its new show. But the rest of this solid revue addresses the nation’s woes in more than 30 bits, including a scene about the president’s blunders that gives the show its title. There are some very funny takes on family interventions, duplicitous presidential candidates, the decline of the nuclear family (discussed by third graders “acting like second graders”), racial profiling (audience members get interrogated), and Al Gore’s anti-global-warming campaign, spoofed as a Jim Jones suicide mission....

Cliff Doerksen, as wry, intelligent, and versatile a writer as the Reader has ever been lucky enough to publish, died unexpectedly a few days ago at the age of 47. Among the first of Cliff’s friends to offer us his thoughts was Ira Glass: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a prize that food writers all over the country covet, the James Beard Foundation Award....

You know I was married once? Yeah, we had a substitute teacher one day and so that meant free period for my third grade class and everyone got married. It didn’t last though. We were divorced right after recess because I wanted to play basketball instead of walk around with my wife. It’s alright, I was over her by the time I caught the bus that afternoon. To be fair, I really jumped into that marriage not thinking....

I ‘ll watch Vince Vaughn in anything—he’s the most skillfully sardonic comic actor working today, and though he grew up in Lake Forest he’s more persuasive onscreen as a regular guy than any of his contemporaries. He carries Delivery Man, a strange and sometimes beguiling story of a man who discovers that his copious sperm donations two decades earlier have yielded more than 500 biological children. With The Dilemma (2011), Ron Howard’s ambitious comedy about loyalty and infidelity, and now this movie, Vaughn has begun to take on roles that stretch him more than his usual outings with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson....

Thursday7 DungenHorse Meat DiscoTim Sparks Saturday9 Burton GreeneMacbeth Sunday10 Lina Allemano FourFaun FablesKylesaChucho Valdes Monday11 Belle & SebastianA.A. BondyWee TrioTim Sparks Tuesday12 Big K.R.I.T.ForgettersWee TrioMacbeth Wednesday13 Herculaneum HORSE MEAT DISCO If you’ve ever had the itch to roll with a psycho glitter queerbo crew, you’ve probably ended up at one of Berlin’s Thursday-night Stardust parties. In celebration of Stardust’s two-year anniversary, Berlin is hosting the DJ collective responsible for Horse Meat Disco, a celebrated London club night with a regular crowd of cutie-pie scruffy fashion gays, heteros who homo on the weekends, and hedonistic spazzes decked out like alien muscle monkeys and wearing the most makeup I’ve seen this side of the Sephora where the Jersey Shore hoochies load up....

The Far East won’t seem so far when Taiwan-based WCdance shares a stage—and dancers—with Chicago’s Seldoms. Beach towels become the unlikely psychological anchor for an evocative, culture-straddling new sextet, Otaku’s Beach, created for the Seldoms by WCdance artistic director (and former Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company member) WenChung Lin. Festooned with goldfish, the neon-colored towels might refer to the bright fabrics used in Chinese traditional dance (Lin’s mother directed a Chinese folk-dance troupe)....

friday18 THEE MORE SHALLOWS Sometimes there’s more to a band’s breakthrough than buzz and bucks. On their last full-length, More Deep Cuts, this San Francisco art-pop three-piece sounded tense and hopped-up enough to be every so slightly vibrating, like they’d snorted No-Doz hoping to finish a term paper but ended up quietly scrawling disturbing notes in the margins of their textbooks. With their new third album, Book of Bad Breaks (Anticon), the tension finally gives way, and it turns out that what lies beyond isn’t violence–it’s bubble-blowing, giggling delirium....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recent weeks have seen the appearance of Sapore di Napoli, another Neapolitan pizza spot whose opening raises the question: “How much brick-oven pizza can a city built on deep-dish support?” The enigmatically named Simply It, a casual Vietnamese place from former Pasteur partner Tuan Nguyen, opened this week (after sending us an appropriately enigmatic Christmas card). It’s BYO, with no corkage fee, for now....

Years ago, in another job, I reported something wrong. Awkwardly, litigably wrong. The editor who could have asked for my resignation told me to write a correction. I poured my heart into it. I owned my crime and marveled at the enormity of my misjudgment. The editor gagged at this cry from the heart and told me to start over. Keep it to a short paragraph, he said. This is a newspaper, not a confessional....

Colts rookie: NFL isn’t so tough Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the headline once you click the link from the home page. OK, easing away from the first statement a little already. It’s still referring to a first-year player for the Indianapolis Colts. But apparently that player said the NFL isn’t so tough. Like he’s been taking some hits and they’re not quite as bad as he thought....

Last month I fretted about “celebrity journalists” turned into “commodities” doing “star turns.” That doesn’t sound like a good thing—but what exactly was I talking about? What I had in mind was the columnist, and the most insidious of all threats to his or her individualism and self-worth: fans. There are two ways to respond to these fans. The bad way is to keep doing the tricks that delight them. The not-quite-as-bad way is to betray them....