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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2002 I was pretty unsparing in my criticism of Jackson’s then-new large-band effort, Project Project. He was clearly enamored of the possibilities afforded by a large crew of horn players, but at the time he wasn’t capable of writing music or arranging for such an ensemble; the result was static and aimless. When he got around to making a record with Project Project—Just Like This for Delmark in 2007—he had grown as both a composer and an arranger, but he still had plenty of room to grow....

Challenged by Scofflaw’s Danny Shapiro with fish sauce, the pungent distillate of fermented fish, Perennial Virant bartender Erin Hayes made a savory cocktail inspired by Thai tom yam curry. Starting with a fish sauce aged in bourbon barrels, she combined two virgin sugarcane rums—one infused with coconut flakes—with a homemade coconut curry made with more of the sauce than she had expected it could handle. “I was going to serve it in a coconut too, but I thought that was too much,” Hayes said....

Challenged with Madras curry powder by Micah Melton of the Aviary, Graham Elliot Bistro bartender Dave Michalowski initially thought of doing a tiki-style cocktail. That changed once he got a whiff of the spice blend in full flower. His “awakening moment”? It smelled like maple syrup. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zaya Gran Reserva 12-year rum, from Trinidad, provides some sweetness and a little vanilla, with “a barley note in the background,” he said....

Challenged with the Mexican snack Takis by Big Star and the Charleston‘s Annemarie Sagoi, Barrelhouse Flat bartender Jess Keene refrained from any mention of the kiddie-rap video “Hot Cheetos & Takis.” She doesn’t even like the things—”a garnish with Takis would be disgusting,” she said. Instead, she wrapped about 20 of the cigar-shaped chips (Nitro flavor) in cheesecloth and used them to infuse a simple syrup. The mezcal-based cocktail she arrived at is savory, smoky, and only mildly spicy despite the addition of habanero and chile de arbol syrups....

It’s no surprise that audiences generally mob Chicago Dancing Festival events: they’re free and good. But this year the CDF will be packing ’em in onstage, too—at least for two dances. The fest commissioned New York-based choreographer Nicholas Leichter to create a piece for 36 kids age 14 to 18, enrolled in the hip-hop culture program run by Chicago nonprofit After School Matters. Set to Estelle’s “Wait a Minute (Just a Touch)” and Manu Dibango’s 1972 proto-disco song, “Soul Makossa,” Leichter’s Touch of Soul herds teenagers into nearly martial onslaughts....

We may have a hard time imagining this now, but a century ago comic songs were an absolute staple of popular entertainment. The British music hall teemed with tunes poking fun at working-class life and the hardships of World War I, and American vaudeville was populated by singers who spoofed romance or ethnic characters. Jazz Age composers like Cole Porter (“Be a Clown”), Gus Kahn (“Makin’ Whoopee”), and Harry Ruby (“Hooray for Captain Spaulding”) brought enormous style and sophistication to the form, and for every performer who made the transition to radio and talkies—like Fanny Brice (“Second Hand Rose”), Eddie Cantor (“If You Knew Susie”), or Jimmy Durante (“Inka Dinka Doo”)—there were hundreds more still plying similar material onstage....

The tenth European Union Film Festival continues through Thursday, March 29, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 22; for a full schedule visit chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » R Beauty in Trouble A struggling Prague family loses everything in a flood, which pushes the husband into crime and imprisonment and his beautiful wife (Ana Geislerova) into the arms of the kind and wealthy Tuscany-based winegrower who sent him away....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last few weeks I’ve been meaning to check out the music of the young and provocative German composer Johannes Kreidler, who makes a rare U.S. appearance tonight at the Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater at 7:30 PM, where Ensemble Dal Niente will play a selection of his works. I did look around for some commercially available recordings of his music, but I had no luck....

“We’re terrible interviews,” says Hollows bassist Emma Hospelhorn as I turn on my digital recorder. I ask her to elaborate, and she tells me about an in-studio performance the band gave at WHPK last winter. “We ended up committing a bunch of weird copyright crimes,” she says, but once I’ve heard the story I’m not sure the band did anything but dance right up to the edge of the station’s rules prohibiting advertising....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But someone else with a reputation for good baking and farmers’ market ingredients has been quietly honing their craft at pizza making since May, hand-making well-composed specialty pizzas on Friday and Saturday nights (which will become Fridays only in November). It’s Floriole Cafe & Bakery in Lincoln Park, specifically baker Rachel Post, who owner Sandra Holl says was “Floriole’s very first employee....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Journalists are advised to beware of citing Wikipedia as a final authority on anything, but I’m ignoring that advice because its discussion of walk-off home runs is exactly on point. Wikipedia traces walk-off as a baseball idiom back to Dennis Eckersley, then an Oakland reliever, in the late 1980s. According to a 1988 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Eckersley was given to calling home runs that ended ball games “‘walkoff pieces....

Founded in 1946, the Juilliard String Quartet rose to international prominence following its 1948 American premiere of the complete cycle of Bartok’s six string quartets. In its multiple incarnations since, the quartet has premiered the works of more than 60 American composers, championing the music of Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt; it rescued the quartets of Schoenberg from near obscurity and gave the first U.S. performance of Shostakovich’s String Quartet no....

Mike Sheerin, consulting chef at Three Floyds Brewpub and chef-owner of the yet-to-open restaurant the Trencherman, challenged his brother Patrick Sheerin, executive chef at the Signature Room at the 95th, to come up with a recipe using hop pellets for this installment of our weekly feature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In keeping with his beer theme, Sheerin used malted barley, another core ingredient in brewing (the sweetness of the malt balances the bitter hops), to make a risotto....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last fall I reported that Chicago has been paying more in legal settlements and judgments than LA, Houston, Phoenix, Philly, and Dallas combined. From the beginning of 2005 through the middle of last year, Chicago paid out nearly $230 million. Los Angeles, which has a million more residents, paid out about $77 million in that time. The vast majority of Chicago’s payments were for lawsuits involving the police department....

“Why Streeterville as opposed to, oh, say, just about anywhere else?” Aviva Patt Given the remedial math skills of these “brain trusts” they must have graduated from CPS schools…. Oh, that’s right, the graduation rate sucks so maybe they went to… the Richie Daley School of “Stick It to the Taxpayers.” One more in a long line of rip-offs, where the F*** is Fitzgerald? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The article by Lee Romney told the story of an 88-year-old Oakland, California, man—a World War II vet who’d “grown hard of hearing and become a bit paranoid”—who’d been caring for his 57-year-old daughter since she suffered a devastating brain injury 26 years ago. The man, William Knox Roberts, was stricken with lung and liver ailments and he sensed his end was near. Then who would protect his daughter, Marian? One night in August he fired a bullet into Marian and then turned the gun on himself....

EXPERIMENT PERILOUS Directed by Jacques Tourneur Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Experiment Perilous (1944), which screens this weekend, is probably the least known of Tourneur’s major films; it’s available on DVD only as a custom-burned disc from the Warner Archives site, and as far as I can determine, it hasn’t been screened here in at least 16 years. Produced by RKO as a vehicle for Hedy Lamarr, it certainly qualifies as a mystery in the generic sense: there are unexplained deaths, concealed motives, tantalizing clues, and a climax that finally exposes one character in all his wickedness....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May a judge in Yonkers, New York, dismissed the most recent of many lawsuits filed by a public-access TV host known as Glendora; this one alleged that a cable-company employee had “poisoned” sponsors against her. Of the 360 pages of largely handwritten documentation she offered to support her suit, the judge wrote, “The record should reflect that the overwhelming majority of the material submitted is completely irrelevant, consisting of multiple copies of a 60-year-old photo of the plaintiff with Bob Hope, sheet music, commentary about the impressive geographic expanse of the City of Yonkers ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of them are kinda vague (“Harness the inmense power of a retiring generation“), but others seem well thought-out and, more important, actually doable. One of my personal favorites is to allow low-power radio in America’s urban areas. The proposal calls for opening up our cities’ airwaves and granting licenses to low-wattage stations that could conceivably break the stranglehold of corporations like Clear Channel, allowing something vibrant, varied, and interesting to flourish in the nooks and crannies of the stale, test-marketed-to-death landscape of Big Radio....

We live in glass-half-empty days. Economic uncertainty, environmental crises, interminable wars, the rise of China, and the perceived decline of the West—it all points to one ineluctable conclusion: we’re fucked. Surely this accounts for the uptick in dystopias appearing in recent science fiction. As sci-fi virtuosa Ursula Le Guin wrote in 2009, one thing the form does is “extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire....