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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although improvisation remains a crucial methodology of Colorlist’s music, calling it jazz is a real stretch, especially on the new record, where the duo often push more boldly into the terrain of ambient drift. But that’s not the case when Sky Song‘s opening track, “Sun Song,” begins, as rolling tom-and-snare patter and skittering cymbal work set a relatively turbulent foundation for the overdubbed coats of Gorczynski’s terse soprano flutter and plangent flute lines, as well as washes of synthesizer, until the thickening sound mass wipes out the percussive force with a meditative beauty that keeps building, layer by layer, harmony by harmony....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What is the best thing about the holidays? Gifts? Actually, I’m kinda bad at getting people good gifts so it’s not gifts. Santa Fetishes? True, one way to make sure the holidays are a lot of fun is to incorporate some white beards, red hats and creativity with a candy cane into holiday doin’ it but this kind of thing can really surprise your boyfriend or girlfriend (good way?...

thursday19 Thursday19 Jeb Bishop TrioClaire HuangciRayon Beach Friday20 SadiesSlayer Saturday21 A Frames Monday23 Clare & the Reasons Tuesday24 Unsane, KeelhaulVandermark 5Wooden Birds Wednesday25 EnthronedLeila Josefowicz and John NovacekLittle Al Thomas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RAYON BEACH Last month, just when it seemed like every jerk with an iPhoneBerry who entered the sanctum sanctorum of the Pitchfork fest felt compelled to tweet poetic on every facet of that tedious and sweaty spectacle, a member of the HoZac Records crew updated his Facebook status with the simple observation “Side Boob City....

I got an e-mail from a reader telling me: you’ve got to see it to believe it, but the city made a movie about TIFs. Like I said: progress. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not a bad line, though I’m not sure what Mayor Emanuel hopes to accomplish by depicting Chicagoans as charming and clueless . . . unless it’s his subterranean way of assuring Wall Street investors they don’t need to worry about trouble with his infrastructure trust, which will privatize the funding and selection of government projects....

July 13, 1979 February 2, 1979 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friday the 13th By Lawrence Wechsler “The 13th of the month is more likely to occur on a Friday than on any other day of the week,” or anyway that’s what the bespectacled stranger on the bus insisted to me about ten days ago – “and you can prove it,” he said. ....

If Michael Montenegro is one of Chicago theater’s best-kept secrets, it’s largely because he’s kept the secret himself. Though he’s created marvelous puppets—starkly beautiful mechanisms that seem to harbor their own, powerful narratives—for productions by the likes of Mary Zimmerman, his own shows have been infrequent, irregular, under-the-radar affairs. Which is terrible, because he’s as extraordinary a performer as he is a visual artist. I’ve known Montenegro for years (he’s had a close relationship with the Actors Gymnasium, which I cofounded), and have always been exasperated by the diffidence that kept his talent hidden....

METAL: Yakuza keeps spreading out on the new Beyul Chicago avant-garde metalband Yakuza release Beyul, their sixth full-length and second for Profound Lore, on Tue 10/16 (with a listening party Wed 10/10 at Liar’s Club). Plenty of metal bands incorporate jazz and world-music influences, but few integrate them so seamlessly and purposefully. Yakuza function very well as a tight four-piece, but they like to invite friends and sprawl out: guests on Beyul include cellist Helen Money, vocalists Tim Remis (Sweet Cobra) and Angela Mullenhour (Sybris), and improvising saxophonists Mars Williams and Dave Rempis....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week the Gene Siskel Film Center will celebrate experimental filmmaker Robert Nelson, who died earlier this year at the age of 81, by screening programs of his work tomorrow at 6 PM and on Saturday at 12:30 PM. As Bruce Weber wrote in his New York Times obituary, Nelson “brought spontaneity, teasing, and wit to the often deadly serious arena of avant-garde moviemaking,” though it should be noted he possessed a strong formal sensibility as well....

If you’re trying out a hot new restaurant these days, odds are good that, seated at a communal table in a room so loud you have to yell to be heard, you’ll order organic, locally sourced food—possibly including some part of a pig you never thought you’d consume—from a menu that changes seasonally. The Grocery Bistro is that hot new restaurant without the snout-to-tail devotion that defines the menus at similar concepts like the Publican and the Bristol: there’s no shortage of meat here, but it comes in comfortably familiar cuts, and seafood and vegetarian dishes are equally prominent on the menu....

Hey kids! Want to be a City Hall reporter? Here’s a handy template. It’s based on a real recent meeting where the buildings committee considered an ordinance designed to crack down on the owners of abandoned properties, but it could just as well have been almost any committee reviewing any one of the dozens of legislative proposals introduced each month by the Daley administration. After the committee approves the proposed ordinance it goes on to the full council where it gets passed....

September 3, 1982 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Christ Came to Chicago! Part 5: What Would Christ Do in Chicago? By William P. Stead “Unless civilization is a mistake and Christianity a delusion, monogamy is the ideal toward which our race is tending. In the future, adultery and fornication will be regarded as almost as inconceivable as incest.” —from If Christ Came to Chicago!...

Most of the time I’m not really feeling the stuff that Craig over at the Chicago-based indie rock blog Songs:Illinois posts, but every once in a while he’s absolutely on point. Like today. This past week he’s been doing a series focusing on what he calls “Real Indie Rock”: bands that have decided not to go the publicists/managers/licensing route and instead stick to the punk ethos that indie rock used to be based on....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The three young artists are “self-identified as queer” or “address queer themes in their work,” according to a press release. But “queer” covers a lot of ground, and Harper, Kling, and Lora are a diverse lot. Lora, 31, is a Latina lesbian trained in modern dance. Harper, 27, is a gay African-American actor. And Kling is a white 24-year-old transitioning from male to female....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Hamstrung by debt payments, the museum is facing far-reaching consequences: layoffs and a massive restructuring that has stirred controversy around the globe,” said the Tribune in a March 8 story headlined “Dinosaur-size debt.” A dissident insider—Jonathan Haas, curator of the department of anthropology—was quoted: “What the administration is talking about in terms of cutting curators and scientists will dramatically and permanently change the nature and mission of the Field Museum....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now I know there are those jaded observers out there who contend the mayor’s reawakening has less to do with love for public education and more to do with internal polls that show his school cuts and closings have made him even less popular in Chicago than the Green Bay Packers. So let’s see . . . The tax increment financing program is, of course, the one in which you pay property taxes in the names of things you presumably want, like schools, only to see the Chicago Public Schools hand that money over to Mayor Emanuel....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crain’s Chicago Business reports again on NATO summit partisans’ efforts to satirize themselves before protesters get the chance next weekend. Yesterday it was an article giving voice to Chicago tourism boosters, who expressed their desire to introduce foreign journalists to 50 “real Americans”—presumably political agnostics—who will provide them with home-cooked meals. What’s on the menu? For security reasons, that information went undisclosed....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best picture competition may be dominated by American movies (the only “foreign” titles nominated this year are Midnight in Paris, a Woody Allen movie, and The Artist, a silent movie set in Hollywood), but the race for best live-action short is decidedly more international, with entries from Ireland, Germany, and Norway. Directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), the touching and funny drama The Shore follows an Irish expatriate (Ciaran Hinds) as he returns with his grown daughter (Kerry Condon) after 25 years in the United States; the visit unexpectedly reunites him with the woman he might have wed had he stayed (Maggie Cronin), who’s now married to his best friend from the old days (Conleth Hill)....

Actor Peter Weller, poets John Giorno and Anne Waldman, and performance artist Penny Arcade are among the notables scheduled to appear Friday, August 28, at Thinkart Salon to mark the 50th anniversary of William S. Burroughs’s landmark novel Naked Lunch. Weller, who played Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee in David Cronenberg’s 1991 film version of the book, will headline “an evening of art, readings, happenings, and performances” to raise money for the new documentary William S....

The Rhinoceros Theatre Festival is an odd institution. When it was started 20 years ago, the International Theatre Festival of Chicago was still going strong; but the ITFC shut down in 1994, so the Rhino Fest has spent three quarters of its life as a fringe event in a city lacking the grand fete. Think of a beard without a chin. And where, say, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe attracts productions from all over the world, the Rhino’s impulse is expressly nativist: only local artists present work....

The first night of last weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival was dedicated to that most archetypal indie-rock pastime, the worship of the influential album. Slint played Spiderland, GZA did Liquid Swords, and Sonic Youth performed Daydream Nation–or, as I heard it referred to moments before the set, “Oh. My. God. Daydream Nation.” The presence of a Wu-Tang veteran alongside two canonical alt-rock acts was welcome evidence that indie rock has lowered its drawbridge to admit something besides dudes with guitars....