ZIGA KORITNIK Ches Smith I spent last weekend in New York, where I attended the annual Winter Jazz Festival for the first time. The two-night extravaganza is a mind-melting showcase of contemporary iterations of jazz and improvised music—most of it made in New York—organized by Brice Rosenbloom and Adam Schatz. Having attended South by Southwest for many years, I thought I would be prepared for facing six or seven acts spread out across nine stages, all of them tightly clustered in the heart of Greenwich Village....

If a movie review falls in the online forest, does anyone hear it? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself about my piece on Batkid Begins, which we yanked from the print edition after learning that the movie would close on Thursday. Also this week, Ben Sachs considers the inefficacy of using celebrities to provide the voices of animated characters. Case in point: Minions, the latest in the Despicable Me series....

When I first saw the list of specials at Town Hall Pub, it was like something out of a dream. What mastermind thought to mix the delicacies of my childhood (gummy bears, pudding, and Jell-O) with the one true love of my adulthood (alcohol)? The boozy snacks run as cheap as a buck per helping, and ingesting a small cup of vodka-soaked bears and a serving of spiked pudding is enough to get a strong buzz going....

Jeppson’s Malort www.jeppsonsmalort.com/jm.html Runner-Up Koval Distillery Susan for President

The Chicago Park District also has driving ranges at Jackson Park and near the lake at Diversey, but Marquette Park is the only one with natural-grass tees. The range is tucked away on an island encircled by a lagoon, just east of Kedzie. Its concealed location means you won’t have to wait for a tee. There are 30 in all, and general manager Adam Piratzky says they never fill up, in part because “no one knows about us....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, March 7, 2017. Local immigration activists: Trump’s modified travel ban is still unacceptable President Donald Trump introduced a modified travel and immigration ban that bars immigrants and visitors from six of the seven predominantly Muslim countries that the original policy named. The law will go into effect March 16 and last for 90 days. Citizens from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen who didn’t have a U....

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Batman’s first appearance, in Detective Comics No. 27, and it seems, therefore, like a good time to reveal a villainous and dastardly secret: those first Batman comics were unbelievably wretched. Early Superman stories have a vindictive socialist charge as Siegel and Shuster gleefully have their high-jumping hero bash greedy capitalist pigs; early Wonder Woman comics are a delirious mix of bondage, feminism, and giant space kangaroos....

On Anatomy of a Sellout (Logan Hardware) Dark Fog run their glowing nuggets of psych through a rock tumbler, retaining the genre’s impenetrable mystique while polishing away much of the indulgent noodling that many contemporary psych bands seem to think is a foundational element. Not that there isn’t any freaked-out wailing—there’s plenty. But Dark Fog know how to play with purpose, and on the record it pays off in something resembling cohesion....

I had always assumed that Eric Clapton was a mostly useless windbag. But recently I discovered that, in fact, there was a period between 1965 and 1970 or ’71 during which Clapton was not a useless windbag. “Clapton is God” hyperbole aside, the guitarist went on a pretty remarkable run between the Yardbirds, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, session work, and Derek and the Dominos....

We can all enjoy art, feel it, reflect upon it, and even participate in creating it. But be it? Chicago was the final stop of a tour that began last September in New York. You can see more videos at the website, 29rooms.com; more of Alexa Meade’s work follows.

Fadi Freij Wanees Zarour Palestinian musician and composer Wanees Zarour has been a fixture on Chicago’s international music scene for more than a decade, adapting his fluency on the violin and the buzuq (a long-necked Arabic lute related to the Greek bouzouki and the Turkish saz) for a wide variety of musical traditions from the Middle East and the Mediterranean. For the last four years he’s led the well-regarded Middle Eastern Music Ensemble at the University of Chicago (taking over for oudist Issa Boulos in 2010), leading the group through a broad traditional repertoire, but as the musician’s debut album proves, his personal aesthetic is even broader....

Metro Manila Despite its long, diverse history, the cinema of the Philippines has never made much impact on Western movie culture. But in a surprising turn of events, Chicago has been consistently abuzz with Filipino movies since the beginning of September. The Siskel Center recently concluded a monthlong Filipino series, and a few weeks back artist Blake Heo spread the word about noted political filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik when he almost screened Tahimik’s I Am Furious Yellow at the Drake Hotel....

The President If you’re free tomorrow at 2 PM, I recommend going to River East for the encore screening of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The President at the Chicago International Film Festival. The film is this year’s winner of the Gold Hugo for best narrative feature—and, for what it’s worth, I too consider it the most impressive thing I saw at the fest this year. President finds the Iranian director working in the righteous, formally adventurous mode of his groundbreaking 80s features The Peddler and Marriage of the Blessed, though it differs from those earlier films in a few crucial ways....

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Rev. Billy’s Chop Shop 4314 N. Lincoln Runner-Up Iron Herritage & Supply Co

3730 N. Clark 773-549-4140 smartbarchicago.com Runner-Up Neo

Goodman Theatre 170 N. Dearborn 312-443-3800 goodmantheatre.org Runner-Up The Glass Menagerie

Anyone who lives in Chicago who has any artistic ambition whatsoever has seriously considered, at least once, moving away. All the real action, it seems, is elsewhere, and if anyone outside the midwest is going to pay you any attention, you’re going to have to head to one of the coasts, where you can spend the rest of your life wallowing in nostalgia for how young and free you were in Chicago....