Both Linklater and Northwest Chicago Film Society have revived Warren Beatty’s Reds in the past two years. Richard Linklater is not only one of this country’s most versatile working film directors, he’s also an accomplished film exhibitor. Linklater started the Austin Film Society in 1985 to bring hard-to-see movies to his hometown and to stoke his own nascent cinephilia. What began as a ragtag (and often one-man) outfit has grown to a million-dollar organization that awards grants to new filmmakers, offers youth education programs, and operates a 100,000 square foot production facility....

610 W. Lawrence mondog.org Runner-Up Wiggly Field

Silver Room 1506 E. 53rd Runner-Up Lillstreet Gallery

Big Chicks 5024 N. Sheridan 773-728-5511 bigchicks.com @BigChicks

Up to ten times a day at Japonais by Morimoto, a sushi commis loads upwards of eight pounds of a proprietary blend of California Tamanishiki and Tamaki brown rice into a big, bulky imported rice polisher. After a few minutes the bran is eroded from the grains, leaving a bit of the germ intact for flavor and nutritional value. The rice stays fresher because in the husk it retains its moisture longer than commercial milled rice....

Obliterations is a band of dudes in other bands—a couple of them of the stoner/metal variety, including Black Mountain and Saviours. And those dudes possess a collective affinity for an 80s west-coast brand of pissed-off hardcore punk that warranted a side project of sorts. So they made the very calculated move to play exactly that and not bother with the frills. Can’t blame ’em. The LA-based foursome currently has a pair of EPs on its Bandcamp, but I just got word via PR e-mail that the tracking for their Southern Lord debut—due out sometime this fall—is all wrapped, and in three days no less....

Suddenly the 2600 block of West Lawrence, on the west end of Lincoln Square, seems like an international sandwich incubator. Along with longtime banh mi supremacists Nhu Lan Bakery and the cheesesteak church of Monti’s around the corner on Rockwell, the new kid on the block is Sweet Pepper Venezuelan Food Bar, a storefront trafficking in the arepa rellena, the stuffed cornmeal wonder of Venezuela. They’re frying their own yuca and plantain chips at Sweet Pepper, and bottling a few juices like mango, passion fruit, and papelon, a lemonade gently sweetened with cane and brown sugar that almost tastes like an unfermented tepache....

Runner-Up Logan Square

Since launching in 2010 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Already Dead Tapes & Records has kept up a busy schedule. The label, which now operates out of Chicago and Brooklyn as well, has dropped almost 250 releases. This Friday number 249 arrives: Population, the second full-length by local art-rock band Crown Larks (a collaborative release with Satellite Records). On Population, Crown Larks drag jazzy saxophone through the muck, discombobulate their limber Krautrock riffs, and strip down the arrangements surrounding their velvety psych melodies till simple keyboard notes are left bare....

Expresso 2222 I spent a chunk of the past weekend watching some of the World Cup, sleepily taking in long stretches of dribbling and passing punctuated by dramatic and improbable goals (poor Greece, I was rooting for them). In the spirit of the World Cup taking place in Brazil, I’ve been spending more time revisiting some older Brazilian music. For today’s 12 O’Clock Track I’m going with Gilberto Gil’s “Back in Bahia,” the second track off the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s 1972 album Expresso 2222....

Monique Burrell had just turned 16 when Jay Z pulled her up on stage for the first time. While watching Trey Songz open the concert at the United Center, she said to herself, “One day that’s going to be me on that stage.” She had no idea how quickly she’d be right. “I kid you not——right when I said that, I felt this indescribable energy,” she says. “I cannot put it into words....

In his long-running duo Arborea, guitarist Buck Curran skillfully spun lines of gossamer beauty and tenderness into a sparkling blanket under the sweet cooing of his musical collaborator and then-wife, Shanti Deschaine, occasionally descending into meditative treacle. Since he began making solo records a couple of years ago, his liquid fluency has taken a more rhapsodic direction. He’s achieved a new depth with his recent Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas (ESP-Disk/Obsolete), on which his delicate fingerstyle playing emphasizes lyric generosity over flashy technique....

With the 20th pick in the NFL draft, the Chicago Bears selected Kyle Long, offensive guard, Oregon—and the collective response from Bears fans was, “The fuck?” To be fair, Long’s story didn’t precede him. He started his collegiate career playing baseball for Florida State, piddled around in community college before deciding to switch to football, and played just one season at the FBS level for the Oregon Ducks, a team at a school most people east of the Mississippi are more or less clueless about....

Runner-Up Logan Square

When I first saw chef Jason Vincent he was jiggling his daughter’s child seat and talking about duck tongues. It was 2011, and he was featured in our chefs’ challenge, Key Ingredient, the video for which showed him minding his baby while creating a sandwich that showcased the avian body part in question. As he worked he called on the kind of ingredients that had already made his Pilsen restaurant, Nightwood, acclaimed: fermented foie gras, deep-fried Meyer lemons, an egg poached in duck fat....

Thirteen years ago Roger Ebert made an argument for making things up—one I’ve wrestled with ever since. But who is the “we” doing the asking? Given that standard, “JFK” is a masterpiece. In 2011, after writing out careful instructions for his brain to be harvested and studied, Duerson committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart. His instructions were carried out and pathologists found his brain was riddled with CTE. “People go to movies not to digest information and data but to have an emotional experience,” Concussion’s director, Peter Landesman, told the Times....

On March 26, 2014, FBI agents raided California state senator Leland Yee’s home and offices in what would become, according to the Los Angeles Times, one of the biggest public corruption scandals in San Francisco history. Arrested as part of a five-year investigation targeting the flamboyant gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, Senator Yee admitted in a plea deal to racketeering and accepting quid pro quo deals. For playwright Lauren Yee, the case hit close to home: Her father, Larry Yee, was an enthusiastic supporter of the politician, even volunteering for the senator’s secretary of state run....

Dulse, a type of seaweed that grows in the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is lauded as a health food that, according to some, tastes remarkably similar to bacon. Chef Ben Lustbader of Giant, challenged by Publican Anker‘s A.J. Walker to create a dish with the seaweed, was skeptical. “People call it the bacon of the sea,” he says. “I don’t really think it tastes a whole lot like bacon. One of my cooks described the flavor as malty, which seemed a little more on point to me....

courtesy of the artists The Jist The veteran Norwegian vocalist Sidsel Endresen and the imaginative young guitarist Stian Westerhus have only made one album together—their bracing 2011 collaboration, Didymoi Dreams (Rune Grammofon)—but it already seems to be exerting an influence on the country’s improvised music scene. The upstart label Va Fongool recently released the eponymous debut by an Oslo duo called the Jist, another voice-and-guitar project that channels extended technique and crazy effects into rigorous, abstract excursions across the realms of noise and texture....

Among the many issues bogging down Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is its weak grasp of Chicago hip-hop. Like gun violence and its roots, hip-hop takes a backseat to Lee’s sex satire; this weakness might not be such an issue, except that music is central to the vision of the the city that Lee tried to capture, the title character is an aspiring rapper, and the film’s name came from the local hip-hop scene....