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Smoque BBQ Runner-Up: Lillie’s Q

Partial It’s always sad when somebody robs a tour vehicle, and it’s happened to acts as big as Sonic Youth and Leon Russell—to avoid simply throwing in the towel and going home, the musicians are forced to play borrowed equipment or buy an entire new stage rig, while sending increasingly desperate pleas to fans asking them to comb pawnshops for the missing gear. But it’s barely possible to steal equipment from Partial, the Pilsen-based duo of Noé Cuellar (also of Coppice) and Joseph Clayton Mills (from Maar and Haptic)—and even if you did, it wouldn’t slow them down at all....

In early March, Shin Thompson’s Furious Spoon ramen minichain was humming, with five locations in the city and Evanston, and a new one set to open in Indianapolis. But contraction also presented him the opportunity to flex. As a kid, Thompson spent lots of time in Japan visiting family—he spent his first two years there. He grew up on the country’s unique form of curry and rice, or kare raisu, thick and enveloping, mild, sweet, and warmly spiced, with fat chunks of meat, carrot, and potatoes, often topped with a thick, crispy, panko-breaded, deep-fried pork or chicken cutlet....

This 2016 musical based on Chazz Palminteri’s 1989 solo show (which itself became a Robert De Niro-directed film in 1993) is a paradox. Palminteri wrote about his own life (when he was known as Calogero) around Belmont Avenue in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, torn between the honest values of his bus driver father, Lorenzo, and the romantic allure of Sonny, the local gangster who runs the neighborhood. Yet it evokes so many other influences—from GoodFellas to West Side Story—that Palminteri’s personal story occasionally feels like a comic riff on earlier tales....

XXL magazine is preparing to roll out its eighth annual “Freshman issue,” and earlier this week it opened up the polls for readers to vote for an MC to join the batch of rappers the editorial staff already selected for the cover. Regardless of my own reservations about the pomp and circumstance around the buildup to the XXL list and its eventual release, the issue remains a big milestone and goal for countless up-and-coming rappers....

When Crystal Dyer opened Gone Again Travel & Tours in a storefront in Austin in 2016, she was doing more than establishing a brick-and-mortar business. The site was just four blocks from where her grandson had been killed, and in moving her operations there she was seeking to bring some hope and opportunity to the neighborhood. Dyer’s family is from Georgia, and at her request she’d been transferred down to Atlanta to be closer to them, but after Devin’s death, she returned to Austin “with a burning desire to help my family and Austin youth,” she says on her website....

With the docudrama Selma and the documentary 13th, director Ava DuVernay has established herself as one of the foremost political filmmakers in the U.S. These movies tackle complex social issues—civil rights and the U.S. penal system, respectively—and, more importantly, they elucidate how political forces govern society. Given her interests and creative strengths, DuVernay is an odd choice to direct Disney’s new live-action adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved young-adult fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time (1962); the book, which calls on readers to imagine great stretches of time and space, has enraptured generations of children mainly because it resists logical explanation....

Berlin 954 W. Belmont 773-348-4975 berlinchicago.com Runner-Up: Beauty Bar

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media This vacant lot in North Lawndale could become the site of the Obama Presidential Library. I think the best way to illuminate the latest twists and turns in the Obama Presidential Library fiasco is with an analogy to my beloved game of basketball. But as they’re heading home in triumph they hear that the powers that be—like Mayor Rahm—have put more time on the clock....

Relocating to Chicago from Connecticut five years ago gave me pause. My unease had less to do with the city than its time zone. Central Time isn’t the nation’s chronometric gold standard. That’s Eastern Time. Befitting the region’s dominance, Eastern Time goes first. It’s awake while you’re still sleeping, always ahead. And in modern work life, where business can be conducted anyplace that has a Wi-Fi connection, your time zone matters more than your physical location....

As much as I love the traditional jazz organ sound immortalized by the likes of Jimmy Smith, Baby Face Willette, Big John Patton, Jack McDuff, and Charles Earland—that funky mixture of sanctified and greasy—I’ve always preferred the music of Larry Young. In the 60s Young radicalized jazz organ, deploying a modal approach that built on the innovations of John Coltrane—his pianistic style used relatively fluid and sophisticated lines compared to the dominant sound of the time, which was more percussive and chordal....

In the year and a half since Willis Earl Beal most recently appeared in the Reader, he’s settled in Portland, Oregon, and released two EPs: Through the Dark, which came out in March, and A Chaos Paradigm, which he dropped last week under the name Nobody. Beal has grappled with nothingness and the unknown in song for as long as I’ve known him, and he continues those explorations on A Chaos Paradigm....

Osteria Langhe Monteverde Restaurant & Pastificio Finalists: La Scarola, Tuscany Taylor, Davanti Enoteca, Torchio Pasta Bar

Chicago Cubs Chicago Blackhawks Finalists: Chicago Bears, Chicago White Sox

The state of the world is bleak, that’s for sure—not just politically but also economically and environmentally. I know it, you know it, and Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker know it. That’s why the Chicago guitarists decided to host a holiday party at the Hideout last year. “We just thought we all could use a lift,” MacKay says. “So why not have a concert and emphasize the already joyous theme the holidays are supposed to embody?...

Singer-songwriter Matthew McGarry caught my ear in 2012 with the charming, unruffled indie-rock tunes he released as Upholstery & Carpet Cleaning. By 2015 he’d dropped that name in favor of Bossa IV, and it’s been a pleasure to hear him refine his laid-back style of rock. But the whole project could’ve come to an end in April 2017, when McGarry went deaf in his left ear. As he wrote in a detailed blog post, an urgent-care doctor diagnosed him with sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL), and the ENT he saw next said he had only a 50 percent chance of recovering some of his hearing....

Nearly 50 years ago, Chicago documentary makers Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner recruited a couple of Dominican nuns, Sister Marie Arné and Sister Mary Campion, for an experimental film in which they would approach random people on the street, ask them if they were happy, and try to determine why. Inquiring Nuns (1968), one of the earliest releases from the directors’ Kartemquin Films, screens outdoors Tuesday at Millennium Park as part of Kartemquin’s extended golden anniversary, with Quinn taking questions after the movie....

Sultan’s Market various locations, chicagofalafel.com

Andersonville Midsommarfest Ribfest Chicago Taste of Chicago Finalists: Mole de Mayo, Chicago Vegandale Food & Drink Festival, Taste of Randolph, Chicago Gourmet