Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I came late to singer Nedelle Torrisi (who made a string of solo albums in the early aughts), falling for her lovely voice only in 2007 after she had formed Cryptacize with Chris Cohen. I remain a big fan of both of their albums, and was saddened when to learn that when they split as a couple, they also split as a band....

Earlier play about Mom and Dad This is about tradecraft. I read the first paragraph—no, not even the first paragraph; the first sentence of the first paragraph—of a story in last Sunday’s arts section of the New York Times, and wondered where the editor was who should have saved the writer from himself. The writer was Joe Gilford, a playwright whose father, Jack Gilford, had been a well-known actor a few decades ago and whose mother, Madeline Lee Gilford, had been a child actor before raising a family....

Died Young, Stayed Pretty Directed by Eileen Yaghoobian Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A similar contest has been unfolding, albeit on a smaller scale, between American video maker Merle Becker and Canadian video maker Eileen Yaghoobian, both of whom set out to document the world of rock poster artists. Back in 2004 Yaghoobian began a three-year shoot in which she lived with and interviewed various contemporary poster artists around the U....

Though it’s been scaled back from a weekly to a monthly event, Dragonlady Lounge’s vegan Korean buffet is a holy shrine for the sometimes gluttonous vegan who appreciates a good food pile. Cooked solely by superwoman Sue Chong, the buffet—which falls on the third Thursday of the month and runs 15 bucks—is an almost indiscernible mess of dumplings, kimchi, and bi bim bop served against a wall in the dimly lit, low-key bar....

In search of airplane reading material before a trip to China last spring, I grabbed Lisa See’s popular novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan from a bookstore shelf and was promptly riveted by her description of foot binding. Nothing in my glancing awareness of this practice prepared me for the details she provided: that it was inflicted on girls as young as three years old, that “the arch and toes of the foot must be broken and bent under to meet the heel,” and that the ideal result would fit into a shoe no more than three inches long....

Part of an occasional series of oral histories, as told to Anne Ford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I came out here from New York in 1964. Over the years I’ve had over 10,000 students, always individually. I don’t run classes; I don’t believe in classes. If you’re sitting in the class and I’m the instructor, and you ask me a question I can’t answer, I can turn to one of the better kids and say, “Well, Bill, how’d you do it?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Emir Kusturica & the No Smoking Orchestra “Founded in 1980 in Sarajevo, Zabranjeno Pusenje (Serbo-Croatian for ‘No Smoking’) were part of a cultural resistance movement called ‘New Primitivism’; inspired by everything from Jethro Tull to the Sex Pistols, they combined brash, simple garage rock with touches of Balkan folk,” writes Vera Videnovich. “Since the early 90s they’ve developed a style they call ‘Unza Unza Time,’ a mix of rock, Romany music, and Balkan brass with a distinctive two-four rhythm—the name evokes the sound of a guitar playing a traditional folk dance or a sort of Serbian rumba....

Street vendors hawk hot dogs and novelties in a public square. Revelers in jeans snap pictures of one another with their smartphones, drink “Victory Beer,” and generally look like they’re headed for a football game. They’re so psyched that they start in doing a line dance, country-western style. A streamer overhead reads Veni Vidi Vici Motherf*ers. Strangest of all, Caesar’s triumphal entrance is framed as an amalgam of pop savvy (an ad invites us to visit caesarforall....

QCould you tell my boy to calm the heck down? Can’t seem to get him to get the difference between bestiality, necrophilia, and screwin’ a bearskin rug. Emphasizing my usual sexual interests—which involve rope bondage, floggin’, and an e-stim unit—hasn’t worked. Logic isn’t helpin’ out at all. Maybe you can help? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » AWhat can you do? You mean besides send video of you and your bear in action to prove this isn’t the most entertaining fake letter I’ve received since Michelle Obama invited me to dinner at Sarah Jessica Parker’s apartment?...

Given my usual aversion to war and slasher movies, I wasn’t instantly won over by either Letters From Iwo Jima or The Dead Girl. Both films display a fundamental decency and seriousness from the outset, but both are unrelievedly grim and full of booby traps. (At press time I was told that The Dead Girl may not open for another week or so.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Letters From Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood, one of the finest directors alive, looks at the World War II battle of his recent Flags of Our Fathers from a Japanese perspective....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Already on probation for a 2005 child-endangerment conviction, 20-year-old Shawn Mohan was arrested in January near Saint Peters, Missouri, for allegedly shooting his 12-day-old son at least five times with a BB gun. According to police, Mohan said it was an accident. And in December drivers in Indianapolis stopped to rescue a three-year-old boy they’d seen wandering down the right lane of I-465 wearing only a T-shirt and a diaper....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taking a hint from the fellows at Guys Drinking Beer, this year I observed Fall Beer Freedom Day—it’s the beer-nerd version of not wearing white after Labor Day, except in this case you don’t partake of Oktoberfests or pumpkin beers till then. (This is easy with pumpkin beers, because most of them are nasty.) Since FBFD I’ve tried ten Oktoberfests, though only one of them, Spaten, would qualify by the narrowest possible definition....

fine-film.com All this month we’ve been reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the final installment. Color gives our lives meaning without having any real meaning itself. I kept thinking this as I watched Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine’s Inocente, a disarming profile of a homeless 15-year-old girl in San Diego who gets a big break when she’s chosen to create a 30-work show for a local gallery as part of the nonprofit program ARTS....

Nothing The suicide-hotline volunteers in Adam Rosenberg’s Prevention are having a bad night: Joachim is determined not to let his caller hang up, Sonny focuses on the logbook, and Dexter insists on recounting the story of his own near-death experience. Are they three distinct individuals or different facets of a single character? Under Scott T. Barsotti’s fast-paced direction, what is essentially a monologue with flanking harmonies is transformed into a dazzling visual and aural kaleidoscope charting the progress of at least one mortal’s final decision....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some are calling him an elder statesman and others a Democratic Party hack, but nobody’s saying Roland Burris isn’t upright. However, 12 years ago a group of journalists from the State Journal-Register in Springfield published a book called Illinois for Sale: Do Campaign Contributions Buy Influence? and when it came to the office of attorney general when Burris ran it, the implicit answer to that question was ....

Garland Room, Chicago Cultural Center What Is This Thing Called “Jazz”?12:30 PM & 3:15 PM The Jazz Institute presents drummer Paul Wertico, bassist Larry Gray, and multi-­instrumentalist David Cain in a program called “The Rhythm Method II,” an insider’s view of the intricacies of jazz performance. The Garland Room is on the Cultural Center’s first floor, on the Washington Street side. See our previews of acts playing on: Thursday & Friday ·Sunday ·Aftershows Jazz Festival main » Best of Chicago voting is live now....

What happened to Steve Martin? When, exactly, did he cease being the man from masterful comedy LPs like Let’s Get Small and commence being the man who merely occupies space in unbearable family comedies? His is the same strange path trod by Albert Brooks. Both made their mark in the late 70s and early 80s. Both aged prematurely but made it look good. And both declined creatively in what seemed like direct proportion to their soaring box-office success (though Brooks began his decline in the late 80s, and his success came in one shot, as a voice in Finding Nemo)....

The Reader-sponsored Tomorrow Never Knows music festival is expanding into comedy for the first time this year, and Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac is one of the headliners along with Todd Barry and Chicago’s own Hannibal Buress. (Three other local funnypeople will be opening for Cenac at his two sold-out shows: Cameron Esposito, Tony Mendoza, and Gabe Wallace.) Cenac’s fake reporting is strong, but the former King of the Hill writer is funny off-camera, too....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the midst of so much horrendous financial news about American newspapers, a story in the New York Times a month ago came as a tonic. “Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs,” by Richard Perez-Peña, focused primarily on voiceofsandiego.org, a site where in the last couple of years some of San Diego’s “darkest secrets have been dragged into the light,” but it said “similar operations” have cropped up in other cities, including Chicago, and “more are on the way....

“I like things that are messy,” says Achy Obejas. “The conventional detective story seems to seek out a way of making order in the world, and I’m much more interested in the disorder in the world—living among the disorder and making sense of it on a daily basis.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Novelist, poet, and longtime Tribune reporter (she won a Pulitzer in 2001 as part of the team behind a series about the nation’s air-travel system), Obejas was six in 1963, when she and her parents left Cuba on a boat bound for Miami—a bit of biography snappily summed up in the title of her 1994 short-story collection, We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?...