Seann William Scott is the best comic Neanderthal in Hollywood (American Pie, Role Models), and he’s found the perfect story in this fictionalized adaptation of a memoir by minor-league hockey brawler Doug Smith. After clobbering an enraged player in the stands at a game, Doug Glatt (Scott) is recruited as an enforcer by his hometown team in Massachusetts; he can barely skate, but he has a punch like a cinder block....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the more admirable qualities of Robert Greene’s Fake It So Real, which opens Friday at Facets, is how it creates such a rich sense of place with such a mundane setting. The movie documents a small-time wrestling league based in Lincolnton, North Carolina, a town of roughly 10,000 located 40 miles outside of Charlotte. Like many American towns, the geography is dominated by strip malls and nondescript housing: the people seem to spend a lot of time at home or in their cars....

Last week while writing about the young and impressive Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad I referenced the brilliant and singular jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock, a man out of time whose predilection for searing noise and dissonance was almost too much for the 60s and 70s—he released his unalloyed and uncompromising masterpieces Black Woman (Vortex) and Monkey Pockie Boo (BYG) in 1969 and 1970, respectively, and then pretty much disappeared, although he did appear briefly on the Miles Davis classic A Tribute to Jack Johnson and a Herbie Mann record in 1973....

Could you tell me a bit about its director, Armand Weston? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weston started his career as a graphic designer and a painter. He was a pretty prolific poster designer in the 60s and 70s—filmmaking was sort of a side project for him. What I like about his work in X-rated films is that they reflect his artistic background. His films are always focused on how sexuality fits into a landscape, cultural or environmental....

When the Chicago Park District announced last month that it had hired a New York landscape architect to redesign the northeast corner of Grant Park on a $45 million budget, including the controversial site of the new Chicago Children’s Museum, there was no mention of an ongoing legal battle over what it’s already done in that area. But there’s a decision pending in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that’s expected to have repercussions for artists and public art all over the country....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A lot of cheese is coming through Oak Park’s Marion Street Cheese Market these days, and when I queried cheesemonger Eric Larson about his favorite of the bunch, he picked Prairie Fruits Farm Chevre Round. This fresh organic goat cheese is preternaturally fluffy. Leslie Cooperband, the cheese maker at Prairie Fruits Farm, hand-ladles the milk of Nubian and La Mancha goats into the forms, Eric explained, so as “not to disturb the curd....

Challenged with okra by Johnny Costello Jr. of GT Fish & Oyster, Vie bartender Mike Page adapted one of the techniques the restaurant and its chef, Paul Virant, are known for, pickling the vegetable to make a shrub, a vinegar-based syrup used since colonial times to preserve produce. The resulting cocktail is named after Ghostbusters, the 80s movie that brought us not just the Ectomobile but Ecto Cooler, a green Hi-C fruit punch named for the Ghostbusters’ mascot, Slimer....

Joshua Young, author of To the Chapel of Light, fuels his love of poetry with: Robinson Alone A good book of poetry is not hard to find—there’s so much out there right now. But Kathleen Rooney’s novel in verse, Robinson Alone, is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Full disclosure: we are pressmates. But that’s not why I love this book. It feels like a conversation between the reader and the speaker, Robinson....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scrolling through this week’s Hot 100 it seems like business as usual: Lorde holding onto the top spot for the ninth week, One Direction grabbing a block of spots in the teens after the release of their new album. Then about halfway down you run into a 13-year-old Enya song sitting at number 43, in between Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” and Joe Nichols’ forgettably breezy country-pop cut “Sunny and 75” like it’s no big thing, and your brain locks up for a second while it tries to figure out exactly what’s happening....

Julia Thiel Hibiscus and more hibiscus Several months ago—probably in the winter, now that I think about it—I was mailed a bottle of Huitzi, Five Rabbit’s “midwinter” beer brewed with hibiscus, ginger, chamomile, and honey. I’d tried it at a beer festival and liked it, but for some reason I put off opening the bottle (or maybe I just didn’t get around to it, which is more likely). Then I came across Rosa, a summer beer from Revolution Brewing—another local brew, also made with hibiscus....

How often do you think about dying? I think about it every day. I don’t dwell on it. I don’t long for it. But I’m aware of it. It’s a universal truth that unites us, one that we endlessly contemplate, ruminate on, hold to the light like Hamlet with poor Yorick’s skull. We can’t stop thinking about death because we don’t know what comes next. It’s hard to accept that the answer may be nothing....

hachettebookgroup.com It’s always exciting when you come across your own home turf in a book. Yeah, yeah, literature is supposed to be about broadening your horizons and bringing you out of yourself and introducing you to new worlds, but that happens all the time. Seeing someplace you know well through someone else’s eyes—now, that’s something rare and worth getting excited about. Jami Attenberg‘s latest novel, The Middlesteins, just out in paperback, happens to be set in an unnamed northwest suburb that is clearly, at least to those of us who grew up there, Buffalo Grove....

Convicted of killing her husband, Fay’s spent 15 years in Scottish prisons and out of communication with her daughter, Josie. Now, at 25, Josie’s taken it upon herself to reestablish contact. Rona Munro’s smart, interesting, potentially affecting play follows Fay and Josie as they simultaneously discover and bypass each other. That Kurt Johns’s production never manages to liberate “affecting” from “potentially” has a lot to do with its overall softness–but most of all with Apple Tree’s temporary space, which requires in-the-round staging even when that works against the best interests of the material....

Don Draper, looking concerned Season six has ended; let the exegesis begin. Actually, to say this is to sell Mad Men short; the exegeses began when the season began in April, and what we saw when it ended Sunday night was simply the climactic tsunami. Websites are insatiable maws, and Mad Men fed them; for instance, newrepublic.com rounded up four reviewers— Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak—to post weekly “letters” about the series....

“Will we ever invent anything this useful again?” wonders the cover of a recent Economist, and the query is illustrated by Rodin’s Thinker sitting on a flush toilet. Unfortunately, arguing in my head with the Economist doesn’t make me any less gloomy. No wonder journalists can’t figure out how to monetize the rising digital tide—the economy can’t, either! It’s not lifting our boats because it’s not lifting anybody’s. The 21 things Fourcher learned are all discouraging....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On one hand, Harper Court is dumpy-looking and the buildings are poorly organized. On the other, it houses some of the best stuff in Hyde Park: Barack Obama’s favorite restaurant (IIRC), the fine, modestly-priced Calypso; the beloved (if perhaps overrated) Dixie Kitchen; Maravillas, the best cheap food in the neighborhood; and Dr. Wax, with its estimable collection of hip-hop and R&B vinyl....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Politically, McKeon came of age in the 90s, an opportune time for gay politicians in Chicago. Mayor Daley, son of Bridgeport, had decided that it would be politically worth his while to build an alliance with the city’s north-side gay community. In 1992 he hired McKeon to be his liaison to the gay and lesbian communities. Four years later, in 1996, Daley gave McKeon his blessing to run for state rep in what would become the 13th District, which includes parts of Uptown, Ravenswood, Andersonville, and North Center....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This morning my MacBook’s software update alerted me to the existence of iTunes 10.6.3. Reading through the list of changes, I saw that most were to make iTunes compatible with Apple’s new Mountain Lion OSX and iOS 6 for iPhones and iPads, both of which were unveiled yesterday at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference; there were also a couple of minor bug fixes....

Julian Pena, Dysqo, DJ MTM Info 773-278-6600 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What he looks for in all those records are breaks, the building blocks of his crazy-quilt music. A break is just an element of a song–a drum pattern, a guitar riff, a bass line–that can be isolated, looped, and stitched to other snippets. The Bronx party DJs who developed the technique in the 70s ended up inventing hip-hop as a by-product: old-schoolers like DJ Kool Herc would bounce between two copies of the same record to keep a single break going for long stretches, which made a perfect backdrop for an MC....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sixth Ward alderman Freddrenna Lyle described it as a “bad-news budget” but said the council had fought for and won important revisions since the mayor introduced it last month. “We’ve done our homework,” she said. But the Fourth Ward’s Toni Preckwinkle didn’t think she and her colleagues had done enough homework. She called for an additional week of budget hearings next year....