Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lots of old fogeys, including famous social scientist Robert “Bowling Alone” Putnam, have said that TV may be ripping up our social fabric, on the grounds that time spent with Tony Soprano is time not spent with friends and neighbors. It’s hard to test this hypothesis because in the US the spread of TV coincided with other trends, like suburbanization, so the other trends might be at fault and TV an innocent bystander....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On account of some neuroses*, I had put off reading Gabriel Sherman’s New York cover story, “The Emasculation of Wall Street”—also maybe on account of that headline, from which not much good can follow. (See the cover art, if the hed’s too subtle. Literally, it is a photo of a guy grabbing his crotch and grimacing.) But the article—I caved—is edifying if you read it alongside Chris Lehmann’s “Dick Joke,” in which the author dismantles what seems to be Sherman’s point: Wall Street bankers feel threatened (“castrated,” even) by the spectral presence of greater regulation and by, yup, Occupy Wall Street (“which does appear to have rattled a lot of nerves”)....

One day not long ago, when I was ranting and railing—as I’m apt to do—about the utter dysfunction of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school policies, a fellow named Peter Cunningham cut me short. First let me say something about Mr. Cunningham: he is, among other things, a former press aide to Mayor Daley and to U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan. Plus, he’s pals with Mayor Rahm. And the mayor is free to use that line in his next reelection commercial....

If you ever ate at Big Shoulders Cafe, the restaurant that used to occupy a bay-windowed corner of the Chicago History Museum, you’ve probably heard Roberta Brown play the piano, because that used to be her gig. When she reminded me of it, I remembered how intense the music was there, how the sound reverberated off all the hard surfaces. She says she got that job after she walked in one day to pick up a couple of Latin School kids for their private lessons and couldn’t resist the unoccupied piano....

The Chef: Sarah Grueneberg (Spiaggia)The Challenger: Giuseppe Tentori (Boka, GT Fish & Oyster)The Ingredient: Propolis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s difficult to find a recommended daily dosage online, and it’s possible that Grueneberg far exceeded it; propolis is most commonly sold in the form of drops or capsules, but Grueneberg was working with resiny chunks that were trickier to measure. Bees make propolis from tree resins, wax, and pollen; its composition varies widely but it often has antibacterial properties....

If running a restaurant is enough to give anyone a headache, Michael Altenberg must be trying to give himself a migraine. He’s weeks away from the opening of Crust, a pizzeria in Wicker Park that stands to become the fourth certified-organic restaurant in the country and the first in Chicago. But certification presents a unique set of problems. Even the simple act of bringing food into a kitchen gets tricky....

Mesrine: Killer Instinct Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 Directed by Jean-Francois Richet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A year later, Public Enemies doesn’t stack up. Watching it on DVD last weekend, I was disappointed all over again by how little it actually delivers in terms of human drama or cultural insight. Director Michael Mann proved he could supply both of these in a true story like The Insider (1999) or a biopic like Ali (2001), but the Dillinger movie was so choked with action, vintage clothes, and gleaming 1930s automobiles that it seldom paused to consider its protagonist as anything more than an icon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A group of us had broken away from the University of Chicago Theatre and opened Playwrights Theatre Club on the near north side, which lasted from 1953 to 1955. We then opened the Compass, the predecessor to Second City. Tom O’Horgan joined us for our third show and was the composer for all the shows we did at Playwrights that needed original songs and/or incidental music; he never charged us....

I’m pro-sex, bisexual, and GGG. I’m also a mother. I have a 14-year-old son, and when I type a Web site address into our home computer, a million porn sites pop up. I’ve had lots of lovers, watched my share of porn, I masturbate, blah blah blah. But something about my baby looking at Asian sluts getting it up the ass turns me into a sex-negative freak. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Over the years the Chicago jazz scene has displayed amazing resilience, withstanding not just the defection of musicians to other cities but the loss of important venues. This time last year Joe Segal’s venerable JAZZ SHOWCASE was still in search of a new location, but late this spring he reopened in Dearborn Station, and the club will once again host its famous afterfest shows, which typically draw many of the festival’s best and most notable mainstream players....

Ann Hui’s A Simple Life, which begins a weeklong run at Facets Cinematheque on Friday, is the sort of film in which every detail feels unforced but essential. It seems to have been assembled casually from personal observation, and in a sense it was. The story—about a middle-aged bachelor devoting himself to his family’s longtime maid after she suffers a stroke—is drawn from the experience of Roger Lee, the producer and cowriter....

thursday26 Thursday26 Johnny Rawls RevueWye Oak Friday27 Coliseum, Fight AmpFruit BatsGod Bullies, TV Ghost Saturday28 Memoryhouse, Twin Sister Sunday29 Elisabeth Harnik Monday30 Stereo Total Wednesday25 Elizabeth CookAlon Goldstein WYE OAK Wye Oak front woman Jenn Wasner sounds goth as hell on the Baltimore duo’s new EP, My Neighbor/My Creator (Merge). But she flips the script from suicidal to homicidal on “I Hope You Die,” uttering the title’s unsubtle sentiments while someone taps a woodblock gingerly in the background....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As if your last experience on the road–any road–in Chicago weren’t convincing enough, the numbers [pdf] prove it: traffic around here sucks. Rush-hour drivers in the Chicago area spend an average of 46 hours a year–that’s on top of normal traffic times–sitting in congestion. Three of every five miles of local roads are congested, and the total length of rush hour–morning or evening–has grown over the last decade from seven to eight hours a day....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this year Films We Like released a two-disc set on the idiosyncratic New York indie Sara Driver, a filmmaking contemporary (and a longtime partner) of Jim Jarmusch who handled production on his early features Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver made her own directing debut with the striking mood piece You Are Not I (1981) and followed it with two surehanded exercises in low-key surrealism, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993)....

Please Give Written and Directed by Nicole Holofcener Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oddly, nothing I’ve read about the movie seems to pick up on this, even though it’s spelled out in the title. In the Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt dismisses Please Give as a New York story with little appeal for outsiders, while Andrew O’Hehir in Salon and Manohla Dargis in the New York Times both fixate on the filmmaker’s gender....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pitchfork weekend was a true test of what the human body can endure—high-volume bands, constant exposure to direct sunlight, sweat, dirt, torrential downpours, mud, hordes of zombielike live-music junkies, gallons of Heineken Light—I’m honestly a little surprised I survived. By Sunday afternoon, the power nap I’d joked about in my itinerary accidentally became a reality. Fortunately I was conscious for Thee Oh Sees’ amazing 2:50 PM Blue-stage set—if you followed the Reader‘s interactive Pitchfork coverage, you might remember that pretty much everyone lost their shit for that....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who’s the greatest alcohol-inspired filmmaker? I guess that depends if you mean directors who were known for depicting alcohol consumption or those who often worked under the influence. The first category would include George Cukor, Akira Kurosawa, Blake Edwards, and Billy Wilder; the second would include Nicholas Ray, Sam Peckinpah, John Ford (who made light of his predilection in The Wings of Eagles), and the underrated independent Eagle Pennell (The Whole Shootin’ Match)....

The opening panel discussion at this year’s Art Chicago is titled “What If: To Dream, Desire and Acquire,” and that pretty much sums up the annual fair that brings together collectors, curators, artists, gallerists, scholars, and kibbitzers for four days of looking, talking, and dealing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your Thursday-evening preview options depend on how much you want to spend and how late you want to stay up....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ll grant this to the South African film Of Good Report, which screens at CIFF tonight at 6:10 PM and on Saturday at 4:15 PM (and in a special off-site screening at the Logan Theatre on Sunday at 6:30 PM): it has a lot more fun with arbitrary mystery than any other film I’ve seen at the festival. Lead actor Mothusi Magano doesn’t speak once in the entire movie, even though his character’s an English teacher and presumably he talks sometimes (moreover, no one makes reference to him being mute)....

cake balls at Bleeding Heart Bakery 1955 W. Belmont 773-327-6934 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When you’re a “local, sustainable, punk-rock” bakery, how can you justify wasting all the foodstuff that gets pared away to construct every special-occasion cake? You can’t—and that’s how Bleeding Heart Bakery came up with cake balls. Cake balls ($1.50 a pop) look a lot like doughnut holes, but they’re actually dense nuggets of premium cake mixed up with frosting and rolled in chocolate and other toppings....