Richard Nickel Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Archives © The Art Institute of Chicago A starry consortium of Chicago theater folk and others (think Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, William Petersen, Jim Belushi, George Wendt) is frantically gathering signatures on a last-ditch petition aimed at saving Hull House’s Leo Lerner Theater. Currently the home of Pegasus Players, the theater, at 4520 N. Beacon St., was central to the development of Chicago’s off-Loop theater scene....

BARS & CLUBS Readers’ Choice: High Dive Readers’ Choice: Fizz and Happy Village (tie) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The demise of Linda’s, the Saxony, the Lakeview Lounge, and Sharon’s Hillbilly Heaven (which appears in Dwight Yoakum’s 1986 video for “Guitars, Cadillacs,” filmed when he was across the street at the Aragon opening for the Violent Femmes) leaves Carol’s Pub the sole remaining shitkicker joint in Uptown, where folks from Appalachia settled en masse in the 1950s....

If you’ve been out to see underground experimental music in Chicago in the past ten years, odds are pretty good you’ve heard a manic laugh somewhere in the crowd, maybe followed by a scuffle—and if you have, odds are even better the source of both was Camilla Ha. An installation artist, stylist, costume designer, and former butoh dancer, Ha has been performing and recording as Magic Is Küntmaster since 2002, making electronic music that’s celestial like a black hole....

As a public service announcement for the people of Chicago, I’d like to urge each and every one of you to beware of any claims by Mayor Emanuel about how he’s expanding preschool for poor kids, because I have a feeling he’s preparing the campaign ads as we speak. To make matters worse, it guarantees that a couple thousand low-income kids—the very children who need pre-K programming the most—won’t get it....

What was the seminal album Drag City released that made you think, “OK, that was a big deal”? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I remember getting a cassette of the finished Royal Trux Twin Infinitives double record, then driving around with Dan Osborn (my partner in Drag City), playing it in his tape deck. It was a heavy and intimidating listen, after which I remember thinking, “OK, that was a big deal....

Last week UK tabloid The Sun reported rumors that Twilight star Robert Pattinson was the front-runner to play Kurt Cobain in the forthcoming biopic, but the report was debunked a few days later by Spin, which reported that the title role has not yet been cast. Gossip Wolf did manage to confirm that the role of Nevermind producer Butch Vig has gone to eight-time Grammy Award™ winner Anita Baker. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In taking the reins at Avenues at the Peninsula, Curtis Duffy has a job that’s two, maybe three times as difficult as that of his predecessor, who only had to convince the world that he could make magic in an institutional hotel dining room. Now Duffy has to follow Graham Elliot Bowles’s formidable act, and do it in a market that’s far more competitive than when Avenues first drew the national spotlight....

The corridor roughly bounded by Montrose and Irving Park Road seems to be a magnet for the South American charcoal-fired rotisserie chicken known as pollo a la brasa. Until last summer, when Flying Chicken closed, between Lincoln Square, Irving Park, and Albany Park there were four pollerias spitting marinated whole birds over live coals, and two more are now on the way. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four years ago Garcia, an NIU computer science graduate, couldn’t find work in his field....

Something’s different this time: when I sit down in a booth at the Rainbo with five-sixths of the 1900s, they’re all smiling and laughing and joking with one another, and nobody seems to be itching to pick a fight with anybody else. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Technically, they are a different band—two members who were aboard in 2007 are missing now. Drummer Tim Minnick and guitarist-keyboardist Mike Jasinksi left in August 2008....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I ended up missing Low vs Diamond and Plastic Little while I waited for a friend to show up so I could ditch my manpurse in her car. You’d think that the HoB, which has one of the largest and most aggressive security teams of any Chicago venue, could handle the threat posed by a Moleskine pad and a copy of a third-string Philip K....

The critical shorthand for a film like this is “tragicomic,” but more precisely one might say that Iranian writer-director Abbas Kiarostami indulges in comic complications that invariably pay off in melancholy. A Tokyo college student moonlighting as a hooker (Rin Takanashi) is browbeaten by her pimp into meeting an old friend of his out of town; there’s a heartrending sequence, set in her moving cab, in which she listens to a series of increasingly plaintive phone messages from her sweet grandmother, who’s visiting Tokyo for the day, and then passes by the old woman as she waits alone under a statue in a public square....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ll start with Gallery Bar since I went there first. It’s an art gallery/street food concept restaurant that specializes in Asianish fusion wraps called “bonzais” and beer cocktails (cocktails made with beer). Nothing about the previous sentence appeals to my sensibilities. In fact, it’s just about a roundhouse kick to the old gag reflex. An open-minded friend and I went one evening for after-work drinks and snacks and, against all odds, liked what we got, the food in particular....

Lori Felker: I feel that Denis is on the other side of narrative rather than in between the two categories. She takes the basic elements of narrative cinema (series of events, cause and effect), then takes out lots of the familiar entry and exit points. It occurred to me while rewatching Beau Travail and while watching The Intruder that many of her shots start in the middle of an action and end before there’s full closure....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By now you’re surely well aware of Jay Bennett’s new lawsuit against Jeff Tweedy; Jim DeRogatis has a sad update. It’s just depressing – Bennett’s contributions are key to my two favorite albums, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, although the brilliance of the latter has a lot to do with the shift in non-Tweedy creative influence from Bennett to Glenn Kotche....

In her 2002 video I Spill My Guts Every Day for Nothing, Kirsten Stoltmann slices open her prosthetic abdomen and animal guts splatter across the floor. The innards evoke the offal-wallowing of Carolee Schneemann or the Viennese Actionists, while a reaction shot of Stoltmann’s horrified face has all the comforting familiarity of a slasher movie. Stoltmann’s combination of morbidity and exuberance, snark and vulnerability, bluntness and delicacy, characterizes lots of the wonderful work produced by emerging American artists over the last decade: a celebration of postmodernism without the air-quotes ambivalence....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One darn nice guy is Iran’s new president, Hassan Rohani. Reports the Economist: “In written messages, Mr Rohani spoke directly to his enemies and ostensibly did so with humility and goodwill. He wrote a private letter to President Barack Obama, who sent one back. He also tweeted new year’s greetings to Jews celebrating the festival of Rosh Hashanah. Western social-media sites including Twitter and Facebook were temporarily unblocked in Iran, though users still reported problems gaining access to them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The invertebrate-heavy offerings were part of a preview for Taste of the Aztec World, a program taking place in conjunction with the Field Museum’s current exhibit “The Aztec World” and intended to give people a taste of Aztec-inspired fare. From Sunday the 11th until Saturday the 17th, 16 local restaurants will be offering specials–some more exotic than others....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Horse meat was until recently an accepted part of the American diet—the Harvard Faculty Club served horse-meat steaks until the 1970s. No longer is horse meat eaten by Americans, Christa Weil, “We Eat Horses, Don’t We?,” New York Times, Mar. 5, 2007, p. A19, though it is eaten by people in a number of other countries, including countries in Europe; in some countries it is a delicacy....

Catalonian director Calixto Bieito made his name as a provocateur in opera, where audiences are grateful for provocation because it helps them stay awake. His 2004 staging of Mozart’s The Abduction From the Seraglio famously involved urination, mutilation, and a cast that reportedly included authentic prostitutes. Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls saw that show, and you’ve got to wonder whether it was a coincidence that two years later he gave us a King Lear chock full o’ people getting drunk and humping one another....

Old Town School of Folk Music 4544 N. Lincoln Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So you think you can’t dance? Think again. The dance and movement program at the Old Town School of Folk Music is one of the city’s biggest and certainly its most welcoming. At the Lincoln Square and Lincoln Park locations, the school’s 46 instructors offer everything from ballet, tap, jazz, and modern to Qigong, Hawaiian hula, bhangra, psychedelic go-go, and clogging, plus kids’ courses and free sample classes....