Next fall’s production of The Magic Flute will mark the end of an era at Chicago Opera Theater. It’ll be the last COT show planned by Brian Dickie, who’s retiring in August after a 13-year stretch as general director. During Dickie’s tenure, COT developed its reputation for staging excellent, innovative versions of baroque and modern works on a modest budget. Dickie also oversaw the company’s 2004 move from the modest Athenaeum Theatre in Lakeview to the 1,525-seat, state-of-the-art Harris Theater in Millennium Park—which brought its own set of advantages and challenges....

Almawal Restaurant | $$ 10718 S. Harlem Worth, IL 708-361-5100 Cunis Candies | $ 1030 E. 162nd South Holland, IL 708-596-2440 Find our favorite 12 restaurants down south View Chicago suburban dining—south/southwest in a larger map Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Viewed from the strip mall parking lot next to a combination lottery ticket and Chinese-takeout counter, Cunis Candies has all the charm of a Baskin-Robbins....

Rapper, producer, and Magic: the Gathering enthusiast Rjyan Kidwell, aka Cex, is one of the most consistently underrated and constantly adventurous musicians of the past decade. A few years ago, around the time his slightly tweaked, slightly too-cute electro-rap started to earn him a measure of popularity, he blew his crossover potential by taking a hard turn into abstract tribal psychedelia, and he’s been wandering from sound to sound ever since, apparently completely free of concern about the usual metrics for music-career success—like how much of your remaining audience each new stylistic shift drives off....

The British indie The Other Side of Sleep screens this Friday and Saturday at the Patio. As I noted earlier today, the Chicago Cinema Society will present an archival 35-millimeter print of Walter Hill’s The Warriors three weekends from now. But this screening is just one of many that the local programming group has lined up at the Patio Theater. Yesterday the Cinema Society and the Patio announced that they’ve agreed to an ongoing partnership and released their schedule for the next two months....

This nugget of gold came to us from the good people at Found magazine—and it inspired us to ask Twitterers to tweet us their #idealmate (with the results being only slightly less bleak). @borrachabaker: Snarky bastard with a heart of gold. Bonus points if he looks like a lumberjack. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » @Josevedo: Is my Netflix Instant account in human form....

I had a couple of interesting exchanges about gun control last week. One was a reasonable debate with a guy from the National Rifle Association who thinks Chicago (and everywhere else) would be better off if concealed weapons were legal. The other was with Mayor Daley, who didn’t like a question I’d asked him and suggested maybe he could make his point better by sodomizing and shooting me. That’s when I asked the obvious question about whether he thinks Chicago’s gun ban has been effective: it’s clear people are getting and using guns in spite of it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one knew why Averbuch was visiting Shippy, or exactly why or how he died, but for many Chicagoans his supposed involvement with anarchist circles solved the mystery: he had obviously intended to assassinate the prime representative of law and order. There was a hysterical fear of anarchism at the time, frothed up by the newspapers—“The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror,” Brik tells us....

Joseph Hammer wears a single white cotton glove when he performs, but it’s no homage to Michael Jackson: he needs it to get physical with his tape. A late-era member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (a wild collective that combined radical noise and goofball humor) and one-third of the 90s electronic group Solid Eye, Hammer has been manipulating loops for more than two decades. These days he keeps his sound files–snippets of spoken-word recordings, old soul tunes, and orchestral music, among other sources–on a laptop but transfers them to analog when it’s time to go to town....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Democrats control the White House and Senate, and won more of the national vote in House races last year than Republicans, Packer observes—”And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay.” Obama proposals that require new spending—universal pre-K, for one—will be easier to block because those automatic cuts have to be dealt with first, according to Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox News commentator....

Mario Batali: What you need is a staff of about 700 people, 690 of whom are geniuses. And the remaining ten are going to be geniuses. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t think we’re going to change people’s lives, but what I think we may do at best is enhance them. I think when people have their ‘holy jeez!’ moment while traveling in Italy, what they often realize at that very second is that simpler can actually be better....

METHOD TO MADNESS FESTIVAL LINK’S HALL That element of self-congratulation isn’t particularly attractive, or relevant: you can use all the recycled materials in the world and still not produce good art. But good, thrifty small-scale works can make a point by countering the trend in our culture toward the huge and expensive—Broadway musicals, big-budget movies, TV series. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By far the most finished piece was the opera, Laika’s Coffin, directed by Frank Maugeri and written by Seth Bockley, both of Redmoon....

death at a funeral directed by neil labute Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But this joke is one of the few times we see Rock thinking about race at all. Of the five movies he has now produced as starring vehicles for himself, three have been remakes of movies that starred white actors—before Death at a Funeral he did Down to Earth (2001), a remake of Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait (1978); and I Think I Love My Wife (2007), a remake of Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon (1972)....

QI am a 28-year-old woman and have been with my boyfriend for two years. I would call it a stable, fulfilling, and kinky relationship. I consider myself GGG, and every time my boyfriend has brought up a kink or variation, I’ve been willing to try it. Some things became a permanent part of our play, others have gone into the “tried that, didn’t like it” pile without any problems. Recently, though, there has been a problem....

Snow flurries fell on the Cubs as they took batting practice before Monday’s home opener at Wrigley Field, as if to reinforce the notion that the championship chill that’s gripped the franchise for 99 years will last another season. For all the money they spent over the winter, this was a notion the Cubs had done nothing to dispel on the road in their first week. They’d been decidedly average, splitting six decisions in Cincinnati and Milwaukee....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steven Soderbergh claimed to have watched films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as inspiration for his underrated Bubble (2005), but Behind the Candelabra—which is currently available at Redbox stands after premiering on HBO earlier this year—strikes me as his most Fassbinderian movie. This blackly funny (and sometimes horrific) showbiz saga, about pianist-showman Liberace’s unhealthy relationship with a much-younger man, echoes numerous works by the great German filmmaker....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The day began at the crack of 11:00 am. Our first stop was the house of a friend of my host Kelsey – the friend agreed to lend me perhaps the second most essential SXSW tool after a cell phone loaded with local hipster contacts: a bike. While most of the official venues were heavily concentrated downtown along 6th Street and Red River, the also-enormous unofficial side of SXSW is much more diffuse, with venues scattered throughout the East Austin and South Congress neighborhoods, as well as around the University of Texas further north....

Open since August, the Ravenswood BYO Me Dee Cafe is a mere six tables squeezed in amid a wall of Thai snacks, a freezer full of mochi, and walls decorated with squabbling cartoon brats and wide-eyed, troubled-looking cows. (A herd of bipedal, urinating cows graces the wall in the loo.) The main dishes are inexpensive but decorously presented Ameri-Thai standards with hints of fusiony gimmickry—a noodle dish tossed with fat disks of Polish sausage, or grilled mushrooms with chihuahua cheese, or entrees garnished with raspberry and blackberry gumdrops....

A 10,000-word interview with Axelrod, now a top Obama adviser, was originally published in the Chicago Reader on July 12, 1991; this is an excerpt. Read the entire interview here. The author now goes by Sarah Bryan Miller. Axelrod is intense, aggressive, manifestly intelligent, extremely verbal, argumentative, and highly competitive. His politics are standard leftist: he talks about Republicans as “country clubbers” with the fervor of one who really believes it, despite the electoral evidence of the last few years....

Behind Willi Lehner’s house in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, under a hillock of craggy earth supported by a wall of stone slabs, is a bunker that’s supposed to withstand tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. The manufacturer of the kit it was made from, Formworks, even claims that one of the same design survived a simulated nuclear blast. But Lehner , a 52-year-old cheese maker, isn’t preparing for the apocalypse—he’s just trying to protect his wheels of bandaged cheddar, farmstead Käse, Havarti, and Gouda....

When Ella first started working at the hospital, three months ago, Marcus would see her in the cafeteria, and say, “When you headed back to the vegetable garden?” To her this helped explain their silence, the way their blind eyes shifted. They were all severely brain damaged; in most cases only the brain stem still functioned. Many had never been outside the hospital walls, yet they’d been alive for months, sometimes years....