In the years after my grandpa died, my grandma always went with us. She felt about downtown the way I did, I think, even though her version was far more elegant than mine: trips to Field’s to look around the 28 Shop—but never to buy anything—and lunch in the Walnut Room, or nights out at swanky places where you danced after dinner. She was of the generation of women who never left the house without a protective coat of lipstick, but a trip downtown on a Friday night meant the mink....

Captive Audience MORE Gallery talk with Marc Fischer and artists Lucky Pierre Sat 1/27, 2 PM. Public discussion Sat 2/3, 2 PM. INFO 773-344-1940 INFO 773-235-0936 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Captive Audience, an extraordinary exhibit about incarceration curated by Marc Fischer, approaches its compelling subject from many angles, using the gallery as a place to savor, examine, and blend experiences. You can try on prisoner clothing, restraints, and hoods, for example, as well as see the catalogs that sell these products to public and private institutions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just got a press release for an ongoing eating contest at Phil’s Last Stand; contestants have to consume a six-pound shrimp po’boy, a pound of fries, and a 32-ounce drink within an hour. That po’boy, the PR continues, is “three iPhones in length, one iPhone in width, and an iPhone in height.” I realize that iPhones now fill every purpose imaginable, from virtually simulating breast augmentation to sending messages from a virtual girlfriend—there’s even someone who deep-fries them and calls it art....

NoBody’s Perfect Directed by Niko von Glasow I’m thinking, to cite just one particularly egregious example, of 39 Pounds of Love, Dani Menkin’s coercively “inspirational” 2005 portrait of Ami Ankilewitz, an unbelievably emaciated 34-year-old Israeli quadriplegic born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type II, a rare genetic disorder his pediatrician predicted would kill him by the age of six. The narrative takes the form of an unnecessarily protracted—and for Ankilewitz, life-threateningly stressful—road trip across America to confront the blameless medical man with the fact of Ankilewitz’s continued existence....

For the three decades Father Michael Pfleger of Saint Sabina Church has been a Chicago news maker, he’s kept the media consistently off balance. Now there’s a book, Radical Disciple, by former Reader staff writer Robert McClory, that sets out to think him through. (The book project had nothing to do with the documentary project, but McClory’s publisher liked Hercules’s title so much that they got his permission to borrow it....

thursday28 Finch, Scary Kids Scaring Kids Metro, 5:30 PM Nobunny, Johnny & the Limelites Permanent Records, 6 PM F Marshall Tucker Band Beverly Arts Center, 8 PM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » cGREG OSBY For more than 15 years, saxophonist and bandleader Greg Osby has consistently demonstrated a tech savviness rare in jazz—in the late 90s he cut a live album with a MiniDisc recorder, and he was posting free MP3s on his Web site long before it became the norm....

As I wrote in my Critic’s Choice for drummer and former Chicagoan Weasel Walter, who plays Friday night at Enemy and Tuesday night at Elastic, he’s been churning out recordings since he moved to Oakland in 2003, especially in the past few years. He dials down his usual frenzied energy on the brand-new Last Distractions (Singlespeed) with reedist Aram Shelton (another former Chicagoan) and cornetist Josh Berman, and he’s part of an unlikely meeting with drummer Grant Calvin Weston—a longtime cohort of James Blood Ulmer—on last year’s Nassira (Amulet)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About 1,000 international cheese makers hit town this week for the American Cheese Society‘s annual meeting, where more than 1,200 cheeses will be judged. Wisconsin has always done exceptionally well in this competition, and this year promises to be no different, though Illinois cheese makers like Leslie Cooperband of Prairie Fruits Farm should make a strong showing. Much of the conference is closed to the public, but on Saturday, July 26, Wednesday, July 23, there’s a “festival of cheese” offering tastings of the wares–it’s $85....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » April 25 is Dark Lord Day, the annual free-for-all at Three Floyds. It’s the one day a year when you can buy the brewery’s Dark Lord Russian Imperial stout, and enthusiasts queue up for hours to buy a few bottles of it–as scalpers cut in line and then, when it’s announced that the beer has sold out, try to resell bottles for $100 apiece to those who’ve waited in vain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Something I’ve wondered off and on about myself—assuming Hughes hasn’t simply mutated into Judd Apatow Incorporated while none of us was looking. But Apatow himself apparently feels the loss, which presumably explains why he’d exhume an old Hughes story idea as plotline for Drillbit Taylor (starring Owen Wilson, pretty in pink as always), the Judd factory’s current teen-market outing....

It’s a sad fact of the musical life of Chicago that many players move away—for romance, work, better opportunities, weather . . . the list goes on. Luckily for most jazz players, a change of scenery doesn’t always mean an end to projects that began in the city. Saxophonists Aram Shelton and Greg Ward, for example, remain regular presences around town, maintaining numerous bands with locals. That’s also been the case with the drummer Dylan Ryan, who moved to LA a couple of years ago....

This “paean to death” looks formidable on paper, with its big names (Rembrandt, Goya) and extensive inventory of objects (nearly 1,000, all from the holdings of art collector Richard Harris). But the bare facts are nothing compared to the show as experienced. It’s enormous, powerful, and overwhelmingly creepy. Works by Kathe Kollwitz, Jasper Johns, and scads of others are hung about six high, all the way up to the ceiling in one room....

Last weekend the Washington Post ran a story about perpetual singles—those who never, ever find “the one.” It focused more on women than on men, which is unsurprising in a society where Newsweek once famously (and erroneously) reported that a woman over 40 had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In two other recently produced plays, Aces and Blizzard ’67, the Chicago-based Steinhagen showed serious chops as a chronicler of male bonding while demonstrating a gift for ensemble scenes rife with lacerating banter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On August 20, Eichenwald wrote again. This Times story was about Web sites that feature prepubescent children scantily attired in an attempt to get around child porn laws. Five days later freelance writer Debbie Nathan responded on Salon. “The kind of looking [Eichenwald] did can get a journalist arrested,” she wrote, and she was “irked” that during an exchange of e-mails with him he hadn’t taken that danger seriously....

The most unpredictable aldermanic race in the city is probably the one going on in the south side’s 15th Ward, where the incumbent, Ted Thomas, is retiring. Twelve people are on the ballot, and at least two others have organized write-in campaigns. Among the contenders are a minister, a high school basketball coach, and an ex-con former alderman. “Everybody says it’s crazy out here, but it’s democracy at work,” says candidate Janice Jeffries, a local school council member....

FLYIN’ WEST COURT THEATRE WHEN Through 4/8: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM Blues for an Alabama Sky Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Flyin’ West, which put Cleage on the map when it premiered at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre Company in 1992, takes place in 1898 in the black farming community of Nicodemus, Kansas. The play’s all-female household, a sisterhood without genetic bonds, is made up of migrants from Memphis, part of the great exodus from the south after the collapse of reconstruction and the resurgence of white supremacy....

The tenth European Union Film Festival runs Friday, March 2, through Thursday, March 29, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 9; for a full festival schedule visit chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RColor Me Kubrick Alan Conway, a gay con artist in England who successfully impersonated Stanley Kubrick in the 90s, died in 1998, only a few months before Kubrick....

It’s no accident that Gossip Wolf is cheered by the news that surrealist Chicago prog-rock institution Cheer-­Accident is revving up its weirdo engine again after a long hiatus! Drummer and mastermind Thymme Jones tells us that the band is undergoing “a convergence of the distant past, the present and ‘the future,’” and at Mayne Stage on Sat 6/22 it will play an epic 90-minute set—its first live show in two years—as a nine-piece, with a full horn section and new bassist Dante Kester (formerly of the Gillespie Killings and Sounds Like Braille)....

In this heady documentary, TV footage of left-wing social critic Paul Goodman being interviewed by conservative host William F. Buckley Jr. in 1966 makes one realize how low public discourse in America has sunk since then: despite the men’s political differences, their freewheeling discussion, touching on topics from education to pornography, is playful instead of rancorous. Best known for the book Growing Up Absurd, Goodman was hard to classify: a married father of three who was also openly bisexual, a cofounder of Gestalt therapy who was also an urban planner, and a champion of the counterculture until he decided the younger generation had squandered their gains....

Like D.C. punk and Detroit techno, Houston hip-hop has influenced musicians across decades, casting a net far broader than a single cluster of urban area codes. Maybe when somebody says “Houston rap” the only things you think of are purple drank, candy-colored low-riders (“slabs”), and the words “chopped and screwed,” but the hip-hop scene in Texas’s largest city has been a distinctive presence on the national stage since at least the early 90s....