Kid Sister belongs to the same dramatic category as Killer Joe by Tracy Letts—that category being White Trash Parade of Horrors. But where Letts’s play has a cruel wit and some imaginative depravity, Will Kern’s lurid new thriller, now onstage at Profiles Theatre, manages to be both unpleasant and unremarkable. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best known as the author of the cult hit Hellcab, which ran for nine years in Chicago starting in 1992, Kern here supplies not a scrap of memorable dialogue, offers only half-assed attempts at black comedy and social comment, and comes across as a little too desperate to shock, trotting out tried, true, and cheap gambits—coarse language, graphic violence, the suggestion of incest—all without making a discernible point....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To indulge in a mild bit of Oliver Sacksish storytelling, I’ve recently come off a very odd period of dysgeusia, which means that for almost a month food has tasted weird. Off. Bad. No matter what I eat (tap water, bottled water, crackers, tournedos a la Rossini), no matter when, flavors are upside down and wrong. Salty is bland, sweet is sour, savory is bitter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some sort of fraternal struggle went down that prompted Maurizio Michi to leave Riccardo Trattoria, the Lincoln Park classic northern Italian spot he ran with his brother Riccardo. That’s not our business, but the familial discord has led to a happy development for Printers Row, since the former opened Sofi Restaurant, with an MO not terribly far removed from the spirit, if not menu, from Riccardo....

James McAvoy in Welcome to the Punch By coincidence two British thrillers starring James McAvoy, Trance and Welcome to the Punch, are playing in Chicago this week. They’re both pulpy, far-fetched crime stories marked by shifting allegiances between characters and elaborate action sequences. They’re also highly stylish movies, displaying near-constant visual invention that allows one to forget (or better enjoy) the preposterousness of the narratives. I prefer Welcome to the Punch, though I could understand why someone might like Trance better....

From: Doug Ray Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, the traditional display and classified advertising categories have fallen this year to levels not seen since our most difficult recessionary cycle. In past cyclical downturns, we have weathered the storm with temporary measures that reduced expenses, awaiting a return of business in the wake of economic recovery. This situation is different and requires short-term expense reduction initiatives as well as long-term structural adjustments in the way we do business, which will position the company for the future....

Synchronized singing and dog-paddle choreography suit the swimming-pool venue of Jay Paul Skelton’s splashy revival of The Frogs, Stephen Sondheim’s irreverent 1974 musical version of Aristophanes’ comedy. But for all the slapstick, the show’s essentially a plea for humanity in hard times: theater god Dionysus journeys to Hades where Shaw and Shakespeare vie for the opportunity to return to earth and bring hope to a democracy mired in pointless war (Vietnam then, Iraq now)....

When the snow starts coming down hard on Mozart Street, my mother, who has lived in West Rogers Park (aka West Ridge) for more than 50 years, can usually rely on her neighbors to help her out without even having to ask. Ari, one door to the south, shovels the snow. Or Benji, who lives with his family one door north, does the job. When my mother’s windshield wipers snapped in the cold, Mr....

Everybody’s work is different . . . When my book group met a couple of weeks ago, we decided to take on John le Carré’s latest, A Delicate Truth—and for purposes of comparison, because his latest has received mixed reviews, the book that made him famous, 1964’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. We don’t normally assign ourselves two books at a time, but then we don’t normally read authors whose newest novels are their “latest....

Propeller Guided by Voices’ fifth LP, Propeller—released in 1992—is a noise-pop masterpiece. It opens with the one-two punch of “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox,” a guitar-heavy, bombastic romp that pretty much sums up what the band does so perfectly: a blend of jumpy indie-rock and beautiful pop balladry buried under layers of fuzz and hiss. I recently stumbled (you can only stumble when you’re listening to GBV) upon a stripped down-demo of these two songs, a medley which also includes “Circus World,” a number that falls later in the Propeller tracklist....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That said, the book is full of pleasures. I want to go back to some passages I marked as I read A Century and share what I was thinking when I marked them. In his introduction, Rapoport argues that early in the 20th century, Charles Dryden and Ring Lardner introduced a new kind of sportswriting to Chicago. It quickly spread: “Nor did it take long for New York and the rest of the country to catch up with the Chicago writers who were making sports and the men who played them seem like so much fun....

Last month the superb Berlin electronic and experimental music label PAN Records presented showcases in Boston and New York, but Chicago was pretty much left off of the U.S. itinerary. Luckily, there’s a little bit of salvage occurring on Wednesday night at the Empty Bottle, when two of the acts involved with those east-coast events will perform: Lee Gamble, from London, and Kouhei Matsunaga (performing under the moniker NHK’Koyxen), from Osaka, Japan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow night you can check out Obituary at Cobra Lounge, the Men and Fuzz at Logan Square Auditorium, Bonobo at the Mid, or Parris Mitchell and Paul Johnson at Smart Bar. On Saturday there’s the Spits at Empty Bottle, Black Milk at Subterranean, and Mucca Pazza at the Fall Ball at Logan Square Auditorium. If you make it through all that and want to see even more live music on Sunday night, you can go see Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples at Akoo Theatre....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ross Douthat’s weekend column in the Times is about the differing views on abortion held by “cultural liberals” and “social conservatives.” There’s some funny language in this piece. It’s not clear, for instance, why Douthat considers abortion a “cultural” issue—a divertissement on par with, say, a night at the opera—for east-coast communist gay elites, and a “social” issue for others....

Ryan Duggan, Artist and printmaker, is really getting into: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last week or so I’ve been nurturing a hearty obsession with British comedian Charlie Brooker. My first viewing of his series How TV Ruined Your Life was borderline cathartic. This guy says all the things I’m thinking, but his excessive swearing and dry British wit makes it far more hilarious than I ever could....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Absurdism asserts the pointlessness of existence—we want the world to mean something but it doesn’t—and The Zoo Story certainly gets bleak. A poor slob named Jerry shows up at a Manhattan park bench occupied by Peter, a prim middle-aged man with a pipe, a wife, kids, a good address, some pets, and what he calls an “executive position” at a small publishing firm that specializes in textbooks....

LAST NOVEMBER, GRETCHEN Kalwinski and Eugenia Williamson were among a crowd of local writers and editors bundled into the California Clipper for the Guild Complex’s monthly Palabra Pura event. On the bill were poets Ada Limon and Jorge Sanchez, but for many the real draw was New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear, in town to research a piece on the Poetry Foundation and its new president, John Barr. “It was a bit sad,” says Kalwinski, 31....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today is the annual Great American Meatout, an international effort encouraging people to “kick the meat habit (at least for a day) and explore a wholesome, nonviolent diet of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.” Chicago Diner and Alice and Friends Vegetarian Cafe are celebrating by offering vegetarian specials and samples, and Saturday from 2-4 PM, the Bucktown-Wicker Park library branch hosts a lecture on how to choose healthy vegetarian foods....

Phantom Manor A lot of great music comes out of Chicago, and a lot of it has been recorded at Phantom Manor—the Humboldt Park recording studio has been a staple of Chicago’s music community for the past ten years. It was located above a print shop, so the smell of ink permeating the studio was part of its charm; the toxic taste lingering at the back of your throat at the end of the day became associated with a sense of accomplishment....

Somebody’s Bad Day Just Got a Little Worse As read the article I could see squalls of red handwriting, question marks, and those long arrows telling me to switch paragraph order like on my essays in High School. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I came to read Strauss through reading Bloom and I came to read Bloom through reading Plato and I came to read Plato because I was in the Great Books Program at the University of Notre Dame....

I was recently interviewed, along with a few other writers, by a veteran radio host of a certain age about the state of the restaurant scene. Among this older gent’s complaints was the prevalence of what he charmingly referred to as “science food.” This subject arose with the inevitable invocation of the groundbreaking work of modernists like Grant Achatz and Homaro Cantu, specifically in the context of the opening of Baume & Brix by two veterans of Cantu’s restaurants....