Julia Thiel Mario Ravenna, tasting wine from the barrel In the mid-aughts I lived in Santiago, Chile, for a couple years, and despite the city’s proximity to the wine-producing Maipo Valley, I never went to any of the vineyards there. But when I visited the city recently, on the plane ride from Miami to Santiago I sat next to a race-car driver named Carlo who had just been to Disney World with his extended family (I’d noticed the group in the airport—the half-dozen kids clutching enormous stuffed dolphins made them stand out)....

Everyone already knows the astounding, outrageous climax of Rod Blagojevich’s political career: he’s arrested by the feds after being caught on tape talking about selling the Senate seat just vacated by Barack Obama. As he put it in his own immortally recorded words: “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing.” So in her breezy new book about Blago, Pay to Play: How Rod Blagojevich Turned Political Corruption Into a National Sideshow (Ivan R....

An early masterpiece by the great documentary maker Frederick Wiseman, this 1973 black-and-white feature takes viewers inside the juvenile court system in Memphis as lawyers and social workers wrestle with the dilemmas common to prosecuting teen and preteen offenders. Among them are a 12-year-old girl charged with prostitution, a male babysitter accused of sexual molestation, a hopeless stoner charged with selling LSD, and a young man who served as wheelman for his pal’s robbery and now tearfully insists he was coerced....

Elvis Costello likes vanilla ice cream bars dipped in dark chocolate with almonds. Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie has a taste for Bomb Pops. Kanye West, Sufjan Stevens, the Arcade Fire, and the Dears all favor Julie’s Organic ice cream. And Matt Allen has served them all. Allen, who won’t reveal his age, grew up in Long Beach, California, and attended Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, where he studied accounting and finance....

As in all good noir, Marcus Sakey plays expertly with duality in his debut thriller The Blade Itself (St. Martin’s Minotaur): good versus bad, rich versus poor, the wisdom of age versus the invincibility of youth. Of course there’s a madonna and a whore. Sakey–a Chicagoan and member (along with Sara Paretsky, Kevin Guilfoile, and others) of the Outfit crime-fiction collective–weds these classic conflicts to a contemporary setting in the tale of Danny Carter, a petty thief gone straight who’s forced back into the life by circumstances he believes are beyond his control....

Missed connections are the business of Shannon Edwards’s Chronicles of Nostalgia, one of three pieces by Dance COLEctive members whom Margi Cole has nurtured into keen choreographers through her “COLEctive Notions” project, now in its fourth year. A trio of dancers become grief coaches, issuing directions such as “If the person you miss has passed away, try not to think about how much you miss them,” to which one dancer responds by pulling on each of her fingers individually, mimicking the futile grasping and inevitable slipping on the threshold of death....

Tattoos! On the wall! Oh my stars! The superficial rock ‘n’ roll trappings of Blue 13, from former Zealous sous chef Chris Curren, aren’t any more original than those at Graham Elliot or even Rockstar Dogs—the framed flash looks suspiciously similar to the wallpaper in the men’s room at Kuma’s. (Replace the skin art with skin diseases and maybe you’ll scare me.) But even if badass fine dining already seems so last month, I wouldn’t write off this little spot, housed in the former Tony Rocco’s River North....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At ten minutes, Andrew Bowler’s Time Freak plays like a pitch film for a feature-length concept comedy, though not a particularly original one. Evan (John Conor Brooke), a young slacker, visits his neurotic inventor friend, Stillman (Michael Nathansan, who has the balefully sad eyes of Zero Mostel), and discovers that he’s finally perfected his time machine. In testing it out, however, Stillman has fallen into the habit of continually and self-consciously revising his encounters from the previous day, one with a querulous cashier and the other with a young woman he fancies....

Our four picks for art exhibits “News From Nowhere: Chicago Laboratory” Art by and about African-American men Expo and the best of the rest of the fests Though there’ll be objects on display too, including films, photographs, architectural plans, and fashion sketches. None offer concrete solutions. But the artists, says Jacob, are hoping for something better: “This beautiful, whacked-out, imaginative presence could plant an idea in someone’s mind or introduce a way of thinking....

I kind of reached a crossroads in my life—that big moment where you have to either shit or get off the pot. It was my early 30s. I was just a big alcoholic and partier. When I came out, it was 1981, and then there was AIDS, and I was terrified that I was HIV positive. I decided to finally get tested in my early 30s. When I found out I was negative, I had this come-to-Jesus moment....

Celestine V I’m impressed by Pope Benedict XVI. He’s retiring. No pope has done that since Gregory XII resigned in 1415 to help resolve the Great Western Schism; and before Gregory XII there was only Celestine V, who gave up the papacy in 1294. For his troubles Celestine V was imprisoned by his successor and dismissed as a coward by Dante in The Divine Comedy. A brief but informative Tribune article that gives this history the once-over notes that nearly four years ago, Pope Benedict visited Celestine’s tomb and left a garment there....

Q I’m from the other side of the country, but I’m sitting in my lover’s San Francisco apartment wondering what I’m doing. I flew out here to spend five glorious days with her. We connect sexually (she’s a dom stone-butch top, I’m a queer femme sub), we connect intellectually, and we make each other laugh. I’m head over heels for her and for this city. AStart with the cliches—”Age is just a number,” “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” “Someone’s gotta change your diapers”—and finish with a grace note: You love her, and you want to be with her, and you hope you’ll always be close, whatever she ultimately decides....

CEILING STARSCeiling Stars(self-released) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’d never mistake GemStones for anything but a Chicago MC—on this mix tape, released by Lupe Fiasco’s label, he jacks beats from Kanye, trades raps with Lupe, and occasionally borrows Twista’s rapid-fire cadences. But between the frequency with which he swears to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” and the number of times he claims to be carrying on Biggie’s legacy, it’s apparent that he also takes inspiration from the east coast, specifically a certain former Def Jam president....

thursday16 Thursday16 Najat Aatabou, Justin Adams & Juldeh CamaraJon Irabagon & Mike PrideMoanersWhite Mystery Friday17 Andrea MarcovicciThose DarlinsTotal Abuse Saturday18 Harvey MilkAndrea Marcovicci Sunday19 Andrea MarcovicciMin Xia-Fen Asian Trio Monday20 Andrea Marcovicci Tuesday21 Future of the LeftPsychedelic Horseshit Wednesday22 Keefe Jackson & Frank Rosaly JON IRABAGON & MIKE PRIDE A lot of great artists have won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition since it started in 1987, but not till last year, when New York saxophonist Jon Irabagon took top honors, did the prize go to a musician bent on pushing past the traditional mainstream sound....

Michael Gebert Jake Bickelhaupt of freshly minted Michelin two-star restaurant 42 Grams So first off: congratulations to the recipients of the two well-deserved new stars on the 2015 Michelin list for Chicago. Grace, which has both food and service that truly live up to the top level of fine dining anywhere in America, has joined Alinea as the only two restaurants in Chicago with three stars. And 42 Grams, the tasting-menu-only, 18-seat-maximum, run-by-a-couple-in-the-space-downstairs-from-their-apartment, formerly underground-dining place that is a sheer delight, jumped straight to two stars in its first year of operation....

Friday | Saturday | Sunday Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year’s lineup includes some of the sort of twee indie pop that people still like to equate with the Pitchfork brand—the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, for instance—but anybody who actually visits the site knows it casts a wider net than that, and the festival does too. Among this year’s non-indie highlights are evil-villain rapper Doom, epic hardcore outfit Fucked Up, border-smashing mashup specialist DJ/Rupture, and electronics-enhanced Afropop group the Very Best....

The first Catholic and the first African-American in the White House were a couple of cool customers—young, witty, eloquent, self-deprecating, and married to sensational women. Their elusiveness—whatever about them was not quite in focus—helped deepen their mystique. On that $64,000 question, Obama is no longer getting the benefit of the doubt. Perceptions of him are undergoing a sea change, and beyond the headlines and opinion polls that say so are conversations I’ve had with Obama loyalists who are fed up....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My favorite moment of To Kill a Mockingbird, which screened at the Film Center on Wednesday night from a beautiful new 35-millimeter print, is a brief cutaway shot to Scout in an early scene. Atticus Finch is tucking her into bed and telling her of the jewelry she’ll inherit when she’s old enough to take responsibility for it. Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus is justly revered; it’s authoritative but warm, and above all conveys great deliberation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trap Them go on first, and judging by the group’s 2008 triumph Seizures in Barren Praise (on Deathwish Inc., the label run by Converge singer Jacob Bannon), the five-band bill may very well blow its load with the first set. Blending the ferocity of Tragedy with the punk attitude of Black Flag will never be a bad idea, and Trap Them carries on the tradition of both with devastating metal riffage, blistering drumming, and absolutely balls-out vocals....

“The fairy tale’s concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner processes taking place in an individual,” wrote child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment. Bettelheim argues that fairy tales are therapeutic because they help the reader contemplate “what the story seems to imply about him and his inner conflicts at this moment in his life.” British dramatist Anthony Neilson flips this formulation on its head in his 2004 play The Wonderful World of Dissocia, currently receiving its U....