Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watching Margaret for the second time this weekend, I was struck by how much screen time is taken up by teachers. The main character, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), is an upperclassman at a place she describes as “a private school for rich Jews” (if memory serves), and writer-director Kenneth Lonergan includes numerous scenes of her classes, which are relatively small and all seem to center on student discussion....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The evidence clearly showed that the governor attempted to put a price tag on the provision of financial assistance to the Tribune Company. And what was that price tag? He wanted some editorial board members at the Chicago Tribune fired. Fifteen conversations with [chief of staff] John Harris over a one-month period. Fifteen conversations in which the governor repeatedly directs Harris to talk to high-ranking members of the Tribune Company....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wilson, 70, was a resident playwright at Caffe Cino, the legendary Greenwich Village coffeehouse and theater that helped launch the off-off-Broadway theater movement in the early 1960s, introducing new work by Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, John Guare, Robert Patrick, William Hoffman, Tom Eyen, and Jean-Claude van Itallie. In 1969, Wilson participated in all three nights of the Stonewall riot, the event that launched the gay liberation movement....

The Reader’s Guide to the 44th Chicago International Film Festival A Christmas Tale French director Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen) sets this overstuffed drama in the northern provincial town of Roubaix, his birthplace, which he also considered in his 2007 documentary L’Aimee. A dysfunctional clan gathers there for the holidays, arguing over a compatible bone-marrow donor for the leukemia-stricken mother (Catherine Deneuve); hovering like a ghost is the memory of the first-born son, whose death has polarized his sister (Anne Consigny) and black-sheep brother (Mathieu Amalric)....

Space 1,200 | Rent $1,395 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hogan, the director of public affairs for the Art Institute, is happiest in a spare, almost monastic environment. But Northcutt, a sculptor and woodworker who teaches at SAIC and makes furniture under the name Onesixtyfourth Design, finds inspiration in stuff. A lifelong scavenger, he admits he has a problem. “I’ll find one thing that I think is kind of neat and then I’ll feel obliged to finish out the set,” he says....

Longtime reader with a vanilla question: What to do about differing libidos? We’re a straight couple together 20-plus years, and we’ve aged well. No weight gain, no radical changes in appearance. We’re open and loving, and I’m cognizant of her needs and feelings. Yesterday I read an interview with Joan Sewell, author of I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, and handed it to my wife, observing that this is the new ideal: women laughing at their male partners and shrugging their shoulders about women’s general lack of desire....

Things didn’t go too swimmingly when the United States started trying in earnest, toward the turn of the 20th century, to join the old-world superpowers in the colonialism game. Traditional colonialism had already begun its long, slow decline even as we were trying to lay claim to the Philippines. But in the era of soft colonialism that’s followed, we’ve excelled—as American pop culture has gone international, foreign countries have been Westernized through movies, music, and consumer products instead of at the end of a gun....

Oracle Productions is a shoestring theater, founded nearly a decade ago by a clutch of Barat College students and now based in a tiny, 44-seat storefront at 3809 N. Broadway. But there’s nothing small about the members’ thinking. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The announcement included a rationale that boiled down to: we’re a charity, why aren’t we acting like one? Signed by executive director Brad Jayhan-Little and artistic director Ben Fuchsen, it noted that most theater companies in Chicago are nonprofit corporations, which enables them to collect donations from individuals, corporations, foundations, and the government....

The Valley, Larry Sultan Admittedly, not a whole lot. The Viennese philosopher was consumed by the boundaries of language and knowledge whereas the actress-cum-train wreck seems more concerned with testing the limits of the law. Wittgenstein gave us Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, perhaps the finest piece of philosophical thinking to come out of the 20th century. Lohan gave us Herbie: Fully Loaded. And while I don’t really have time to debate which of those contributions has done humanity the greater good, I would like to draw your attention to the shaded portion of the Venn diagram that is Wittgenstein and Lohan: Larry Sultan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August, Abreu defected from Cuba. He’s a 6-foot-3, 250-pounder not known for his defense or speed. But his slugging stats have been ridiculous. In his 2010-11 MVP season in Cuba, he hit .453 with 33 homers—in just 66 games. In Cuba’s six games in the 2013 World Baseball Classic, he hit .383 with three homers and nine RBI....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rod Blagojevich committed his greatest sin when he broke the cardinal rule of Chicago politics: don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers. He could have followed George Ryan’s lead by stepping aside, accepting cut-rate legal counsel from a well-connected, high-powered firm, and putting himself in position for political forgiveness and maybe even a high-paying job when he’s out of the can....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His recently released solo debut, Glass Armonica (Root Strata), is a vibrant expression of this love for drone. The title comes from an instrument designed by Benjamin Franklin in 1761: Captivated by a glass performance he’d seen in England four years earlier, Franklin came up with an instrument that would provide greater and richer harmonies than the usual wine-glass orchestra, which uses glasses of different shapes and sizes filled with varying amounts of water and “played” by rubbing a moistened finger along the rim....

Tonight, any alderman or Streets and San official who wants proof Chicagoans want a working municipal recycling program need only go to the Lincoln Park Nature Museum’s drop-off bin. The bin is heaped full and is overflowing. That so many people are making the time and special effort to drop off their recycling should surely prove something to the city’s elected officials. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until Chicago has a functional recycling program, I will continue to scorn any “green” designation the Mayor and city tout, and so will my friends....

Money changes everything even when it changes nothing. When there’s money no challenge is too great. As the beast must have reminded himself showing the beauty around the castle, “Give Cupid his bow and his arrow! I’ve got a lot of dinero.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2006 Mella’s mother died, and he faced a harsh new set of financial circumstances—he’d lived with her in her Wilmette apartment for most of the life of the journal....

Nashville-born William Tyler is currently one of the most skilled and imaginative proponents of American fingerstyle guitar, a distinction he’s achieved in part by refusing to color inside the idiom’s lines. A longtime member of weirdo-country juggernaut Lambchop (as well a session player with the likes of Candi Staton, Bobby Bare, and Charlie Louvin), Tyler has absorbed ideas from many strains of American music; on this year’s Impossible Truth (Merge), his talent as an assimilator and conceptualist occasionally seems to surpass his considerable skill as an instrumentalist....

In his new book, The Governor (see Mick Dumke’s review), Rod Blagojevich blames Michael and Lisa Madigan, every legislator in Springfield, U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, and his own father-in-law, 33rd Ward alderman Richard Mell, for destroying his plans to help the hardworking people of Illinois. But the buck doesn’t stop there: he also rips the press for disseminating reckless accusations against him to sell more papers and drive up ratings....

The Flat Five Cover bands get no respect, yet even the snobbiest concertgoer enjoys hearing a good cover—especially when a group digs deep into its record collection to remake an obscurity you never thought you’d hear live in any version. The Flat Five do that over and over again. Their repertoire stretches from “Vanishing Girl” by XTC alter ego the Dukes of Stratosphear to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Lazy Bones.” Calling them a cover band hardly does them justice: they’re a supergroup of talented performers associated with Chicago’s alt-country scene—Kelly Hogan, Nora O’Connor, Scott Ligon, K....

The Reader’s Choice: Piccolo Sogno Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charlie Trotter’s and a handful of other top-end restaurants are renowned for their encyclopedic wine lists; what makes Piccolo Sogno’s special is partner Ciro Longobardo’s uncompromising commitment to Italian wines. He recently boosted the lineup from 400 to more than 500 bottles, but even more impressive than the number is the range: every region of the mainland is well represented, along with Sicily and Sardinia....

This could be one very dark comedy: a hard, harsh laugh at the battle of the sexes, played out in a grifter’s world where it’s either scam or be scammed. Or this play by the pseudonymous Jane Martin could be what director Ray Frewen’s made of it, a summer romp with just enough cussedness to keep things lemonade tart. Ata’s a mad housewife whose rich, sleazy husband has moved out; Bo and Robbie are thieves trying to turn Ata’s misfortune to their own ends....

When Daley administration officials announced in December that they were leasing out the city’s parking meters for nearly $1.16 billion over 75 years to a consortium of investors headed by Morgan Stanley, they assured the media and anyone else who asked that this was a great deal for taxpayers in economic hard times. In fairness, even critics of the deal concede that trying to project the value of 36,000 parking meters is hardly a straightforward task....