Russell Bowman Art Advisory Vivian Maier’s photography is the subject of a South Side Projections event this Saturday. There are two noteworthy film-related events happening around town this Saturday night. At 8 PM Black Cinema House will host a program called Radical Speculation, a collection of short films on speculative design, critical design, and design fiction. To quote the program notes: “Largely non-commercial, these tendencies question the simplistic emotional and psychological assumptions that underlay normative, mainstream 20th-century design culture....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The versatile Vancouver guitarist Gordon Grdina returns to Chicago this week for a couple of concerts, and I suspect they’ll nicely encapsulate the range delivered on recordings he’s made over the last years, where a love and investment in Arabic music has leavened and expanded his already broad jazz chops. When I caught Grdina at the Hideout in September 2009, with drummer Kenton Loewen, sub bassist Kent Kessler, and trombonist Jeb Bishop, he was already absorbed in the Arabic sound, playing oud nearly as much as guitar....

AP Photo/Mark Christian A cell block at Tamms on the day the supermax was dedicated in March 1998 “This place is one hundred times better than Tamms,” a prisoner in the Pontiac Correctional Center told me in a recent letter. “I was able to purchase a regular Bic ink pen and a regular-size toothbrush.” In Tamms, prisoners were limited to what were called “security toothbrushes,” he wrote. “A security toothbrush is the size of your pinky finger....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the end of What Jesus Meant, Garry Wills comes to Good Friday. He writes, “Dark and mysterious as is the whole matter of the Incarnation and the Passion, perhaps a single thing can help us think of them.” And then Wills relates a simple personal anecdote. His young son woke up one night crying. He had had a bad dream, a nightmare....

courtesy of the artist August Darnell I’m as bruised by the onslaught of canned Christmas music pumped out in retail joints this time of year as anyone else, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy holiday music. In fact, back when I was in college I was kind of obsessed with unusual Christmas music—although in retrospect I was an utter novice compared with someone like Chicago collector Andy Cirzan, whose annual mixes are something I always look forward to—and a couple of compilations I bought back then still hold a close place in my heart....

Dear readers: I’m writing this week’s column in a drug-induced coma. Well, not quite a coma, but close. I was fighting a cold for two weeks, and the cold won: it morphed into an insanely painful sinus infection—you know it’s bad when your doctor urges you to err on the side of too much Vicodin, not too little. So a warning to everyone whose letter appears in this week’s column: my reliably sucky advice is probably going to be suckier than usual....

On top of being a highly efficient pornography distribution system, the Internet is also a pop cultural remix machine that’s encouraged a phenomenal number of allegedly “normal” people to engage in the kind of obsessive fandom that used to be the turf of only the most diehard geeks. At this point a Tumblr trend mixing Grammy-nominated musicians and Downton Abbey characters is no surprise. And of course there’s not only a Twitter account of potential Seinfeld plots if the show were set today but a Weird Twitter parody of that Twitter account....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until Fat Possum Records released The Dawg Years last year I’d never heard of Texas singer-songwriter Blaze Foley (born Michael David Fuller), and I’m sure I have plenty of company in that regard. A new documentary called Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah, directed by Kevin Triplett and produced for Austin public-access TV show Between the Scenes, screens at 7 PM on Sunday at the Hideout as part of the closing festivities for the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival....

Where were you when the first plane hit the World Trade Center? David Foster Wallace—the experimental novelist who grew up in Illinois; who wrote Infinite Jest, which established him as the most influential author of his generation; and who committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46—was in the shower of his Bloomington-Normal home, listening to a Bears postmortem on WSCR. With the publication of D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the first full biography of Wallace, we can start to answer such questions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “[Daniel] Brook, citing the social critic Brendan Koerner, calls college debt America’s new ‘ambition tax.’ Inspired by Brook, I coined some other new taxes bequeathed to us by the demons a triumphant Goldwaterism has set lose. There is, for instance, the ‘idealism tax.’ In 1980, a University of Chicago student paid a $5,100 tuition–and, if her heart called her to teach in a Chicago public school, earn two and a half times that: not impractical....

There’s a lot going on—from tacos to pierogi, poutine to fried alligator—on Central Standard’s sprawling menu. But I guess that’s the point, because there’s also a lot going on foodwise in the entire central standard time zone, the disparate geographic swath from which this River North enterprise takes its inspiration. On its website, Central Standard is described as “a journey across an entire time zone” to “destinations from the North Woods to the Deep South....

This week the Music Box will present the Chicago premiere of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a film produced by the U.S. War Department in 1945 and ’46 to document the landmark war-crimes trial of 22 top-ranking Nazis by an international military tribunal. Though the movie was released in Germany in 1948 as a way of confronting citizens with the grim reality of the Holocaust, it’s never been shown in the United States until now, which gives its 63-year-old subtitle an ironic twist....

The Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema runs Thursday, October 21, through Sunday, October 31, with screenings at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Northbrook Court, 1525 Lake Cook Rd., Northbrook; and 600 N. Michigan. Tickets for most programs are $11, $9 for matinees before 5 PM, and can be purchased by calling 847-946-6026 or visiting chicagofestivalofisraelicinema.org. Following are reviews of the programs screening in Chicago; for a complete schedule of suburban shows see the festival website....

The Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival is the largest event of its kind in the nation, cementing the city’s reputation as the mecca of the improv and sketch world. The sixth annual edition, presented by Lukaba Productions, features more than 100 ensembles from Chicago and across North America, selected on the basis of stylistic, thematic, racial, and gender diversity as well as quality. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SketchFest runs January 4 through 14 at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W....

Man, I could sing that song all day. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You know, like the song says, “Snap your fingers and I’ll turn you some flips, I’m your puppet . . .” As you probably know, a lot of residents have been demanding more police if only to keep up with attrition caused by retirements. In any event, Aldermen Rick Munoz and Scott Waguespack introduced the proposal to hire more cops at Monday’s hearing of the budget committee, whose primary purpose, as near I can tell, is to rubber-stamp the mayor’s budget....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Pilobolus “Mining Pilobolus’s roots in comedy, Rushes creates a surreal world featuring creeping figures, a mysterious suitcase, and flashing dream images—an ear unlocked with a key, a butterfly caught in a web, a chair with bat wings,” writes Laura Molzahn. “Its gentle whimsy is light-years removed from the almost sadistic physical comedy of Walklyndon, also on the bill....

The annual HoZac Blackout festival returns for the second time since being reincarnated in 2011 after a four-year hiatus. This year the Blackout—and likely the actual blackouts of the many inebriated garage-rock fans attending—will stretch over three days, Fri 5/18 through Sun 5/20, at the Empty Bottle. (There’s also a preview event Thu 5/17, about which more in a sec.) Two dozen acts are scheduled to play over the course of the weekend: Friday’s highlights include Puerto Rican scuzz poppers Davila 666, San Diego neo-protopunks Spider Fever (fronted by Off!...

Abiquiu Cafe A restaurant dedicated to the highly specialized southwestern variant of New Mexican food—most commonly identified by dishes blanketed in red or green roasted chile sauce—is a noble venture. This Lakeview spot unfortunately executes it with uneven results, though the house-roasted red and green New Mexican chiles that form the foundation of the cuisine offer a good start. That’s particularly true of the almost soupy green chile (available vegetarian or porky), which has a nice depth of flavor, and the brick-red variety carries admirable heat, particularly as it drenches a cheesy plate of chicken enchiladas or small order of pan-seared corn cakes....

Who to see, hour by hour, on:Friday • Saturday • Sunday There is no reason to go to Lollapalooza. Most of the acts worth watching are playing afterparties around town over the weekend; those that don’t will probably be back as soon as they’re out from under the festival’s notoriously stringent radius clauses—which the organizers use to keep Lollapalooza acts from gigging in the Chicago market for weeks or months before and after the big weekend....

Laura Eason’s condensed but satisfying adaptation of America’s finest coming-of-age saga is rooted in Jurgen Hooper’s triumphant portrayal of Huck–he comes across as raw, resilient, and conscientious in the best way. Mark Twain’s masterpiece contrasts the boy’s real but false dad with his true protector, runaway slave Jim (a wiser-than-words Chike Johnson). On their travels Huck and Jim learn that, on and off the Mississippi, a nugget of genuine conscience outweighs a ton of hypocritical righteousness....