Diana Slickman, ensemble member of Theater Oobleck and BoyGirlBoyGirl, can’t put down: John Saturnall’s Feast I’m reading a terrific novel: John Saturnall’s Feast, by Lawrence Norfolk. It’s about a boy in 17th-century England, orphaned after his mother starves to death, who goes on to become the most celebrated chef in the country. Part romance, part cookbook, part history, part mythology, and wholly engaging. Comparisons will inevitably be made to Dickens (orphan boy protagonist, rags to riches, historical backdrop) but Norfolk’s style is less prolix and more involving—mysteries and characters unfold slowly against a vivid rendering of life before and during the English civil war....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For next week’s paper I’ve written a Critic’s Choice about upcoming gigs at the Hungry Brain (10/19) and the Chicago Cultural Center (10/20) by New York saxophonist Tony Malaby, bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, and drummer Nasheet Waits; in it I discuss two of Malaby’s recent trio recordings. What I didn’t get around to was his very different Cello Trio, which celebrates the release of a brand-new album called Warblepeck (Songlines) Wednesday night at the Hideout....

The letter, from provost Lon Kaufman, also warns that it’s important, “per the federal mediator, for both sides to refrain from using social media to discuss issues being presented and discussed in mediation.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I write to update you on the status of the collective bargaining negotiations between the university and the faculty union. After 17 months of negotiations and reaching agreements on a range of significant items, last month the union and the university requested the aid of a federal mediator to expedite bargaining over the remaining items....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you want the details, here’s what William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said they said. Here’s a sample of Donohue’s own output. And here are the statements from Edwards and the two bloggers. Salon‘s Alex Koppelman and Rebecca Traister have been on the case. Media Matters documents the noncoverage of a similar situation involving John McCain and a right-wing blogger who not only engaged in what Donohue now wants to call hate speech but didn’t disclose that McCain had employed him....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My column last week, “In Praise of Selling Out,” on the advertising industry’s adoption of indie rock, has generated probably the most mail of any piece I’ve written so far. Unsurprisingly, most of it’s been negative. People, and especially people from the glory days of the DIY movement, don’t like seeing the bands in their scene show up on a commercial for burgers or something....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Team USA, the only bright spot was Chicago’s own Peter Yuen, who took fourth place in the individual Viennoiserie category. “This means I get to come back to France in two years to compete in an individual competition,” he said. The scoring for the competition changes from year to year, and much depends upon the personal opinions of the judges, none of whom are from countries with entrants in the competition....

Ukrainian Village and East Village are two slices of the same pie. Both were once farmland, in the days when plank roads connected the settlements on the city’s western frontier to downtown. Both blossomed at the turn of the century as gateways for European immigrants, with soaring Catholic churches as the focal points for the long, low surrounding blocks of modest working-class homes. Both suffered through the disinvestment and blight that ravaged American cities in the 1960s and ’70s, and both are now, in a (freighted) word, revitalized....

When I was in college, and immediately afterwards, my friends and I did a short-lived online magazine. Not many people read it, and it didn’t last long, but at the bare minimum it was good practice. And I enjoyed it, and we scored some good things, including a photo essay from Iraq. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Contra Mark Penn, no. I mean, you could, but you probably won’t, and definitely not from the get-go....

Because he acknowledged no distinction between art and craft, applied his hand to everything from stained glass and sculpture to woodcuts and wallpaper, and made masterworks of stairwells, reading nooks, and doorways, Edgar Miller is usually portrayed as a latter-day disciple of William Morris, the English designer who helped found the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement. But as Richard Cahan and Michael Williams make clear in the long biographical essay that opens their new coffee-table book, Edgar Miller and the Handmade Home, Miller had plenty of inspiration available to him right at home in Idaho Falls, Idaho, the little town where he was born in December 1899....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week’s New Yorker carried an interesting personal essay by Charles Van Doren, the Columbia University instructor who became a star on the 1950s quiz show Twenty One and then an object of disgrace when the public learned that the show was fixed by the producers. Movie fans probably know that story from Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Quiz Show (1994), but Van Doren’s essay also details his life after the scandal, including the genesis of the movie....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Journalist turned cattle rancher and conservationist Bill Kurtis of Tallgrass Beef gives a talk at Fox & Obel Thursday from 6 to 7:30 PM about the pros of grass-fed, hormone- and antibiotic-free beef: he says it’s more sustainable, tastes better, and is healthier than beef from corn-fed cattle raised in feed lots. Samples of meat loaf and flank steak prepared from recipes in his Prairie Table Cookbook will let attendees judge for themselves; a copy of the book is included in the registration fee....

Nicole speaks to her husband, Wajahat, at night before she goes to sleep, when he is waking up in Lahore, Pakistan. Or they talk in the afternoon, when she is getting out of her organic chemistry class at Roosevelt University and he is getting ready for bed. She doesn’t know when, or if, she’ll see him again. Some of Nicole’s friends suspected the couple’s religious and cultural differences would be too big to overcome, but she says those differences ended up mattering little....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A gay rights ordinance introduced in 1973 had been languishing in committee for a decade, while mainstream gay leaders waited for what they deemed would be “the right moment” to bring the bill up for a vote. They banked on the support of Mayor Jane Byrne–but the playing field changed after Byrne lost reelection in a three-way race between herself, Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M....

Jazz dance today covers a lot of ground. Diehards can still expect sky-high kicks and superhuman layouts from the festival Gus Giordano started in 1990—but this year’s edition also includes tap as well as works of unjazzy introspection and hip-hop-inflected social commentary. Here’s a list of some highlights. For full lineups, go to jazzdanceworldcongress.org. The festival opens with the premiere screening of a documentary about Giordano, Gus: An American Icon, Wed 7/22, 6 PM, only open to opening-night ticket holders....

In the April 17 runoff election, 32nd Ward alderman Ted Matlak was backed by Mayor Daley, Congressman Luis Gutierrez, Congressman Rahm Emanuel, House Speaker Michael Madigan, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and Alderman Tom Tunney, who ventured over from his adjoining Lakeview ward to walk door-to-door on Matlak’s behalf. It was close–the election hung on a mere 121 votes. But the runoff itself was a sign of a significant rebellion growing in Bucktown, Wicker Park, Roscoe Village, Lakeview, and other 32nd Ward neighborhoods....

Local label Tall Pat Records, headed up by the vertically gifted Patrick Sullivan, released its first slab of wax last March—the debut self-titled LP from local garage-pop band Dumpster Babies—and tomorrow night, Fri 11/7, Sullivan will celebrate Cuddlestock: a four-way record release party at Empty Bottle. Over the past year, Sullivan has kept a steady stream of local acts busy, releasing material from bands like Flesh Panthers and the Man, but Cuddlestock is a celebration of a hugely ambitious task, and we get to see him simultaneously drop four local releases in one night: new records from Hollow Mountain, Son of a Gun, Negative Scanner, and the Bingers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Personally I’d feel slightly less queasy if the S-T hadn’t killed off Zay Smith’s clever, amusing “QT” while keeping on zeitgeist cliche factory Richard Roeper. I’ve suggested before that the Sun-Times could save column inches by keeping on Roeper, who is undeniably popular, but just letting him write headlines and subheds, which generally suffice for his column: When Jennifer Hudson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2007, she devoted most of her acceptance speech to her family....

The music people at advertising agencies are like anyone else in the music industry except that their jobs are even more blatantly about commercial functionality than art, which some might see as crass but can also be refreshingly honest. Like the music biz in general, music producers at ad agencies are more than willing to brazenly copy a sound that’s been successful for someone else. Cross that willingness with the relatively new concept of advertisements having a secondary job as a music discovery platform, let unimaginative ad music producers copy each other a few dozen or hundred times, and we end up with situations such as the one where any music that remotely resembles Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky—chiming, delay-saturated clean-tone guitar arpeggios plus slow, sweeping chord progressions and lots of cymbal washes—automatically sounds like it should be selling us a Mercedes-Benz Year End Event....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oden is a Japanese winter stew in which all sorts of absorbent, wiggly, squishy bits simmer for hours—even days—in a broth based on dashi, soy sauce, and mirin. I had my first taste of it a few months ago at the great izakaya Torihei, in Torrance, California. There it’s served in a fairly refined “Kyoto style”—you order individual bites of “white radish,” “hanpen fish cake,” or “half raw egg with salmon roe,” and out comes the particular morsel bathing in a small bowl of light dashi....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chef Pete Repak, a veteran of Charlie Trotter’s, has designed a menu of small plates divided into categories like “handfuls,” “fork and knife,” and “brewer’s favorites,” seemingly at random. The portion sizes and average prices across the sections were very similar (except for “between bread”—the burger and sandwiches are bigger), and if there was another organizing factor I couldn’t identify it....