Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lyric fully delivers on the passion its billboards have been promising in this production of Richard Strauss’s 1909 one-act, which, in the wrong hands (or throats), can seem like an hour and 40 minutes of screaming (in German). In this case, it’s gorgeously sung by Goerke, who’s on for all but the first few minutes. It’s also compellingly staged by director David McVicar, with a stunning, ruined-world set and some eye-popping costumes by designer John Macfarlane....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m glad I was able to spend some time with Edward when he came to Chicago for a retrospective of his films at the Film Center (before it was the Gene Siskel Film Center) in late 1997–one of the few such retrospectives he had anywhere, to the best of my knowledge. Reflecting on why so many of his films should remain out of reach, I’m reminded of the little-known fact that a surprisingly large amount of the art cinema of both Taiwan and Hong Kong is financed by gangsters–or so it would appear, according to some of my more knowledgeable friends–which may or may not help to explain such anomalies as his films remaining inaccessible....

Foreign filmmakers are rarely well served by their excursions into Hollywood, but for South Korean director Chan-wook Park, the guiding hand of Fox Searchlight may not have been a bad thing: this erotic psychodrama rivals his Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005) in its bold color and delirious compositions but avoids the ritualized sadism that made those films such dubious pleasures. The screenplay—written by first-timer Wentworth Miller but worked over by the kinky Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, Chloe)—is a sexualized take on Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Businesses and governments across the country are struggling to figure out how to pay their bills, Daley noted, making his point with an extended metaphor that ended up sounding like he was wishing he could sail away from it all. “I think everybody’s in the same boat. No one’s outside the boat. Everyone’s in the boat—that’s one thing they are....

Chicago takes its improv seriously, and there’s no better proof of that than the Chicago Improv Festival. Now in its 15th year, this weeklong fest features more than 75 acts at ten venues. Here are highlights for each day. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An all-female trio called the Playboys headline Tuesday’s sole show. They’ll be onstage in the E.T.C. space at Second City (6:30 PM, 1608 N....

“[People] believe what they believe, they support who or what they support, and no amount of reason or evidence is going to change that.” Bingo: “The Triblocal.com kind of citizen journalism has at least one conspicuous defect—nothing gets written about unless somebody feels like doing the writing.” Comments on “Sympathy for the Devil?” by Harold Henderson, January 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rick Perlstein: “I have always admired conservatives for their political idealism, acumen, stalwartness, and devotion....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mame, Jerry Herman’s 1966 musical version of Auntie Mame, opens 10/16 at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace , with veteran actress Barbara Robertson as the socialite who takes her orphaned nephew under her wing. Wacky, wonderful Mame Dennis Burnside may inhabit Depression-era Manhattan, but her roots are right here in Chicago. She first saw life as the heroine of a 1955 novel by Chicago-born, North Shore-bred Edward Everett Tanner III, a 1938 graduate of Evanston Township High School....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not the first time Cooke’s quit the Sun-Times. He was editor in chief from 2000 to 2004, when he quit to become editor in chief of the New York Daily News. That job didn’t work out and Cruickshank brought him back to Chicago in 2005 as vice president, editorial for the news group — meaning top editor of every paper but the Sun-Times itself....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 3:15 PM: If past editions are any precedent, there won’t be too many people braving the afternoon sun as Chicago’s Outer Minds play the weekend’s first notes, which is a shame, because they’ve become one of the city’s catchiest hard-rocking bands. I’ll probably sneak out a little early, though, to catch part of Lower Dens. 4:30 PM: I have some mild curiosity to see what Olivia Tremor Control, one of several back-from-the-dead bands on this year’s schedule, sound like now....

Serious rap fans have always considered Nelly to be a guilty pleasure at best and the walking embodiment of crossover-ambitious wackness at worst. “Country Grammar” may bang (especially the radio edit, which improves the chorus’s vocal cadence), but that can be terribly hard to remember when he’s recording cheesy midtempo ballads with Tim McGraw. If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name “Nelly” is superfluous facial Band-Aids, the second is probably early-aughts hip-hop at its most eagerly radio friendly....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in January I blogged about a new series from the folks at reissue specialists Numero Group, and now that I’ve had some time to check out the first installment in their Local Customs project it’s clear that the label keeps getting better. The new release called Downriver Revival focuses on the output of Felton Williams, a self-made record producer who operated his own Double U Sound in the rec room of his family home in Ecorse, Michigan, about seven miles south of Detroit, between 1967 and ’73....

A lot of my tweets are from when I’m half asleep or drunk or something. In real life, if you say things like, “A long time ago a dog stood up on two legs and got sad and that’s where humans came from,” people kind of dismiss it, or they’re like, “Uh, let’s not talk about this.” There’s not really a point in any conversation to insert that thought, but on Twitter you can just say these little tiny things that don’t have to have any context or introduction....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today at 1 PM the local film preservation outfit Chicago Film Archives launches its first-ever sale of 16-millimeter prints, which are being liquidated to make shelf room for more acquisitions. The items for sale include episodes of the 70s cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, the landmark miniseries Roots, and the PBS series America: A Personal History of the United States, hosted by Alistair Cooke....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel like a terrible person for so many reasons. I told my boyfriend—he didn’t respond emotionally, and after 45 minutes he got up and left and said he’d call me when he knew how he felt. I want him to forgive me, but I have a feeling he can’t. I don’t want to cause him any more pain than I already have, but I have no idea how to do that....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times and the Trib have various details on the city’s new parking deal. In short: the city sold all the parking meters to Chicago Parking Meter LLC, aka two Morgan Stanley funds and a parking company, which will subsequently jack up the rates, most from $0.25 to $1. The immediate reaction to any price increase is outrage, but in the abstract it’s clever:...

According to Phillip Jackson, the other candidates vying to be state rep from the 26th District would be wise not to discount Phillip Jackson. “Some people would say, ‘You’re too independent. You’re always doing what’s right for the people.’ That is correct,” he says. “The other guys, they’ve got billboards. They’ve got robocalls, they’ve got mailings—good! Keep it up! All we do is touch the people.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Last week DePaul graduate student Marty Gleason went public about his mounting load of debt in an appeal to Congress to keep the interest rate on student loans at 3.4 percent. His situation is hardly unusual. Student debt in this country has surpassed the trillion- dollar mark—exceeding even total credit card debt—and is still climbing. And a lot of it is owed by English and philosophy majors now working as baristas, or not at all....

In 1990, a year when the American appetite for industrial resources was fixed in the direction of the Persian Gulf, a woman named Cheung Yan moved from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. Cheung was born in 1957 in northern China. She came to Hong Kong by way of the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, the country’s first “special economic zone”—an early laboratory in the Chinese capitalist experiment. Cheung worked there as an accountant; after she’d saved some money, she formed a business in Hong Kong, with two partners, to ship wastepaper within China....

One early morning last month, a dozen Chicago chefs crowded into Stan Schutte’s kitchen, listening to the stocky, buzz-cut farmer talk about the owls, hawks, and coyotes that harass his animals. “Coyotes I’m not so friendly to,” he said. “I will kill a coyote. They’re not so bad this time of year, but once it gets cold they’ll start coming in closer and closer, and that’s when they start to get a little bit greedy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That leaves as your “strongest” candidates Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty. Romney was a one-term governor of Massachusetts. Pawlenty is partway into his second term. Neither has any political experience outside of state or local politics, unless you count being CEO of the Winter Olympics. Neither is/was overwhelmingly popular as governor, although they held their own. Neither is particularly charismatic....