The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, presenting weekday shows for school field trips, weekend shows for families, and kids’ workshops on a variety of cinematic topics. This year’s workshops include sessions on optical effects (Sat 10/26, 10 AM, Instituto Cervantes), computer animation (Sat 10/26, noon, Illinois Institute of Art), motion-capture technology (Sat 10/26, 1 PM, Facets Multimedia), stop-motion animation (Sat 11/2, 11 AM, Facets Multimedia), live improvisation (Sat 11/2, 12:45 PM, Music Box), and gender constructs in film, for girls who don’t yet understand why they’re so pissed off (Sat 11/2, 1 PM, Facets Multimedia)....

A few weeks ago when Frontier chef Brian Jupiter and his crew carried a whole barbecued lamb into the dining room, they got a mixed reaction. Then there’s Jupiter’s regular menu, which features barbecued rabbit with blackberry sauce, venison-black bean chili, pulled boar sandwiches, and braised elk shepherd’s pie (for the recipe see our blog the Food Chain). It’s easily the most game-focused collection of dishes in town. And though the chef admits his partners Mark Domitrovich and Dan McCarthy (who also own the Pony and Lottie’s) were going for a dude-centric customer base, he says he’s selling the wild animals to equal numbers of men and women....

Welles in Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report) It’s a good time to be looking up at the movies. Two high-profile recent releases, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain and Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, employ the low-angle shot like it’s going out of style; and the Music Box Theatre is in the middle of an ongoing series devoted to Orson Welles, the filmmaker most commonly associated with that device. Welles is the king of the low-angle shot, in part because the device fits so well with his theatrical aesthetic—it makes an impression similar to looking up at a stage from the orchestra pit....

Victor Jeffreys II Girma Yifrashewa When most folks think of Ethiopian music they hear the slithering soul-funk sounds created by artists like Mahmoud Ahmed or Tilahun Gessesse—killer singers who delivered Amharic-language jams with raspy finesse and earthy grunts—and the so-called Ethio-jazz of the keyboardist and vibist Mulatu Astatke. All of their work employs a pinched pentatonic scale, giving the music its otherworldly quality to western ears. The young pianist Girma Yifrashewa is on to something totally different, following the path laid out by the Ethiopian nun and fellow pianist Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Gebrou, who developed a distinctive sound and repertoire that borrowed its touch from European classical music and its rolling energy from the blues while retaining a distinctly native melodic feel....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sala Bua, at the far-eastern reach of the Chinatown Mall in the space that housed the late Tao Ran Ju, has a menu of familiar Ameri-Thai standards (crab Rangoon, pad thai, etc), but it’s also been getting some attention for being upfront about serving a lot of things non-Thais used to have to ferret out on so-called secret menus; things like Isan sausage, spicy raw shrimp with fish sauce (goong chae nam pla), and four varieties of papaya salad (with dried shrimp, raw blue crab, salted crab, or pickled fish)....

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photos That’s one happy Republican. As one of the last New Deal Democrats left in Chicago, there are few things I find more sobering than the sight of Bruce Rauner—big smile on his face, thumb raised in the air—triumphantly declaring: “The voters have spoken.” All in all, yesterday’s election was a great day for plutocrats. Maybe my man Matt Farmer will be inspired to write a song or two about it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That doesn’t happen so much anymore. I’m not sure whether it’s because, as I got older, I learned the habit of reading “critically” and how to pick out literary devices and how they worked, which meant that I could now try to outsmart the writers, or because, as Daniel Pinkwater once said, books for kids are meant to be entertaining, while books for adults are meant to calm them down before they go to sleep....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Violinist Austin Wulliman is one of the busiest figures in Chicago’s bustling contemporary classical music scene these days, working endlessly as a member of envelope-pushing groups like Spektral Quartet and Ensemble Dal Niente, in addition to countless, unnamed short-term collaborations. On Friday night at Defibrillator Gallery he’ll show off another such partnership, although this one has quietly been developing for a year....

My favorite idea that came out of the Chicago Journalism Town Hall, held at the Allegro recently with about 350 in attendance, was beautiful in its simplicity. I am ashamed that I cannot recall who said it, but it was this: It would be stupid to buy a newspaper. The Trib? The Sun-Times? Hell, the Reader and its fellow papers? In other words: journalism isn’t dying. (Journalists are dying, of course, but even I don’t blame the Huffington Post for that....

Maybe I am caught up in the Holiday Season but I am now in phase of looking back over the year in terms of relationships. I came across a lot of damaged items over the past year and yeah, as I own too many sweaters so I really have no room in my closet for skeletons, mine or others. I noticed I had a habit of hanging around too long in the relationship but I can only attribute to fact finding and putting that Sociology degree to good use....

A screenshot of Chaz Allen DJing SPF420 Fest I expected to hear chopped-and-screwed samples of slot machines when I logged onto Tinychat to check out the third incarnation of SPF420 fest last night. After all, producer and SPF420 cohost Chaz Allen (aka Metallic Ghosts) did tell me the online fest would be casino themed when I interviewed him for my B Side feature on vaporwave, an online microscene that received a hint of outside exposure for a series of sample-based albums that drew from chintzy 80s music....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In mid-February a label called Star Apple Kingdom gave the “deluxe edition” reissue treatment to Cotton Mather‘s Kontiki. “Cotton who?” you may ask. Cotton Mather the band (as opposed to Cotton Mather the Puritan minister) were a trio from Austin, Texas, that released one of the sharpest guitar-pop albums of the past 20 years. Kontiki, which came out in 1997 on the tiny Copper Records, is precise, superhooky, inventively produced, and heavily Beatlesque (I’ve never heard their 1994 debut, Cotton Is King)....

Maybe you could persuade a pushover promoter or bar owner to let your band play a 21-and-up spot if only one member is underage, provided the youngster has a guardian around and vacates the premises immediately after the set. But everyone in Twin Peaks is a teenager—on a couple occasions they’ve showed up at venues with their gear and gotten bounced at the door. Too bad they can’t use their EP Sunken as ID—already self-released via Bandcamp and due for a reissue through Autumn Tone on July 9, it’s full of catchy, well-crafted garage pop that sounds much older than their years, with a hint of 70s Marc Bolan glam and swagger sewn in....

JoJo Baby had three heroes in this world. He’d met Boy George, but he’d missed the chance to talk to Muppets creator Jim Henson before he died. So when the last of the trio, Clive Barker, came to town in 2008, JoJo was going to do whatever it took. JoJo took the shirt to Packer Schopf for a Barker book signing and was finally able to make contact. Barker not only accepted the gift—he paid a visit to JoJo’s Closet, the gallery in Wicker Park’s Flat Iron Building that’s choked with JoJo’s plaster-cast erections, his hundreds of antique dolls, and dozens of his “children”—the fantastic but eerily verisimilar dolls he constructs from salvaged materials....

Brettly Kawaguchi, Booking agent at the Heartland Cafe, enjoys: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I’m not booking shows and working at the Heartland Cafe and Red Line Tap, I spend a majority of my time at Extreme Kung Fu (EKF) training in martial arts, mainly San Shou and Muay Thai. It’s a place I can get away from it all, so to speak, and do something I still love to do....

If you’re looking to add a little pizazz and a dose of touched-by-a-celebrity enchantment to your copy of Guitar Hero 2, eBay’s got you right now. MusiCares is auctioning off a bunch of GH2 controllers with custom detaiing by My Chemical Romance, Dashboard Confessional, the Rocket Summer, and Armor for Sleep. AfS wins the emo-est paint job award for their inscription, “When your dreams are granted, you will regret having slept,” but if that’s not your thing, there are also guitars by Nickelback and Buckcherry, which might be worth a bid on the off-chance that they come infused with whatever douchebag voodoo keeps those bands frustratingly unkillable....

WINTER’S BONE Directed by Debra Granik Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Believe it or not, there are still places in the U.S. that are isolated, inbred, and insular, where poverty and tradition keep people rooted to the land and bound to each other. Debra Granik’s gripping drama Winter’s Bone takes place in the dirt-poor Ozarks, far from the electronic squall of mass culture, and the cloistered setting is so central to the characters’ problems that it almost seems like a character in itself....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before resuming my media patrol after ten days in the northwest, I want to say a word about the mode of transportation that got me there and brought me back. Flying has changed. Perhaps influenced by my choice of reading material on this holiday, Camus’ The Plague, I observed that flying has become a collective misery so extreme that a collective human decency is emerging in response....

Spotted at last weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival: On Friday Coco Gordon Moore (18-year-old daughter of Sonic Youth’s Gordon and Moore) stopped by the HoZac Records table to drop off a demo by her band, Big Nils. (This Wolf took a spin around their Bandcamp page, and it sounds like they have the HoZac aesthetic down cold!) On Saturday locally grown comedian and 30 Rock writer Hannibal Buress took in Schoolboy Q’s set from the VIP section while Chicago cult rapper Sharkula smoked up with some fans before Hot Chip....

Halloween Events Boolesque Revue Piccolo Theater’s Halloween burlesque show. Thu 10/29, 8 PM, Evanston Arts Depot, 600 Main, Evanston, 847-424-0089, piccolotheatre.com, $15-$25. Cinegasm This Halloween bash features music by the Lifeline, Diagon Alley, and Seven Day Sonnet, burlesque by the Chicago Starlets, video and performance art, costume contests, and drink specials. Sat 10/31, 10 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, 312-949-0121 or 866-468-3401, reggieslive.com/rockclub, $15, $12 with costume, 18+....