[Plus: Our guide to week one of the Chicago International Film Festival] This year the festival presents a number of Chicago projects as part of its ongoing “Illinois[e]makers” series. There are the feature documentaries Louder Than a Bomb and Tony & Janina’s American Wedding (both of which are reviewed in our festival guide). There are Carmen Marron’s inspirational dance drama Go for It! and Julian Grant’s zombie thriller The Defiled, and the eclectic shorts program “Illinois[e]makers....

Art collectors in town for Expo Chicago this weekend have an opportunity to see something they won’t find anywhere else on the international art-fair circuit. The South Side Community Art Center—the only surviving center of more than a hundred launched by the Works Progress Administration—has Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Displayed in SSCAC’s landmark home, an 1893 brownstone with a Bauhaus interior, it features the work of 44 black male artists, most of them local, all with ties to Chicago....

Devon and Beyond Bhabi’s Kitchen6352 N. Oakley | 773-764-7007 The exceedingly friendly Ali Khawaja appears to have sunk a lot of naan into his restaurant on the sleepy eastern end of Devon Avenue’s Indo-Pak strip. The room is crammed with elaborately carved and painted tables and high-backed chairs, and the walls are bedecked with Pakistani handicrafts Khawaja traveled the homeland to procure. Khawaja, who owns another restaurant in Los Angeles, grills zabiha halal meats, and he’s not afraid to see what sort of guts you’re made of....

Correction: This article misspelled Mr. Spadafora’s first name. We regret the error. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Years ago, if I liked one book by a particular author, I would read everything they wrote. This fall while on a trip to Maine, I stopped in a bookstore and purchased Leeway Cottage, a novel by Beth Gutcheon. I liked it so much that I downloaded the sequel Good-bye and Amen: (P....

If Spertus Museum director Rhoda Rosen had cooked up a piece of performance art to launch her new exhibit, Imaginary Coordinates, it couldn’t have been more surreal than the events that have played out at that center for Judaica over the past month. Spertus’s intriguing contribution to the map festival that’s been running at city cultural institutions since last year, Imaginary Coordinates juxtaposes antique and modern maps of the Holy Land (mostly from Spertus’s own collection) with the work of eight contemporary Israeli and Palestinian artists....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A weird thing happened a couple of years ago. All of a sudden there were a bunch of great DJs, producers, and rappers in Chicago, bringing together the hip-hop scene and the burgeoning postgenre underground club culture (which popped up after electroclash sputtered out and M.I.A.’s Arular dropped) like no one else in the country, attracting all kinds of media attention—and then they just didn’t follow through with the records we were all expecting from them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what I was thinking, planting so much summer squash this year, but the reliably prolific vegetables are about the only thing that’s doing well in this cool, wet, sorry excuse for a summer. I can see the vines stretch forward hungrily every time the neighbor’s kids venture into the backyard, and a bunch of Papua New Guinean yam cultists have begun holding midnight rites before the titanic zucchinis and yellow squashes I’ve ignored on the ground....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Black metal had an interesting year in 2011. Records by Liturgy and Wolves in the Throne Room, two American bands, topped year-end lists at outlets both expected and highly unlikely, stirring up controversy and bringing out haters all across the metal world. Criticism of these bands ranges from more or less reasonable if not terribly sympathetic (purists see Liturgy et al as snotty trust funders exploiting a subculture they don’t understand—the word “hipster” gets thrown around a lot) to childish and absurd (I read a post on Metal Sucks that compares Liturgy front man Hunter Hunt-Hendrix to Justin Bieber)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicagø (abbreviated CGØ), the local branch of San Francisco-based alternate-reality game/site/creator SFZero, is hosting the Architect & the Urchin, its second-ever free street game, starting tonight at 7:30 PM at Washington Square Park (900 N. Dearborn). The rules are a bit complicated, but basically you search for 12 secrets hidden within a 1.5-mile radius of the park and collect ribbons from other players....

It’s not as if these three companies couldn’t find places to perform. One of them, Theatre Zarko, even has a little studio of its own, suitable for putting on shows. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the bunch, Livewire is dealing with the most conventional material. Playwright Bekah Brunstetter has been through the MFA system and clearly absorbed its lore, so her Oohrah!, unsurprisingly, is a smart, well-structured, just-goofy-enough, small-cast dramedy dealing with a current social issue at the domestic level....

I admire Beau O’Reilly. Over the decades, nobody’s stuck with the ideal of rough-hewn storefront idiosyncrasy more resolutely than he. His approach, though, pretty much guarantees crazy variation–even within a single production. This one by the Curious Theatre Branch, for instance. Directed by O’Reilly from a motley script written “both individually and collaboratively” by Scott T. Barsotti, Matthew Rieger, Buddy Rivara, and Adam Rosenberg, the play has its moments: specifically, those where Barsotti plays a logorrheic tourist feeding ducks with what can only be called a vengeance....

One sunny March morning, freed murder convict and tireless rabble-rouser Mark Clements was getting the kind of attention that had eluded him in the nearly three decades he spent in prison. Clements was leading a small rally outside the dreary Cook County Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California. The demonstrators were celebrating the fact that Jon Burge, the notorious former Chicago police commander, would be reporting to prison in North Carolina on this particular day to begin a four-and-a-half-year sentence for obstruction of justice and perjury....

William Hurt in Altered States On Tuesday at 7 PM the Harris Theater will host a special screening of Ken Russell’s 1980 cult favorite Altered States with a 100-piece orchestra performing a live accompaniment alongside the film. The composer of the score, John Corigliano, will be in attendance and take part in a Q&A after the movie. It’s one of four Chicago events Corigliano plans to attend next week as part of a citywide celebration of his 75th birthday....

Gem 1710 N. Damen 773-384-7700 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An engagement ring doesn’t have to be a giant rock of ice—even Princess Diana went for something different, a blue sapphire surrounded by small diamonds. For those who want an engagement ring that they can wear and not the opposite, I always suggest Gem, a small jewelry boutique in Bucktown that offers creations by independent designers as well as vintage pieces—and has a reputation as a destination for couples seeking diamonds that were ethically sourced....

As a political fable, Max Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter is pretty great. Variously known to English-speaking audiences as The Firebugs, The Fire Raisers, and—in a 2007 translation by Alistair Beaton (apparently the one used in this new Trap Door Theatre production, though it’s attributed to “Alistair Bead” in the program)—The Arsonists, Frisch’s wicked piece of writing gives us Gottlieb Biedermann, a wealthy burgher who manufactures a useless hair elixir called Follica Plus and owns a fine house in a town that’s been shaken lately by a rash of arsons....

From Jonathan Demme’s I’m Carolyn Parker, the Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful All this month the Chicago Public Library will celebrate Women’s History Month with free screenings of documentaries about notable women and women’s issues. The series began this past Saturday at the Harold Washington Library Center with Patti Smith: Dream of Life (it plays again at the Lincoln Belmont Library on March 26) and continues today at the Greater Grand Crossing Library with The Principal Story, a 2009 PBS documentary about a dedicated public school principal....

Now in its second year, Chicago Craft Beer Week features dozens of tastings, beer dinners, brewery tours, and new brew debuts between May 19 and 27 (chibeerweek.com). A Beer Passport, available online and at all events for $10, serves as a guide to the week’s events and a ticket for a few featured events each day (the rest are open to the public and don’t require a passport); it also allows the bearer to earn prizes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Another big beneficiary of the government’s policy of requiring most students to borrow money to get an education and then shielding the lenders from risk is Catherine B. Reynolds, the head of a nonprofit foundation in McLean, Virginia, bearing her name. Despite its legal status as a nonprofit, the Reynolds Foundation does business as EduCap and refers to itself as a company....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For months rumors have circulated that a well-known west-side European delicatessen would be moving into to the abruptly abandoned Delicatessen Meyer space in Lincoln Square. The neighborhood chamber of commerce had little information, and the alderman’s office knew what was up but were annoyingly mum on the subject–even though workers had been gutting the interior for weeks. The Luszcz family, owners of the 37-year-old Gene’s Sausage Shop and Delicatessen at 5330 W....

This astounding Sicilian reedist, whose main instruments are the alto and sopranino saxophones as well as the flute, can play in almost any style and sometimes several at once. On Arcana Maior, a series of solos played in response to a tarot deck, he merges hurtling sound columns a la Evan Parker with the chill lyricism of Jackie McLean. On the trio date People in Motion, with bassist Damon Smith and percussionist Garth Powell, he combines coarse drones and Zorn-like duck-call mayhem....