Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five of the series’ key writer-performers—Joel Hodgson (aka Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (Dr. Clayton Forrester/Crow T. Robot), Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester), Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank), and J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo)—are now touring under the moniker Cinematic Titanic, and last weekend they settled into the Lakeshore Theatre for a three-day run, goofing on three different big-screen atrocities. On Friday, when I got a chance to see the act, their stinker du jour was the 1966 Filipino horror cheapie Blood of the Vampires, directed by Gerardo de Leon (or, as Hodgson identified him, “the man who discovered the fountain of shit”)....

“We’re creative soul mates,” says River North Dance Chicago artistic director Frank Chaves of his relationship with composer Josephine Lee. And at a rehearsal they comfortably switched roles; he turned conductor, advising Lee to make her dynamics “wavier,” and she became a dancer, rocking on her piano bench. Lee heads the Chicago Children’s Choir, but there’s nothing childish about The Good Goodbyes, one of two premieres on RNDC’s Valentine-themed program, “Love Is ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was glad for a guide in Ted Cox, who led me up to the fourth-floor press boxes, where we picked up scorecards and media guides. But the press box would be an arid place to actually watch a game. There’s of course no cheering (though I’m told there are sometimes groans or snorts), and the view in the auxiliary box–far along the third base line, with a partially obstructed view of home plate–is nothing to brag about....

Angels & Mariachis 1721 W. Division | 773-227-7772 Birchwood Kitchen The Bluebird Bon Bon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve always been a champion of the miraculous product of French Indochinese colonization that is the banh mi, so I was excited when Bon Bon Sandwiches moved into this Wicker Park storefront, serving up seven separate banh mi at $3.95 apiece in addition to bubble tea, iced coffee, and a range of Asian sweets....

Gwynedd Stuart Claw, meet bun. Or claw meat bun. Weight- and budget-conscious people say you shouldn’t go to the grocery store when you’re hungry or you’ll leave $30 poorer, but much richer in spreadable cheeses and a variety of things on which to spread them. Another piece of prudent advice: don’t go to a place that specializes in lobster rolls when you’re starving or you end up inhaling rather than savoring a sandwich made of the pricey sea meat....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There could be a cookbook out there with that conceit. But this is not it. This book is actually a guide on how to make jams that will — when you actually enter a jam competition — win a blue ribbon. There are long passages on exhibition rules, tips on how to label your jars, and an exploration of the Danish and American systems of scoring....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But about four months ago the humble Las Tortugas de San Luis opened a block south of the stadium, specializing in a particular variant of the common Mexican torta, that multitextural sandwich otherwise built on the light, hollowed out, and sometimes structurally unstable discus shaped teleras. LTDSL, however, makes seven varieties of tortas in the style of the north-central state of San Luis Potosi....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s time to move on. I’ve become tired of mourning the long slow death of Koreatown in Albany Park and its orbit. It wasn’t very long ago that the neighborhood housed three large Korean groceries, great bars like the Hourglass, and terrific restaurants like Kang Nam and Hai Woon Dae (actually in West Rogers Park, but bear with me)....

Go back to the “Valentine’s Day: Why Bother?”table of contents page Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I remember that first time he came too fast. I was 20 or 21, my junior year abroad. I suppose he was my age. He was from Tunisia. I remember thinking that he looked like a North African Elvis Presley, but in a good way. I remember tight white jeans, and white teeth, and my stopping on the street to yell at him in French: But I am very intelligent in English!...

A more innocent time Growing up in Saint Louis, I acquired an idea about the civic life lived by famous athletes that might not have been universally applicable. Stan Musial was accessible not only outside the ballpark after games but in it as well—in the old Busch Stadium, a catwalk over the concourse connected the Cardinals’ dugout with their locker room, and if you spotted Musial in his cleats clattering across it he’d stop and sign an autograph....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I spoke to him on Saturday, he was introducing three new pastries to his growing repertoire—a Paris-Brest (a dessert shaped like a bicycle wheel, with hazelnut cream filling), a raspberry Jalousie (“basically a Pop Tart”), and a Basque cake. Ory is glad that he came to pastry by way of savory food—”If you start in a specialty, you miss the big picture....

Leonard Aronson is a friend of mine who worked with Murray at the American. He remembers Murray as “a dapper fellow with a bald pate and a thin moustache who exuded an air of mischief and wit. He was a real pro, who’d been around a long time and who, still, was one of the men in the news room who felt accessible and regular and full of charm and willing to share his thoughts and experiences with neophyte reporters just breaking into the game....

Daniel Mason’s luminous 2002 debut novel of the same title takes the literary antecedents of the colonial narrative–notably Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”–and transforms them into an original, engaging, and timely tale. James E. Grote’s smart adaptation, cunningly directed by Jonathan Berry, captures the feverish quality of Mason’s prose and honors the complexity of his characters, who are not quite what they appear. It’s 1886, and a diffident piano tuner (a nuanced Patrick Blashill) is sent from London to work on a rare piano owned by a Kurtz-like British army surgeon (tantalizing enigma Kurt Ehrmann) posted to a region of Burma torn by various factions....

I’ve seen history shows about the Salem witch trials and the accusing girls’ hysteria, but the narrative usually ends with the end of the trials. What happened to the accusers later? Did they recant or insist they told the truth? Were the girls shunned, or did people try to forget what had happened? —L, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » None of the accusers was tried, punished, or publicly reprimanded....

Valentino Rarities is a videotape collection of the silent film star’s early shorts. The Sulzer Regional Library is Chicago’s only public library that carries it. After days spent trying to find out from the library’s top brass what’s going on, late last week we finally received a response. Chicago Public Library spokesperson Ruth Lednicer said via e-mail, “The staff at Sulzer is in the process of consolidating the movies in preparation to move them to the second floor....

Most people who come into Meyers Ace Hardware are on a first-name basis with owner David Meyers, and they’re looking for ordinary household items, such as screws or steel wool. But a few years ago, a jazz trumpeter named Drew Nugent arrived in Bronzeville from Philadelphia. He bought a toilet plunger, asked Meyers to autograph it, then rubbed it against the wall in Meyers’s back office. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Art Prize is doing big things for its little hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. By its own accounting (and as previously discussed here), the three-week contest attracted 200,000 visitors to its inaugural edition last summer by inviting them to decide which of 1,262 entries displayed in 159 downtown venues would win the world’s biggest cash prizes for visual art. It also stirred up enough publicity to put Grand Rapids—best known till now as a furniture-manufacturing center—on the art-world map....

Chicago once appeared to be on the cusp of a new era. Back then, the monarchy had run its course and candidates for office were openly talking about reform, sometimes in complete sentences. On second thought, I’m not sure there ever was a time like that . . . but it was easier to daydream for a few minutes in 2010 after Mayor Daley announced he wasn’t running for reelection. These days Rahm Emanuel—just a year into his first term—is in total control, and a City Council elected on promises of independence has signed off on every major issue he’s put before them....

Despite all his work to elevate the status of improvised music, trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon has been criminally underdocumented, appearing on just 24 records–in any capacity–in his 81 years. In 1964 Dixon helped galvanize the second wave of American free jazz by organizing the October Revolution in Jazz concerts and forming the short-lived but influential Jazz Composer’s Guild; he also taught at Bennington College for 27 years. He transformed his instrument’s language with his microtonal slurs, breath sounds, and long silences, and his use of these techniques in an orchestral setting on the landmark 1967 LP Intents and Purposes (RCA) still sounds like an unmet challenge today....

Thanks to his sturdy bilingual flow, Miami rapper Pitbull has managed to build a career as a valuable utility man, adequately hopping from cameo to cameo on reggateon, dancehall, crunk, and R & B records. Unfortunately he tends to disappear on his own records, enlisting so many collaborators they tend to affect the quality of the music more than he does. On last year’s El Mariel (TVT)—a reference to the 1980 boatlift—the Cuban-American is joined by the Neptunes, Vybz Kartel, Fat Joe, Trick Daddy, and Bun B, among others....