Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had the name of a Times Escapes editor but I didn’t have his phone number, so I did the obvious thing — I visited the Times home page to find the paper’s main number in New York, where a living person — or, more likely, a disembodied voice — could connect me to the editor. “Contact us” took me to plenty of e-mail addresses I didn’t want and to extensions where I could record messages that would be read in due time by departments I had no interest in speaking with....

“Oh, this one’s a walk in the park,” thought Ingi Sigurdsson on learning he’d been challenged with sweet potato by Barrelhouse Flat barkeep Mark Brinker. Sigurdsson, now head bartender at the 16th-floor Terrace at Trump, previously worked as a sous chef at the Aviary, which actually had a sweet potato cocktail on the menu at the time. That and his improvised swizzle stick. The “real” ones, he told us, are made from a plant native to the Caribbean (Quararibea turbinata, aka the “swizzlestick tree,” to be precise)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His work on the subject reads a lot like Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, only for the computer age. Gaddis — who wrote ad copy for IBM among other major corporations — saw the instrument as symbolic of a shift towards a binary mode of thought (“the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no”), the triumph of entertainment over art, the move from creation to consumption....

Every spring Baseball Prospectus dusts off its algorithm, the formula that guides the computer that crunches the numbers and makes Baseball Prospectus devastating competition for Hot Type’s Golden BAT. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I digress. When the choice is between an algorithm on the one hand and what Hot Type generously chooses to call human wisdom on the other—well it’s no choice....

The Glenwood Avenue Arts Fest presents music (as well as a bit of dance and theater) on three stages from noon till 8 PM this Saturday and Sunday in Rogers Park, on Glenwood from Farwell to Lunt and along the 1400 block of Morse. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Morseland presents the Morse Stage, at Morse and Greenview, where Saturday’s highlights include Deal’s Gone Bad and soulful hard rockers the Black Diamond Heavies, one of the few out-of-town bands at the fest (they also play an aftershow at Morseland); Sunday’s lineup features Elephant Gun and Ifficial Reggae....

True story: Gossip Wolf once started a gay-positive crust-punk band called buttfl@pz. We got a Wolfbrigade tat and worked our tail into a fierce dreadlock for a few weeks. We even recorded a demo tape, My Other House Is a Pink Boxcar. The only person who currently owns a copy is Felix Havoc. (Felix, we’d like that back.) Anyway, we’re feeling a little homesick for the scene. Luckily, it looks like the scene is coming to us....

Sheldon Patinkin was 17 in 1952 when he fell into what turned out to be theater history. A precocious kid from South Shore, he’d entered the University of Chicago at 15 and was majoring in English lit. But he’d also done opera, plays, even a little radio, and started gravitating toward the student theater club, University Theater. That’s where he met Paul Sills, a charismatic fellow student whose mother, Viola Spolin, had developed a set of theater games she’d been using in workshops with young people....

Pépé le Moko This past Friday, Northwestern University’s Block Cinema concluded its series dedicated to legendary film programmer and cinephile Henri Langlois with a screening of L’Atalante, Jean Vigo’s unwavering masterpiece, easily among the most beautiful films ever made. Langlois’s relationship with the film is well-known. During his stint as head of the Cinematheque Francaise, he famously attempted to restore the film using both the domestic theatrical print and footage found in different versions from around the world, a sort of atonement for what he considered his own inadequacy compared to Vigo’s artistry....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Baseball’s one-game play-in for each league’s two wild-card teams is too random a way to determine which team gets to advance,” Zorn declared in the Tribune Sunday and on his blog site. “Single games can have utterly flukey results.” He’s right about that. The teams with the best records in baseball this season—the Red Sox and Cardinals—won three out of every five games....

A year ago, Miguel del Valle was running for mayor. His resume was outstanding. He’d risen from blue-collar roots on Chicago’s near-northwest side to the state senate, where he was a leading liberal voice for 20 years. Five years as city clerk after that had schooled him on the workings of Chicago government. He was widely regarded as smart, industrious, and honest. His chances of winning were zero. The who’s who of big donors to Emanuel also included Steve Jobs and his wife ($50,000 each), and Donald Trump ($50,000)....

The stage at the Portage Theater doesn’t usually serve any purpose aside from putting a gap of maybe 20 feet between the first row of seats and the screen. But on the afternoon of Sunday, March 21, it was hotly contested territory. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The style is called footwork. At heart it’s a Chicago phenomenon, but a dancer who goes by Bobo—here with the west-side crew Nemesis—tells me it’s starting to spread, mostly to larger cities in the midwest....

Vera Videnovich Elizabeth Alice Crum I smiled when I heard Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” blast through the speakers while I watched nautically inspired crochet work come down the runway at this year’s School of the Art Institute spring student fashion show, the Walk. The choice of music seemed a little over-the-top for what, at first glance, was a subdued color palette with conservative shapes—until I noticed that the designer’s work included heavier elements weighing down its fine handworked details....

ABC, The Bachelor Bachelor Sean, Will you accept this compromise? It would be easy to dismiss ABC’s The Bachelor as reality schlock. The premise is absurd, and as one of the longest-running reality series on network, its patterns have become so predictable that the show seems to fall willingly into self-parody. I admire anyone who’s never watched it, and don’t believe anyone who claims to know nothing about it—but just to be safe, the show works like this: A twentysomething, single man is presented with 25 potential female mates....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve written often about fantastic trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, an Oak Park native, who discovered the music of his Iraqi roots long after becoming a seriously skilled jazz musician. Years before he became interested in Iraqi maqam,* his sister Dena had already become immersed in the tradition, traveling to Iraq with their father in 1990 and learning the music and Arabic upon her return....

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, and several local institutions have mined their collections to recount the war’s history, from its convoluted origins through its devastating aftermath. These include the Newberry Library, which uses newspapers and photographs from its archive to show the role Chicagoans played “over there,” and the Art Institute, which highlighted the contributions of photographer Edward Steichen to, among other things, U....

Il Covo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Italian men making Italian food” appears to be the motto of the revamped Il Covo: I heard it twice on the phone and once in person when I went to scope it out. But it’s not just marketing talk–the concept works. This bilevel Bucktown Italian spot–under new management and with new chefs in the kitchen–is much improved from its earlier days as an uninspired purveyor of Australian-Italian fusion cuisine....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carrothers gigs regularly around the U.S. and in Europe, but his profile remains unjustly low, in part because he lives in a relatively out-of-the-way place. Since settling in Michigan he’s made a series of low-key records for his own Bridge Boy Music imprint, including several that wed his deep interest in history to his love for jazz–in separate collections he improvises on music associated with the Civil War and World War I....

Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor Tears for Fears, Songs From the Big Chair I’d heard this album many times, but when a recent reissue prompted me to revisit it, the music connected with me in a huge way. Part of the reason is that “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is just a massive song, probably one of my 25 favorites. But there isn’t a bum track here (at least not on the original release), and you can hear the influence of Songs From the Big Chair on virtually every big synth-pop album that followed it—Depeche Mode, INXS, the Cure, the Blue Nile....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Music and balmy 80-degree weather make for a perfect summer night, especially when it comes right after a torturous heat wave that can only be explained as the wrath of God. Everyone at the Wilco and Andrew Bird show this Sunday at the ballpark in Geneva seemed buoyed by the long-awaited temperature drop, from the performers to the guys hawking beer in the stands....

At the turn of this century Rich Cahan led the massive yearlong photography project, Chicago in the Year 2000, or CITY 2000. Now the year 2000 recedes into history, in ways those thousands of pictures have begun to intimate. “They’re starting to get old enough to have that beautiful second dimension that only photographs can have,” Cahan says. “They’re just a tiny bit off. In ten years they’ll be a little more off....