Eileen Ryan Roger Ebert passed away yesterday at the age of 70. When I “came out” as bipolar in a blog post last summer, Roger Ebert was one of the first people to offer encouragement. He told his Facebook followers about my piece and referred to me as “courageous.” Not only was I flattered that he’d do such a thing, I was surprised that he was familiar with my writing at all....

A Correction and a Commendation John Edel is truly crazy. He could be out sailing around the world or sitting in a luxurious mansion overlooking the lake. But rather, this guy decides to re-invest all of his time, energy, and money into making Chicago a better, greener place. Nuts, huh? Several years ago, I was all set to move back to the South and get out of Chicago; I had become disenchanted with the myth of new green spaces becoming available for artists in the city....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I angled around in my seat to show him the cover. “It’s called High Rise Stories, it’s about the Chicago projects.” He said he’d been reading over my shoulder and seen the words “Cabrini-Green” on the page, and that that was where he grew up. I started to tell him more about the book, about how the interviewers spent two years finding people who had lived in CHA housing at different points in the 20th century....

Cheryl L. West’s Pullman Porter Blues traveled nearly 3,000 miles, from Seattle Repertory Theatre to D.C.’s Arena Stage, before landing at the Goodman Theatre. The play’s characters, chugging along in a Pullman sleeping car on the Panama Limited in 1937, go another 700 or so, from Chicago to somewhere this side of Jackson, Mississippi. Yet at the end of the long first act, it’s questionable whether this lumbering behemoth is ever going to get anywhere....

Q OK: Female, married 15 years, one young child. No sex with husband over last five years. Have tried therapy, talking, not talking, confrontation—you name it, Dan, I tried it. Lingerie, kink, porn. Seriously, everything. A year and a half ago I got into a relationship with a married guy, a man who also wasn’t getting any at home. Our agreement is basically this: no strings, no ties that could hurt our families, have as much fun as we can....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at the Velvet Lounge, Ken Vandermark kicks off a mini fest to belatedly celebrate the release of three recordings by three different groups. This evening’s concert is by the reedist’s duo with drummer Tim Daisy (who’ll also be behind the kit the other two nights), which recently put out the superb double LP Light on the Wall (Laurence Family)....

Ted Cox The view from below at Cafe des Architectes Back in May, when we pulled together alfresco picks for our Summer Guide, we weren’t expecting another month of gray skies, flash floods, and temperatures chilly enough to make you curse the weather guesser. But look—quick! The sky is blue and the sun is shining (or at least it was). Here, in honor of the occasion, are some more places to sit back and enjoy the breeze....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I sat out the last couple of SXSWs, but I’ve been coming down here off and on for almost a decade and a half—and in that time, the festival has grown exponentially. I’m at beloved dive bar Beerland right now, and across the street Whole Foods has taken over an entire parking lot to set up food tables and I think a stage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nobody felt especially zinged last night, but you can imagine that Barack Obama walked away from the first presidential debate of the season at least a little tingly, given the thrashing he took from Mitt Romney. Both candidates underwent a weird sort of position switching: Romney seemed during the debate proper—during the humanesque back-and-forth of it—to be comfortable and articulate, saving his beady-eyed-creep routine for the closing statements....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m happy to report that in my long and lucky life I’ve now had a much stronger bash at that last item, thanks to the largesse of a Daddy Warbucks who shall go unnamed and an unplanned postwork stop at Pops for Champagne in its newish location near the Reader. In a nutshell: lovely, fizzy fun. Four of us snuzzled an entire magnum of Nicolas Feuillatte brut, which, to our server’s dismay, showed some sudden personality post-corking and started to run over after a safe-seeming pause....

At 23 years old, I was relearning how to live with a disease I’d had since I was seven. This was not the first time I’d been instructed on diabetes management, but it was the first time I was hearing about it from someone who’d been living with Type 1 diabetes herself. I took what she said and ate it up like the carbohydrates she was teaching me to count....

The Madness of George III is as perfectly realized a play as you’re ever likely to see. In fact, it flirts with coming off a little too perfectly at times, and no wonder: Brit playwright Alan Bennett has had multiple opportunities to fiddle with his already masterful account of an English monarch’s mental breakdown since it first saw light in 1991. Bennett wrote the Oscar-nominated script for the 1994 movie version as well as an adaptation for the American stage....

“The modern Olympics have an especially dark but little-known history,” writes Mike Davis in Planet of Slums. “In preparation for the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis ruthlessly purged homeless people and slum-dwellers from areas of Berlin likely to be seen by international visitors. While subsequent Olympics — including those in Mexico City, Athens, and Barcelona — were accompanied by urban renewal and evictions, the 1988 Seoul games were truly unprecedented in the scale of the official crackdown on poor homeowners, squatters, and tenants: as many as 720,000 people were relocated in Seoul and Injon, leadng a Catholic NGO to claim that South Korea vied with South Africa as ‘the country in which eviction by force is most brutal and inhuman....

Jim Newberry Brokeback I guess we just had our biggest snowstorm of the season this week, but spring is in the air (really!) and that means it’s time to get out of the house. The forecast calls for toasty highs in the 40s this weekend. Put on your flip-flops. There’s no shortage of concerts to pull you off the couch, too. On Thursday Gavin Russom’s latest weird disco project Crystal Ark makes its local debut at the Elbo Room, while DJ Jazzy Jeff brings another kind of old-school to the Shrine....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A native of Dayton, Ohio (where she co-founded the Summer Youth Theatre Company), McKenny earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in oral interpretation at Northwestern University, and wrote her first play there, Chatauqua. But musical theater took pride of place in her career. She co-founded the Chicago Musical Theatre Works and collaborated with fellow NU alum Doug Frew on several projects....

“At first I was excited. It’s one of my favorite foods,” said Old Town Pour House bartender Karl Fernandez of his challenge, Parmigiano Reggiano. “Then I realized how difficult it would be to use.” Taking a page from challenger Brendan Smith, who based his own drink on honey-mustard gelato, Fernandez made an ice cream with the cheese. “It has an extremely strong flavor,” he admitted. “But if you like PR, you’re going to love this cocktail!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what it is about sex and slumps, but using the former to solve the latter is a tradition old as baseball, from Mark Grace’s superstition about going to bed with an ugly woman as a “slump buster” to “Nuke” LaLoosh wearing Annie Savoy’s garters as a way to stop overanalyzing things in Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham....

Years ago I had a neighbor whose husband used to beat the crap out of her. One night her panic-stricken children showed up at my door pleading for help–“My daddy’s ripping my mommy’s eye out.” Review the record: The Daley administration awards about $100 million in affirmative-action contracts to companies run by the politically connected Duff family. James Duff, who’s white, is charged with racketeering in 2003 and pleads guilty in 2005....

“In Turkey,” says Ali Ersin Koray, “the underground music scene is really underground, much more underground than here. In Turkey, for example, we don’t have that many famous punk rock bands. I could give you maybe two examples.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Koray came to the States on a work-study program—he was going to take a summer job at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a Bay Area amusement park....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thursday, February 1, there’s a comparative tasting of 1989 and 1990 vintages of Bordeaux at the Casino club; included in the twenty Chateaux they are pouring are all five of the Bordeaux First Growths. Then on Friday, February 2, there’ll be a $1,250-a-plate, five-course dinner at Tru, featuring a vertical tasting of all vintages (ranging from 1990-2002) of legendary California Harlan Estate wines....