David Hare’s 2003 docudrama examines the privatization of the British rail system and its literally disastrous aftermath. But Hare’s artful oral-history collage resonates beyond the dysfunctional particulars of Blairism, or even callous crisis management from 9/11 to Katrina. It’s a universal model of how calamitous projects high (the war in Iraq) and low (our own CTA) are created by policies designed to fail, navigated by profit-driven managers unaccountable to reality and protected after the fact by “investigatory” commissions....

Candide Goodman Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mary Zimmerman’s new production for the Goodman Theatre isn’t a total triumph, but it comes far closer to reaching El Dorado than any of the seven Candides I’ve encountered so far. Her adaptation draws substantially on Voltaire’s book, fusing cutting comedy with philosophical gravity. She captures the wonderful simplicity of Voltaire’s writing—which recounts the characters’ atrocious sufferings with deadpan irony—and gives new clarity to the songs’ witty lyrics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi Sunni, was arrested April 12 by U.S. marines in Ramadi, and he’s been a prisoner since – at this point over 11 months. The U.S. military in Iraq has told journalists that Hussein’s been linked to al Qaeda members and to Iraqi insurgents. The Associated Press lobbied quietly on his behalf until September, when the exasperated wire service went public....

When did you find out the repeal of the foie gras ban was going to come up Wednesday? Members of the City Council had been victims of a concerted campaign by special interests to ridicule the ban and insult the council. I could see the writing on the wall—I knew the chances of keeping the ban were minimal. But I was concerned about the process, so I tried to appeal to my colleagues for a hearing on the matter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Invaluable British label Soundway established its identity early on by specializing in reissues of overlooked vintage music from West Africa and Colombia, but since then it’s branched out into new music rooted in old forms. Earlier this year Soundway released Ondatropica, far and away its most ambitious effort. Spearheaded by producers Will Holland (aka Quantic) and Mario Galeano (Frente Cumbiero) and cut in Medillin studio Discos Fuentes—home to label of the same name, which produced much of the country’s greatest music in the 60s and 70s—it features an era-spanning lineup that includes old-school legends like Fruko, Michi Sarmiento, Anibal Velásquez, and Alfredito Linares....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t think any U.S. label has done more to open up to us the many-splendored world of Brazilian music than Luaka Bop. Early in the imprint’s history a series of compilations assembled by David Byrne introduced us to icons such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, and Gal Costa; in 1999 it dug deeper to release an anthology of vintage Os Mutantes material....

Head down to Pullman on the Far South Side this weekend for Mulligan Stew, urban-industrial camping, and a walking tour of “Bumtown” – it’s Hobofest! On Saturday and Sunday, the historic neighborhood plays host to a slew of hobo-related events, all centered around the Pullman Palace Car Company Clock Tower. The festivities kick off at 4:30 PM Saturday with a welcome dinner, followed by a Grand Hobo Concert. There will be various hobo artists and performers throughout the weekend....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque, this is the eighth Chicago edition of an annual touring festival that collects black independent works from around the world. The festival runs Fri-Thu 6/18-6/24, and includes 15 dramas and documentaries, some which are synopsized below. John Kani wrote, directed, and stars in Nothing But the Truth (2008, 118 min.), a screen adaptation of his play about exiled South Africans returning home after the end of apartheid, and trying to make peace with their countrymen who stayed behind (Fri 6/18, 7 PM, and Thu 6/24, 6:30 PM)....

Wild Flag is made up of some of the most respected punk-slash-indie musicians of the 90s, with a lineup that’s sort of a late-period riot-grrrl who’s who: Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney), Janet Weiss (Quasi, Sleater-Kinney), Mary Timony (Autoclave, Helium), and Rebecca Cole (the Minders). In Wild Flag they take the ethos and attitude of their previous bands and infuse it with an irresistible pop sensibility. Representing Washington, D.C., in this bicoastal supergroup is Timony, a veteran of the Dischord scene....

Stephanie Izard never had anything to prove to Chicago. Long before she conquered Top Chef, she was mistress of her domain at Bucktown’s Scylla. Still, during the interminable two-year wait between her Season Four win and the opening of Girl & the Goat, she rode the rapids of a relentless if entertaining hype stream punctuated by tweets, blog posts, and innumerable public events. And unless you were lucky enough to score tickets to one of her well-publicized “underground” dinners (or to bear witness as a member of the city’s increasingly compromised food media), word of them only served to heighten the anxiety: would Steph really pull it off?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wow, sounds kinda neanderthalic, don’t it? Psych-weirdos Cave headline a (you guessed it) free show at the Empty Bottle tonight. Liz Armstrong says the band, which includes members of Mahjongg and Warhammer 48K, remains “faithful to the shitty, surreal, purposely childish aesthetic of born-in-the-80s art parties.” Also on the bill are Austin noisemakers When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (pictured), who are supporting their latest release Not Noiice, due in May on the Brooklyn-based label Chalk Circle....

One of the bright ideas the media have come up with for staying in touch with the public (not to mention replacing skilled labor) is a wiki-style community journalism called “hyperlocalism.” Last April the Tribune launched its own model, the suburban online newspaper Triblocal.com. You could go to the site, click on your suburb, and immerse yourself in news posted by your friends and neighbors. Then you could write a story of your own....

Some think of Chicago’s theater scene as one big, ongoing fringe fest. But in 2010 Sarah Mikayla Brown and Vinnie Lacey went ahead and founded the Chicago Fringe Festival anyway. This year’s 11-day extravaganza presents 48 shows at a variety of Pilsen venues. Here’s a little of what looks intriguing to us. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, the locals: A Fringe Fest regular, transgender performer Rebecca Kling returns with Storms Under Her Skin, a one-person show about the “equations of sex” (Thu 8/30, 10 PM, Sat 9/1, 7 PM, Sun 9/2, 1 PM, Mon 9/3, 5:30 PM, Thu 9/6, 8:30 PM, Sat 9/8, 4 PM, Sun 9/9, 7 PM, Both Sides Art Gallery, 1838 S....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bad days at gawker.com, the prominent New York-based media-focused blogging site. Reporter Hamilton Nolan files on an unfortunate speech that Village Voice Media press lord Mike Lacey delivered a few days ago at an awards dinner in Phoenix: diners “were less than amused when (the white man) Lacey referred to his deceased friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning black journalist Tom Fitzpatrick, as ‘my nigger....

This week Kyle McHugh announced that Drinks Over Dearborn (650 N. Dearborn, 312-337-9463), his boutique liquor store in River North, will close at the end of December. Cash short and unable to find a business partner, he’ll be hosting a couple of “pay the rent parties” in addition to regular classes and tastings this month. “I have been asked many times already, “what next?” That is a VERY good question,” McHugh wrote in a statement....

Sorry, Brien Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was totally unpalatable to read the culinary abomination regarding a recipe for rabbits’ lungs. A progressive and environmentally conscious paper like the Reader should not promote the eating of meat. We can no longer inhumanely massacre animals for food. It’s very obvious that vegetarianism and veganism are now moral, spiritual, societal, environmental, and planetary imperatives. The flesh-food industries cause massive pollution, deforestation, water shortages, and irreparable damage to marine and terrestrial ecosystems....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Veteran minimalist Phill Niblock has been making up for lost time over the last seven years, releasing more music than in his first six decades on the planet. He uses a computer rather than a tape machine these days, but his basic style hasn’t changed: capturing original sounds (from open-minded musicians like George Lewis, Jim O’Rourke, and Ulrich Krieger) and superimposing them to create long-form drones rich in harmonic overtones....

Tom Van Avermaet’s Death of a Shadow All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. As I mentioned in a recent review, the primary issue that befalls the majority of short narrative work is a tendency to cram too much plot into a limited amount of time. It behooves filmmakers working in the short form to stick to a single concept or theme and fully commit to depicting it, rather than overextending themselves with multiple themes....

Considering Shane MacGowan’s acrimonious split with the Pogues in 1991–he either quit or got sacked, depending on who you ask–this is one reunion a lot of people thought would never happen. Then again, who thought MacGowan would outlive the man who temporarily replaced him, Joe Strummer? His grip on this mortal coil has always been tenuous, a state obvious to anyone who’s ever caught a glimpse of his infamous teeth and cockeyed stance or watched him struggle to remember his own lyrics....

review In fact Weekend‘s politics aren’t realistic at all. The play imagines a Republican senator who decides to stake his run for the 1968 presidential nomination on his opposition to the Vietnam war, only to see his campaign threatened by his son’s plan to marry an African-American woman. Such a premise would have seemed unlikely at best at the time—which may be why Vidal channels it into an epigrammatic, lightly satiric comedy of manners in the style of Oscar Wilde....