Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m a 30 year old, self-employed artist who lives in the 25th Ward. I think the Reader coverage of the 25th Ward’s race was a big guess and kind of offensive. The whole “Medrano is actually a nice guy” thing really doesn’t take into account the history here. It left me wondering if Tony Sutter pitched the story. It looked like another jab and the Mayor and his guys, which is fine, but I just wish the Reader’s political writers actually knew some of the ward politics if they’re going to run a feature length article about it....

Sex With Strangers Steppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eason dealt with similar issues in 28: Pictures of Life in a High-Tech World, which she conceived and directed for her own company, Lookingglass Theatre, back in 1997. Her subject then was television and the short-attention-span culture, which she evoked by jump-cutting between vignettes featuring various unrelated characters. In Sex With Strangers, she uses a single couple to examine how the Internet shapes public discourse and personal connection....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But for me, the best part about living there was the movie theater across the street—the 400—which played second-run features and cost only a couple bucks. The place didn’t serve beer, but it didn’t need to, because I could hang around at my place until 9:29 and be in my seat watching the opening credits at 9:30. I must have gone to the 400 at least once a week; when the theater ran Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, my roommate and I saw it three or four times....

Mary Pickford (center) as Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall Tomorrow night at 7:30 PM, Northwest Chicago Film Society will present Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, a 1924 period piece starring Mary Pickford, perhaps the most commercially successful of silent-movie actresses. The movie is an extravagant costume drama set in 16th-century England, with Pickford playing a noblewoman who finds herself in the middle of an international plot involving Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the best-known groups to have featured local reedist Mars Williams will perform over the next two days. This evening at the Hideout the NRG Ensemble, the wild group once led by free-jazz icon and endearing nutjob Hal Russell, reconvenes for one of its sporadic “Hal the Weenie” Halloween shows, named after a favorite song from its vast repertoire....

Maureen Dowd uses someone else’s perfectly reasonable paragraph -> FREAKOUT. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve long ceased reading her, for the same reason I stopped watching snuff films and Total Request Live: if I wanted to actively particpate in the dumbing down and destruction of American culture, I could at least get paid for it. Fortunately, there are people watchdogging the watchdogs, and they’ve done a fine job of chronicling her sins against thoughtful political observation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you may have heard, I’m moving out of Chicago. Actually I’m out of Chicago right now, though I’ll be back for a bit before my move to NYC later this month. This morning I moved everything I own up to my mom’s place in Michigan for temporary storage using the Mannequin Men van, which is named the Craft....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Dillinger Escape Plan headlines the Summer Slaughter tour, which stops by the House of Blues tonight. “The Jersey band’s onstage volatility is a sight to behold, and it’s made more than a few promoters hot under the collar—I’ve personally seen indoor fire breathing on a side stage, band members scaling at least two stories of scaffolding or crawling atop hanging light fixtures, and a swung microphone detaching from its cord and nailing a kid in the noggin, cracking it wide open,” writes Kevin Warwick in Soundboard....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year Creative Loafing Inc. of Tampa, Florida, bought the Reader and our sister paper, D.C.’s Washington City Paper. Two months ago, CLI, which borrowed $40 million to make the deal, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to reorganize. Earlier this month, CLI asked the bankruptcy court for permission to hire Skyway Capital Partners as “financial advisors.” Skyway’s president, Brian Crino, is a former Chicagoan who played a central role in pulling together the financing that made the 2007 purchase happen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, I have to admit I have a soft spot in my heart for the governor’s proposal to let senior citizens ride the CTA for free. Back when Harold Washington was mayor, I knew a city planner who had an idea for making the CTA’s trains and buses free for everyone. Dreaming big, he planned to enlist the help of then-powerhouse congressmen Dan Rostenkowski and William Lipinski to pay for it with a hike in the federal income tax — a progressive tax hike....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the logic of Cook County politics, it makes perfect sense. Republican state’s attorney candidate Tony Peraica is vowing to use his independence to put away criminals and fight political corruption, so of course it was just revealed that he accepted $2,700 in contributions a couple years back from several felons. His Democratic opponent, Anita Alvarez, has promised to bring the office a fresh perspective–integrity–even though she’s worked in it for 20 years; she’s been under fire for taking donations from prosecutors who’d report to her if she were elected, and from at least one attorney whose firm reaped millions in a lawsuit against the county....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Isa Giallorenzo: How does your work connect with what you wear? Jenny Kendler: My artwork deals with human beings’ relationship to the natural world, and advocates for conservation and biodiversity, so sustainability is very important to me. When we moved to Chicago 9 years ago, my husband and I made an agreement to buy only used, handmade or sustainable goods whenever possible....

The new, hour-long Stupormarket is a “low-budget project,” says Seldoms choreographer Carrie Hanson, featuring costumes by her and Goodwill. But its scope is huge—nothing less than an exploration of New Keynesian vs. neoclassical perspectives on our economy. Hanson has combined edited versions of two 2009 pieces—Thrift and Death of a (Prada) Salesman—with lots of new material to create a dance for eight that includes projected, recorded, and spoken texts. Don’t expect detailed statistical analysis, though....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stephin Merritt, a short, gay, laconic, and exceedingly witty person, is the lyricist for the Magnetic Fields (about whom this is the second Bleader post this week, sorry), in addition to other projects like the 6ths and the Gothic Archies. He writes impeccably and owns a chihuahua named for Irving Berlin. I’ve encountered people who think of Merritt’s lyrics as “ironic,” but I am here to submit that that’s not the case....

If this is “bourgeois realism,” then bring it on! In a neat coincidence, the restored print of Claude Sautet’s Max et les Ferrailleurs comes into town just after Doc Films started its Louis Malle series, which continues every Tuesday night through mid-March. This seems fitting, as the careers of Malle and Sautet overlap in a number of ways. Both had formative experiences as assistant directors; Malle assisted Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped, and Sautet graduated to directing his first crime film, Classe Tous Risques, after assisting on similar features throughout the 1950s....

For a writer, actor, and singer, Hershey Felder is a heck of a pianist. That much was obvious in his first one-man show, the biographical George Gershwin Alone, where Felder found unexpected colors and textures in everything from well-worn pop standards to hoary old Rhapsody in Blue—but when it came to talking and singing, he was disabled by his own stuffy acting, an indecisive voice, and a script that ranged from dutiful to melodramatic to inexplicable....

Like many other African-Americans who were born after the civil rights movement, Keith Richardson grew up hearing stories about the 1963 March on Washington. “To me, the march was about promoting unity,” says Richardson, 39, a lifelong west-sider. “It was about all races of people coming together, living out the American dream of equality.” The 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington Fifty years later, participants in the March on Washington still hoping for justice A dream unrealized for African-Americans in Chicago “Sometimes I think you can cure cancer before you can stop the crime,” Richardson says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Commonwealth (most thugged-out state motto in America: Sic Semper Tyrannis) starts reporting around 6 central time. In 2006 I found that the results came in fastest from the state’s board of elections site. I’ve got that address plugged into my new S-M-R-T PHONE so I can hopefully provide a vaguely informed perspective on the returns from a “real” Virginia native....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fourth installment of the outrageous Cathedral of the Black Goat festival comes to LiveWire Lounge this weekend, with shows on Friday and Saturday night. The festival, which is headlined by the delightfully named Goatpenis, has celebrated gross, Satanic black metal three times before, and the organizers claim that this time around will be the last. If seeing a band called Satanik Goat Ritual isn’t your thing, there are a few other cool festivals going down this weekend as well, including Goose Island’s 312 Urban Block Party, which features Tokyo Police Club and Low; the Chicago Food Social at Kendall College, which is headlined by R....

Courtesy of the artist Devin Drobka Milwaukee drummer Devin Drobka—an increasing local presence through his membership in Andrew Trim’s Dim Lighting, various groupings with former Chicago guitarist Dave Miller, the free jazz group Sweet Talk, and Chris Weller’s Hanging Hearts, among others—rolls into town tomorrow evening with his own group, Bell Dance Songs, for a show at Constellation. Earlier this year the quartet released a pithy, eponymous eight-track album wherein the meditative, melancholy shapes of Drobka’s melodies consistently create tension with his frenetic, active drumming (particularly his cymbal work)....