An old roommate of mine—this spectacularly housebound, Notes From the Underground sociopath—had a favorite quip: “People think it’s easy doing nothing,” he’d say, then pause, surveying the assortment of overflowing ashtrays that filled his coffee table. Selecting the nearest feasible target, he’d gingerly flip an ash off his cigarette, usually managing to avoid a minor avalanche, then sit back, concluding: “But it’s only easy at first.” A frustrating guy to say the least....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After majoring in theater at Connecticut College, Churchill moved to Chicago to work as an actress. “I really loved the rehearsal process,” she recalls, “but found the performing tedious. I realized I was on the wrong side of the stage.” In the early 1990s she became the first producing director of the Lookingglass Theatre, where she produced more than half a dozen shows, including Mary Zimmerman’s original staging of The Arabian Nights (a revival is now running downtown)....

Hand-drawn animation is a business filled with drama; the endless, painstaking work can propel both lonely odysseys (cf. Don Hertzfeldt) and ugly disputes between a ruthless taskmaster and his overworked minions (cf. Walt Disney). One of the more fascinating movieland documentaries to come along in the past few years was Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009), which chronicled the generational revolt at Disney in the 80s and 90s, though that project was hampered by corporate control of the sketches and test animations needed to tell the story....

New TooThirteen more recent openings Cipollina1543 N. Damen | 773-227-6300 As we dithered over half-finished plates in the packed dining room of Hub 51, the restaurant debut of Rich Melman spawn R.J. and Jerrod, my pal and I challenged ourselves to think of one nice thing we could say about it before we’d allow ourselves to escape. And we continued to sit, until our server blinked past the headlights in her eyes and began to twitch....

Alex Chilton—front man for the Box Tops and Big Star, solo artist, idol of pop fans worldwide, and one of the most influential rock musicians of the past half century—died today in New Orleans of what appears to have been a heart attack. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chilton the artist was one of the most emotionally honest writers in rock history, but Chilton the person always came off as somewhat obscure....

It was a sticky June afternoon in East Peoria, and photographer David Banks was shooting the 2004 girls class AA state softball championship. Banks worked for the Daily Southtown then, and Lockport Township High School was playing for the title. He was the only press photographer there. The revenue stream is pretty small—it didn’t come close to sparing the Southtown its recent drastic economies, merging with the Star papers and laying off a lot of people, Banks included....

Black Diamond: The Years The Locusts Have Eaten | Lookingglass Theatre Company INFO 312-337-0665 Awareness of that fatigue runs throughout J. Nicole Brooks’s flawed but fascinating new play at Lookingglass, Black Diamond: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten, a ferocious look at recent history in Africa’s first republic, Liberia, founded by freed American slaves in 1822. In the first years of the 21st century it was embroiled in a civil war between the forces of President Charles Taylor (who went into exile in 2003 with an estimated $100 million siphoned from the government treasury) and a rebel army, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD)....

After a fitful spring, hundreds of the city’s restaurants are offering outdoor dining while they can. Here we’ve selected some notable spots among them; for more patio lazing, search our restaurant database or bar guide. Tucked into a former antique store just off Armitage, Antico is an intimate neighborhood restaurant serving classic Italian dishes including scene-stealing house-made gnocchi. Out back there’s garden seating—literally; chef-owner Brad Schlieder grows his own herbs, kale, and other vegetables for the kitchen....

Mike Sula Lagman at Lazzat Did you know that apart from Lincoln Square’s great Jibek Jolu, that there are (at least) two other central Asian restaurants in Chicago? Don’t feel bad if you didn’t. Bai Cafe on Ashland and the newer Lazzat Euro Asian Cuisine in North Center operate on the down-low, serving a majority-cabbie clientele, and remaining pretty much unmolested by thrill-seeking foodlums. That’s particularly true of the newer Lazzat—which could easily be confused with an Indian restaurant of the same name in Streamwood, or even Luzzat in Rogers Park—and which was quietly installed in the snug space once inhabited by Mio Bento on Irving Park Road....

Thank you for your excellent comments concerning the best-selling book The Secret [“A Little Secret About The Secret” by Julia Rickert, June 1]. I find the amount of positive public response to such a ridiculous work both astounding and tragic because it reveals the failure of many Americans to be able to think straight anymore and to recognize fraudulent expressions of spiritual principles when they confront them. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The rap mixtape is nearing the end of a decades-long journey from the margins of pop culture to mainstream credibility. Once an illicit-seeming format full of jacked beats and gun-flashing beefs, and distributed through liquor stores and Canal Street shops selling bootleg Chinese Louis Vuitton bags, mixtapes are now a multimillion-dollar business, and one of the most effective ways for a rap artist to launch a legitimate career. At least three songs on the Hot 100 got their starts on mixtapes before the major label promotional apparatus kicked in: Lil Wayne’s “Love Me” and Future’s “Karate Chop” (both originally released on Freeband Gang’s F....

Mike Fourcher A few days ago I wrote about Mike Fourcher, a new-media trailblazer in Chicago who’s still looking for a formula for success. Fourcher established a couple of hyperlocal news sites, centersquarejournal.com and roscoeviewjournal.com, that he’d decided to stop maintaining because he couldn’t figure out how to support himself by running them. Hard as it was to build an audience, selling ads was even harder. What he’d discovered, I wrote, was that “the competition for the ad dollars of local merchants is overwhelming; but confounding all the ad sellers is the spreading perception among merchants that they don’t need to be spending ad dollars at all....

Yellowtail, Big Eye, Sculpin Venerable San Diego brewery Ballast Point, founded in 1996, began distributing its beers in Chicago last week. It names many of its beers after ocean fish (black marlin, dorado, sculpin) and generally sticks to a nautical theme even when fish aren’t involved (Victory at Sea coffee-vanilla imperial porter, Navigator doppelbock). Ballast Point is in fact a peninsula near San Diego, upon which a lighthouse stood until 1960; it’s just an automated light now....

The rise of the Internet as a music-distribution platform—specifically hip-hop’s embrace of MySpace—was supposed to free rappers from their record-label overlords and lead to an explosion of collaboration and creativity. Instead it’s yielded a throng of crappy wannabes who think they’re Jay-Z. Though MySpace has helped launch a number of great artists, it’s a safe bet they would’ve hustled their way to the top even without the assist. And another Biggie or Tupac has yet to emerge from the fray—hell, we haven’t even seen another Big L or Rakim....

In the past year the members of KOCO valiantly fought against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to close Dyett High School. The parents in Raise Your Hand called for more school funding from the state despite getting no help from the mayor. And we can’t leave out the folks in Beverly and Mount Greenwood who fought against Emanuel’s unfunded mandate to add an extra hour or so to each school day without providing new resources to ensure the time is used well....

“I have fish and alcohol stewing in my fridge!” Rachael Smith of Bar DeVille announced on my voice mail. Challenged with sardines by Robbie Guevara of the Revel Room, she’d decided to eschew more expected spirits like aquavit, and when she called she was steeping a tin of Matisse sardines and some cayenne pepper in a bottle of Ranchero tequila. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guevara’s choice of ingredient for Smith had been inspired by the sardine tattoo that forms a cuff on her left wrist....

“Mugs in the News” is one of the biggest viewer magnets on the Chicago Tribune website, and I offer it this spoonful of praise: doing what it does, it could do it a lot more offensively. But did she know her mug shot and arrest report had already been posted online for the world to see? It happens automatically. When the four sheriffs’ departments in the Tampa region put mug shots on their own websites, voila, they show up at tampabay....

I had somehow forgotten that San Francisco outfit Girls‘ Album was coming out, but then a download link popped up in my inbox this afternoon. Maybe I’ve just been avoiding the right blogs. Maybe my absent-mindedness in this particular case had something to do with Girls’ set at one of the Hideout’s Lollapalooza afterparties, which was kind of a letdown. The group—core duo Christopher Owens and Chet “JR” White, backed by a couple of other dudes—sank a little too deeply into a mellow haze, and the lack of energy coming off the stage, combined with the fact that they seemed to be playing only their slowest songs, didn’t help me shake the exhaustion I was feeling after a day at the festival....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve also got new capsule reviews of: About Time, a romantic fantasy from Richard Curtis (Love Actually); La Camioneta, a documentary tracing the ownership of a school bus across Central America; Children Without Parents, a local indie about four kids cleaning out their late father’s apartment; Diana, with Naomi Watts as the doomed Princess of Wales; Ender’s Game, a sci-fi epic adapted from the Orson Scott Card novel; I Used to Be Darker, the third feature from Baltimore indie Matthew Porterfield (Putty Hill); Kill Your Darlings, about the early New York adventures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S....

As you may have heard, Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently jetted in from his Utah ski vacation to tell the city—particularly south- and west-siders—that he’d done them a big favor by closing 54 of their schools. For starters, though, I should note that despite it being packed to the gills, Dever parents and students love their school, which may explain why it’s packed to the gills. It’s also one of the city’s higher-scoring neighborhood schools, with a student body about 60 percent low-income and an almost even split of whites and Hispanics....