thursday22 Thursday22 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusGet Up KidsLake Friday23 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusRoyal Bangs Saturday24 David BazanChicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusShorty Mack Sunday25 Great ArchitectShorty MackSix Finger Satellite Monday26 Broadcast Tuesday27 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusKelly ClarksonNeon Indian Wednesday28 Los CojolitesMum, Sin Fang Bous GET UP KIDS There must be something in the air telling certain emo bands that it’s time to reunite—specifically bands the 90s hardcore scene found aesthetically and politically divisive who then saw later groups go multiplatinum by copying their formulas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m excited to hear Reader writer emeritus Fred Camper introduce a program of four avant-garde classics at the Film Center tomorrow at 6 PM. The screening marks the last of Camper’s three-month film-and-lecture series on American cinema of the 1950s, which has provided me plenty of food for thought. Some of the works in the series, like Rebel Without a Cause, are revived fairly often, but Camper has a way of making any movie seem new....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apart from new featured reviews of Schwa and Sixteen in this week’s Food & Drink we have nine others in the listings and a bonus in the Reader Restaurant Finder. Kate Schmidt would take the bus to the Peterson Park tapas restaurant Cafe Marbella, though an easier CTA trip would let her relax among throngs of Evanstonians at Union Pizzeria....

Rob Tringali/Getty Images Dunn, focusing, at a spring training game in Arizona Saturday Robin Ventura seems to be a pretty good manager, but he does have his quirks. In his rookie season as White Sox skipper last year, he usually hit Adam Dunn third. You’d generally prefer your third-place hitter to bat above .204 and strikeout fewer than 222 times. So I’m happy to see that Ventura may be thinking about dropping Dunn in the order....

Culinary foams weren’t invented by El Bulli’s Ferran Adria, the groundbreaking Spanish chef most associated with the modernist cuisine movement. White bean foam, chocolate air, and granadilla clouds may have gobsmacked diners on the Costa Brava coast 18 years ago—and there are carrot, smoke, and potato foams on the menu at Next Restaurant’s El Bulli tribute. But cooks have aerated food for centuries (see whipped cream, meringue, etc), and maybe no one’s been doing it longer than the Yemenis....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when the university announced in mid-October that Ayers would speak on campus on November 15, all hell broke loose. A faculty committee from the College of Education and Human Sciences had invited him way back in February, when Ayers was simply a Chicago educator with a colorful background. But by October he’d become Barack Obama’s unrepentant terrorist sidekick and all the proof any hysteric needed that America simply didn’t know enough about the Democratic candidate with the Muslim name to risk putting him in the White House....

Avec | West Loop | $$$ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A unique hybrid of retail wine store, casual bar, and formal dining room from restaurateurs Dan Sachs and Joanne Chessie, executive chef John Caputo, and wine director Brian Duncan, who aim to demystify the process of matching wine with food. Curved racks of wine divide the retail corner from the bar, which serves tasting portions of light, eclectic fare ranging from seafood sliders and charcuterie to burgers....

Alexis Finch, sketchnoter behind GraphiteMind, is utterly satiated by: Geekfest Chicago has become something of a tech mecca. Startups are thriving here just as much as in NYC and SF. It’s a challenge to keep pace with all the rapid change when you’ve gotta be conversant in the full gamut of design, code, and UX (for the uninitiated, that’s “User Experience”). Luckily, once a week, for one hour, you can get a crash course from one expert or another at Geekfest....

Q I am the father of a recently out 18-year-old gay boy. Here’s the problem: My son is in a relationship with a 31-year-old guy. I’m not OK with that. Yes, my son is a legal adult at 18 and can make his own decisions, but he’s also still in high school. His mother argues that in order to be supportive, we can’t object to this relationship. I don’t think this is a gay-versus-straight objection....

Philip Montoro, Reader music editor, is obsessed with . . . Rorcal, Vilagvege Swiss band Rorcal titled their third full-length with the Hungarian word for the end of the world. Vilagvege combines the frenzied nihilism of black metal, the barely coherent rage of hardcore, and the suffocating density of doom—plus the drummer sounds like he’s playing on garbage trucks with cannonballs. Lung-collapsing screams scour guitars that swing from seesawing dissonance to tooth-­grinding drone to what sounds like the wandering melody of an ecclesiastical chant, all of it blackened by heat as it plunges to earth at 40 times the speed of sound....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) announced the six composers participating in its annual ICElab program, which seeks to help young talents develop new work—musicians from the group maintain ongoing interactions with the composers and eventually perform the pieces that result. Of the six names, the only one I recognize is Anna Thorvaldsdottir, a fantastic Icelandic composer whose album Rhizoma (Innova) was one of my favorites last year....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I thought George Cardenas, alderman of the 12th Ward, had learned this already. In 2006 he delivered an ode to Mayor Daley’s leadership just before flip-flopping on the big-box minimum-wage ordinance. But by the time he gave a speech in favor of the Children’s Museum-Grant Park plan couple of weeks ago, he was almost artful, adding an anecdote about his daughter to an otherwise straight recitation of the mayor’s “It’s all about the children” argument....

During the years that John Conroy was writing about police torture for the Reader, he and I sat at his kitchen table when each new story was done and went through it line by line. Every quote, every date, every significant specific needed to be checked against its source—which Conroy had collected in a box full of carefully labeled folders. He was practicing high-wire journalism. The facts had to be unimpeachable....

With their jingle-jangle melodies, vintage cardigans, and puppylike stage personas, Very Truly Yours seem harmless, maybe even a bit precious. But in their own way, they’re rebels. Indie pop has waxed and waned over the years, but right now it’s enjoying a significant revival in the States. Labels like Magic Marker, Cloudberry, Bus Stop, and Slumberland are carrying the torch, and New York City’s Popfest—where, back in May, Very Truly Yours was the sole band representing Chicago—is one of a growing number of annual indie-pop events, which includes gatherings in San Francisco; Athens, Georgia; and Northampton, Massachusetts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The winners of 1986’s Super Bowl XX retain an unbreakable hold on the city’s sports consciousness because they were every inch the Monsters of the Midway. They were ferocious, outspoken, larger than life; they took the irascible qualities the franchise has always embodied and exaggerated them. Owner-coach George Halas built a series of combative teams known for tough players who took no prisoners, from Bronko Nagurski—a name that still screams not just leather-helmet football but what Nelson Algren lovingly referred to as Chicago bohunk—on through Doug Atkins, Mike Ditka, and Dick Butkus....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The announcement to the surviving staff began: “In order to successfully launch the SouthtownStar and ensure the proper execution of our editorial mission, Frank Shuftan and Mike Waters will serve as co-publisher/editors. Frank and Mike have done tremendously valuable work over the past several months to maintain the quality of their respective papers while engaging in, and in many ways leading, the process that is creating our new paper....

Rib-sticking eastern European fuel is about the last thing I need in mid-June, but thanks to this endless monsoon season, almost everyone I eat with has been forced into a delayed prehibernation feeding cycle. That’s probably why I found myself chauffeured northwest-ward the other night, headed for Smak-Tak. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This tiny, tidy Polish chalet on Elston is much beloved for its deep bowls of hearty soups, (clear amber-colored chicken noodle, creamy mushroom, thick barley), its plump, butter-drenched pierogies (tangy cheese and potato, finely ground meat, assorted fruit flavors, incredible mushroom and sauerkraut), and ample, thoughtfully accented dinners such as hunter’s stew, stuffed cabbage, breaded cutlets, each served with sides of pickled vegetable salads or potatoes and flourished with generous dollops of pure white sour cream....

Screening as the opening-night program of the 19th annual Onion City festival, these eight shorts might seem to be all over the place–Manoel de Oliveira’s The Improbable Is Not Impossible (2006), an eclectic tribute to Portugal’s Gulbenkian Foundation, isn’t even experimental. But many of them share the same alienated fascination with history: Jean-Luc Godard’s archival, corpse-laden Origin of the 21st Century (2000), Guy Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick (2000), which comically restages Melville’s novel in the filmmaker’s kitchen, and Bill Morrison’s Outerborough (2005) and Ken Jacobs’s The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006), which both use footage from the 1890s, all seem to poeticize the weight of the past....

From Robert Aldrich’s The Choirboys (1977) In my long review of Pain & Gain that appears in this week’s issue, I invoke Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls as an example of a film whose predominant attitude towards its own setting is one of pointed disgust. I could have also cited Alex Cox’s Repo Man, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, or Verhoeven’s Spetters and Starship Troopers....

Atwood Cafe Just off the handsomely ornamented marble lobby of the Hotel Burnham, this dramatic room has oversize windows on two sides; floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains, massive baroque chandeliers and wall sconces, and crimson-and-black walls give it a regal yet comfortable air. New chef Derek Simcik has revamped the menu, which now offers small plates and a short list of snacks for “Atwood After Dark.” Cocktails here are excellent, and Simcik has continued to offer afternoon tea during the holidays....