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 » Chanel once said that elegance is refusal. She also famously advised ladies to look in the mirror and remove one accessory before leaving the house. I agree: you gotta pick your fights and draw attention to what matters most. Now, the problem with too much refusal is that it can become tedious, and who wants to look boring at an art event like the SOFA opening?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight and tomorrow writer-director Andrew Bujalski will attend the 7:15 PM screening of his latest film Computer Chess at the Music Box Theatre; he’ll be joined by U. of C. computer science professor Gordon Kindlmann and his wife—documentarian and urban planner Anne Dodge—who act in the film. I recommend going to one of these screenings—as I note in this week’s midsize review, Computer Chess is a strange and heady film; it may benefit from discussion....

As Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his schools team inch closer to the latest announcement of which schools they plan to close, I thought it would be a good time to examine how their predecessors have gone about it. But let’s hold that thought for a minute. So CPS backed off and moved Urban Prep into the old Medill school at 1326 W. 14th Place. The plan calmed folks at Cather and Beidler....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend I made it to Facets Multimedia’s final screening of Patrick Wang’s In the Family, after missing every other Chicago-area screening since it opened at the Music Box in April. Rarely am I so lucky, as five months is a wide time frame in which to see a movie in theaters anymore. The average commercial release now appears on DVD only three months after its theatrical opening—and many art house releases premiere on Video on Demand before people can see them in any other setting....

Mark and Jeri Webb own enough wooden shoes to hang a ring of them around their kitchen. Sandra Soss’s heaps of small dolls make her shelves look like Woodstock in Lilliput. Neil G. says the desire to acquire sleek Italian lamps and mementos of trips he didn’t take is in his DNA. Eva Niewiadomski surrounds herself with brightly colored textiles and baubles in which she feels the artists’ presence. And Amy Meadows has so many collections she has to rotate them in and out of basement storage....

It’s been 13 years since I first moved to Logan Square and 15 years since Jason Hammel and his wife, Amalea Tshilds, opened Lula. Once an oasis in a food desert, the eclectic all-day cafe is now the flagship of a culinary and cultural sea change. “Jason took a huge risk coming here early on,” says Matthias Merges of Yusho, a hip, yakitori-inspired spot on Kedzie that offers a selection of small plates as affordable as they are addictive....

Chicago launched its Property Tax Relief Program this year, promising a $25-$200 grant to “qualifying homeowners.” I completed my application, mailed it in by the March 31 deadline, and the other day received an envelope from the city’s Tax Assistance Center. But inside was a letter saying my application could not be processed because I owed the city a “debt.” It was an unpaid parking ticket. With interest, it came to $73....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As fourth-wave emo continues to outgrow its underground roots (just yesterday Pitchfork posted an in-depth review of the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Billboard-charting debut, Whenever, If Ever), now is a pretty good time to jump in and take a listen to the bands that helped bring the scene to life toward the end of the aughts....

Here’s something new to worry about: I have it on good authority that, for the first time, every single member of the Second City main-stage and E.T.C. ensembles has national representation. What that means is that you no longer have to distinguish yourself in revue after revue to attract a heavyweight agent’s attention—simply gaining access to one of the elite Second City stages is considered enough to guarantee big-time showbiz viability....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2008 he petitioned criminal court judge Diane Cannon for a hearing to consider new evidence, much of it developed by the Medill Innocence Project. What followed wasn’t really about McKinney. Alvarez made it about how the Medill students and their professor, David Protess, developed that evidence. The upshot was a scandal in which Northwestern University turned against Protess; he left Medill, the Innocence Project was overhauled, and McKinney languished in prison—for the rest of his life, it’s turned out....

Chicago Ave and Halsted, created more than just corner to stand on, your walls supported a society where I learned to read and jump double-dutch rope We had to start over! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But for tens of thousands over the decades since the first Cabrini residences were built in 1942, it was home. To commemorate the end of Cabrini-Green and call attention to its role as a haven, a group including Prague-born School of the Art Institute faculty member Jan Tichy, social worker Efrat Appel, and 25 SAIC student collaborators is preparing Project Cabrini Green—an art installation that combines LED and sound technology with short stories and poetry on the themes of home, housing, and community....

It’s 2 AM. Smoke’s billowing out of an abandoned brick building while helicopters circle overhead, their spotlight beams visible through the haze. Police cars, paddy wagons, and news vans are posted up all over, the street is blocked off, and a general sense of panic fills the air. This was happening one block away from my apartment as I was walking on a Friday night a few weeks ago. What the hell happened?...

There are situations in which candlelight is appropriate, such as seances, or an episode of The Red Shoe Diaries. The sensual aspects of a meal at Sunshine Cafe, on the other hand, tend toward the gustatory, and not just because of the light, which does shine a bit garish. (It brings out the facial blemishes.) Consider it a foil for the comprehensive awesomeness of everything else about this place: the superfriendly staff and the primally comfortable home-style Japanese cuisine....

Video maker Esaú Meléndez had been documenting the local immigration reform movement for six months already when his real story emerged: on August 15, 2006, the Mexican activist and undocumented worker Elvira Arellano announced that she would defy a deportation order from the Department of Homeland Security and take sanctuary inside the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Humboldt Park. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Elvira Arellano had been one of the organizers of the Union Park protest, and when she holed up at Adalberto United Methodist, her compatriots invited Meléndez to the press conference....

September Obscura: A Voyeuristic Love Story In a closely monitored apartment building, a man invents a story to win his neighbor’s heart. 9/23-10/23, Red Tape Theatre, 621 W. Belmont, 847-738-6919, $15-$25. 7 Sexy Sins Tour The Flaming Dames burlesque troupe bring the seven deadly sins to life. 9/24-10/30, various venues, 773-771-8932, flamingdames.com, $15. Seven Snakes An apocalyptic western set 30 years in the future, presented by the Chicago Mammals. 9/25-11/6, Zoo Studios, 4001 N....

It’s an interesting time for emo, which has been going through several sea changes since the late aughts, when “emo” became divorced from much of the music it had represented and turned into a catch-all for histrionic whining and a cartoonish version of goth fashion that would make Tim Burton blush. Just this year two of the groups largely responsible for informing that popularized idea of emo—that’d be Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance—went through some major shifts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suspect the immediate reaction (as it was when she was found guilty of reckless homicide rather than murder) will be anger and revulsion, and I’m not sure exactly why. Not in the sense that I think that’s the wrong reaction, but in that I, personally, don’t know how to react, either way. That I didn’t know any of the victims, unlike so many people, certainly factors in....

Hip-hop is a young man’s game, by and large, and not even its biggest stars are exempt. In an August interview with the New York Times, Andre 3000 of OutKast said, “I remember, at like 25, saying, ‘I don’t want to be a 40-year-old rapper.’ I’m 39 now, and I’m still standing by that. I’m such a fan that I don’t want to infiltrate it with old blood.” That’s partly why the explosive success of Run the Jewels has caught so many people by surprise—both of the duo’s members, rapper-­producer Jaime “El-P” Meline and rapper Michael “Killer Mike” Render, turn 40 next year....

Rocky Schenck Madeleine Peyroux I’ve often disparaged what I call producer’s records, where someone other than the artist is the one making key creative decisions (or even dreaming up the concept for a concept album). Few recent releases fit this description better than The Blue Room (Decca), the latest from genre-averse singer Madeleine Peyroux. In his liner notes, Michael Cuscuna describes the impact that the classic 1962 Ray Charles album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music had on producer Larry Klein when he first encountered it as a 12-year-old in the late 60s....

Trying to get to know Ron Slattery is like rummaging through the piles at the flea markets he frequents: It’s much simpler to just enjoy the random finds amid the hodgepodge than to get all worked up looking for something in particular. That’ll make you crazy. Among the details the otherwise highly affable Slattery is reluctant to disclose are where he lives, his age (“Ancient. 43, I think. What year is this?...