Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The New 400, the independent four-screen movie theater in Rogers Park, reopened Friday after ten days of being closed for renovations. During the interim, management excavated and refinished the tile floors in the men’s room, which had been out of public view for decades; installed new screens in each of the four auditoriums; and, inevitably, replaced their 35-millimeter projectors with digital cinema units....

As the days get shorter and the weather colder, farms with community-supported agriculture programs shift gears. Many CSAs end their seasons in the fall, but a few continue into December and some go year-round. Here’s a list of subscription farms that deliver to Chicago or its suburbs into the winter months. Membership in some has already closed for the season, but we included them for future reference. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

QMy girlfriend always responds positively when I initiate sex with her, but she hardly ever initiates sex with me. I’m a no-beat-around-the-bush kind of guy, but I realize that this can be a sensitive topic, and I don’t want to scare her by saying, “Please initiate sex more often!” So I do small things to coax her and let her know that I want her to initiate. I will lotion up in front of her after we shower....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is not like the racial-theory sermons of Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger. Those clergymen were tagged as mentors and allies of Obama’s at the time they were seen on tape giving extended diatribes about the sins of powerful white people. When you’re a black candidate trying to convince skeptical heartland types that you really do love America, that sort of thing is a blow....

Lead Story The Weirdo-American Community Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a January hearing in San Mateo, California, a city board ruled that Estrella Benavides had violated municipal code by painting what she said were messages from God in five-foot-tall white letters all over her roof. Starting roughly a year earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the 46-year-old Benavides had covered the entire exterior of her house and car with generally incomprehensible text containing references to Fidel Castro, Hurricane Katrina, rape, Hitler, the Mafia, cloning, and Watergate....

Intro | Friday | Sunday 1:45 PM Real Estate Over the past year or so this New Jersey combo (relocated to Brooklyn, as so many do) has staked out prized territory in many an indie record geek’s heart with a succession of great singles—sweet little bits of bubblegum, lightly played and sunk into waves of vintage-style reverb and treble-heavy twang, all tossed off so casually they seem effortless. Late in 2009 they were collected into a self-titled album released by the hot-shit Woodsist label....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Never mind the craft-cocktail revolution, Delilah’s has been getting derelicts drunk for two decades, slinging shots from an absurd selection of whiskeys and blaring the Stooges until your head spins. Time to celebrate. Tonight’s 20th-anniversary party features collaboration releases with London’s Compass Box Whisky Company and Three Floyds Brewing. Plus, new paintings from Emily Rapport and Jon Langford are on display, and Chuck Wren and Casino El Camino will be manning the turntables....

On September 13, Chicago police stormed a two-bedroom apartment in North Center and arrested 52-year-old Michelle DiGiacomo, who lived there with her 14-year-old daughter. They tossed the apartment, cuffed DiGiacomo, and hauled her off in a squad car. DiGiacomo recalls her daughter screaming as the police led her away, “Please! She’s all I’ve got!” In the late 90s advice columnist Jeff Zaslow ran a high-profile letters-to-Santa campaign in the Sun-Times. In 2001 the Sun-Times (this was the Conrad Black-David Radler era) decided to can him—so he jury-rigged a program involving Chicago magazine and the Spanish-language radio station WLEY and came up with gifts for about 17,000 kids that year....

By the time the Plastic Crimewave Vision Celestial Guitarkestra finished loading in at the Empty Bottle on February 27, somewhere between 40 and 50 amps filled the stage and ran in a line almost the entire length of the club’s main room. My Fender Deluxe Reverb was set up on the floor in front of the stage. Going into our performance, we had a lot of things working against us. We’d never all been in the same room together–I’d responded to the same recruitment e-mail most everybody else had–and many of us had never even met....

MC Zulu talks the way you want a dancehall rapper to talk. Whether he’s toasting over cut-up dubstep beats or answering your dumbest questions in a booth at the Rainbo, his deep growl has such a distinctively Caribbean lilt that you keep expecting him to slip into patois—he reminds me of modern reggae lions like Bounty Killer and Shabba Ranks. But Zulu, real name Dominique Rowland, just has the accent, not the vocabulary—he spent his early childhood in Panama and moved to Chicago when he was nine....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You have to pay to read the whole article online, but there’s an interesting piece in New Scientist right now about re-creating the conceit behind the movie Super Size Me, in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days and documented the effect on his health. The re-creation was done under very controlled scientific conditions in Sweden and had surprising results....

Sun-Times Media This is actually in the Sun-Times archives. Last week Universal reissued Tears for Fears’ 1985 album Songs From the Big Chair in a ludicrously bloated and extravagant “Super Deluxe Edition” featuring four discs, two DVDs (one a DVD mix of the album and another consisting of a documentary, music videos, and live performances), and “a 30-page replica 1985 tour programme and a 32-page booklet” (according to the album’s Wikipedia page)....

Bob Borchardt’s family goes way back with food. His great-grandparents owned a store that sold produce, meat, and dry goods in Pilsen in the 30s and 40s, and his grandparents ran a restaurant and bar where his grandmother made hearty midday dinners of braised meats and spaetzle for the truckers coming in and out of the nearby South Water Market. In the 90s Bob took over his father’s company, which serviced restaurants with specialized tasks like maintaining professional stove hoods....

You sense it not just in the father (Alex Descas), but in the people around him, especially the friend who ends up committing suicide. There’s a lot of tension between the characters. Sometimes that tension is explained, other times it’s left alone, as in the relationship between the father and daughter and their neighbors. It’s very enigmatic, that sense of something in the past that continues to trap the characters....

Oline Eaton, biographer and pop-culture aficionado, indulges her straight-to-streaming needs with: House of Cards I’m of a generation that has been spoiled by TV on DVD, powering through shows as though there were a medal to be earned upon completion. Netflix totally indulged this impulse when it gifted us the entirety of its new straight-to-streaming show, House of Cards. The 13 hours of this Othello-esque drama pass—increasingly chilling, increasingly cynical—as a blur....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Thursday evening a young, troubled bicyclist from Glenview was hit and killed by a small pickup in the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive north of Belmont. The Sun-Times and Tribune posted tentative and frequently revised first reports online, though those are now lost to us, and their ultimate news stories took up only a few lines. But the process by which an online community critiqued those first reports while inundating itself with rumors, conjecture, and first impressions was prodigious and awesome....

Let’s set aside the Dave McKinney affair as it reflects on McKinney and his former newspaper, the Sun-Times. Let’s focus on Bruce Rauner. Rauner, by the way, commented briefly on the affair in an exchange with Hannah Meisel on public radio station WILL in Champagne-Urbana. Rauner said he personally didn’t talk to anyone at the paper about McKinney or the McKinney story the Rauner campaign objected to, but his campaign staff was “very upset” and did....

I’ve seen great metal in plenty of Chicago venues, but over the past couple years I’ve found myself at Reggie’s more often than any other—and given how frustrating the club’s sound can be, varying from barely tolerable to great depending on where you stand in the room, that says a lot about the quality of the bookings. Reggie’s owes its metal heart to the combined efforts of in-house talent buyer Elle Quintana (who favors old-school thrash and speed metal such as Exciter and Onslaught), MP Shows (which books at Township and Ultra Lounge as well), and Shane Merrill of Empire Productions (who also does some business at Cobra Lounge and was responsible for the Bolt Thrower shows at Reggie’s this month—their first Chicago dates in 22 years)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though it comes to Chicago with hardly any fanfare, Narco Cultura (which opens tomorrow at the City North 14 in Logan Square and the Showplace 14 in Cicero) is one of the best-reviewed nonfiction features of the season (“It’s the most scarific doc I’ve seen since The Act of Killing, praised J. Hoberman). It profiles two interrelated industries, the Mexican drug trade and the Los Angeles-based narcocorrido music business, demonstrating that this is a booming time for both....

The Depot The Depot isn’t your ordinary greasy spoon: chef-owners Jim Perino and Robert Nava have backgrounds in fine dining. Nava, a Bronx native, conjures a nostalgic vibe at this new space occupying a longtime diner–52 years and counting–in the far-west-side enclave called the Island (because it’s cut off from the rest of Austin by the Eisenhower). The menu offers egg creams–the east-coast specialty made with milk, sugar, vanilla, and seltzer water–and other homey standards like open-faced roast beef sandwiches and chicken salad, and blue-plate specials such as meat loaf or grilled pork chops with country gravy....