If I was an Illinois Democrat, I would be really concerned right now. At least concerned enough to not go on vacation after winning the primary. It will be interesting to see how they react now that they know how thin the ice is in Dem-leaning states. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I was an Illinois Republican, I would keep in mind that Scott Brown is a left-leaning Republican even in a state where Republicans are generally more moderate than their counterparts in other states....

Next Tuesday local pop singer and producer Yen Tech (aka Nick Newlin) will drop his debut mixtape, Revengeance, and the Reader snagged an exclusive premiere of one of the songs: “T.R.O.U.B.L.E.” The 27-year-old moved to Chicago to study new media and sound at SAIC and debuted Yen Tech as a “techno-slash-hardcore experiment” at Miami’s Art Basel in 2011, but Newlin got bored with that musical approach and decided to use Yen Tech as the vehicle for something he’d long been yearning to do, which is make pop music....

Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color feature (1964) uses colors expressionistically, and to get the precise hues he wanted, he had entire fields painted. The film came at the end of his most fertile period, just after L’Avventura, La Notte, and Eclipse, and it isn’t as good as the first and last of these, but the ecological concerns look a lot more prescient today. Monica Vitti plays a neurotic married woman briefly attracted to industrialist Richard Harris, and Antonioni does eerie, memorable work with the industrial shapes and colors that surround her; she walks through a science fiction landscape dotted with structures that are both disorienting and full of possibilities....

QI’m a 22-year-old female, and the older I get, the more often I am ridiculed by straight men for being ugly. Just last night, a man asked me if I was jealous of my pretty friends and if I wished I could look like them. I know I’m unattractive, but I’ve met wonderful girls who I think are at least as physically unattractive as me who have managed to find someone to love them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s long review Drew Hunt takes dead aim at the online phenomenon of “vulgar auteurism,” a school of criticism elevating contemporary schlock meisters to the level of Ford, Hawks, and Hitchcock. His case in point: Paul W.S. Anderson, director of such fanboy favorites as Mortal Kombat, Death Race, and now Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth installment in the durable movie/video game franchise....

Life Is a Breeze Suburban punk heroes the Brokedowns have been at it longer than I can remember, and through the years they’ve only managed to get better and better. Over the past couple weeks new tracks from their upcoming Life Is a Breeze LP have been coming out of the woodwork, and these rippers prove one thing about this band that isn’t changing anytime soon: when it comes to tough and melodic midwestern punk rock, the Brokedowns do it best....

“You have to give me a couple days,” says Ron Hermiz, sounding harried. “Everyone here is crying for the product.” A customer in Michigan is on the phone, wanting to place a large order of kubba, the dish of bulgur wheat and minced meat known more commonly as kibbeh. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kubba is a pan-Levantine dish that appears in many forms, though Iraqis will tell you they’re all derived from the one that comes from the northern city of Mosul....

It was a polarized year in music. Pop was comically grandiose, its factory settings hardwired to “spectacle” (Gaga, Watch the Throne), while underground rock wallowed in 90s grunge—the only bands who weren’t nostalgic were oldster acts revivified and coasting on that nostalgia. But a smattering of releases this year—all of which went almost entirely unheralded—did more than recycle the familiar, instead looking forward or culling sounds from unlikely inspirations. Here are some of the best of 2011:...

Sometimes I kick the proverbial hornet’s nest intentionally—”bullshit in the Bible,” for instance—and sometimes I kick the hornet’s nest accidentally. I honestly didn’t expect the outraged response I got after I wrote that poly wasn’t a sexual identity in the “sexual orientation” sense of the term. Some people identify as poly, of course, just as some people identify as, say, dominant or submissive. While I recognize that poly (or D/s) can be central to someone’s sexual identity, I’ve never viewed it as a sexual orientation and I didn’t think this was a controversial point of view....

Courtesy of Wikicommons Che: It’s like a jungle out there Side Effects, the new film from prolific director Steven Soderbergh, hit theaters on Friday. It marks his third project in 18 months, following the kinetic actioner Haywire (2012) and the surprise summer hit Magic Mike (2012). And it’s reportedly his last for theatrical release. If that’s the case, he’ll have left behind a filmography as varied and eclectic as there is....

Jared Rouben: I’ve been exploring food and beer since culinary school at the CIA [Culinary Institute of America]. That’s where I first started a brew club, bringing in other breweries and kind of experimenting with beers as a pairing ingredient, as an actual ingredient in food and just enjoying it on its own. And it’s really from there that I started seeing a lot of the flexibility and opportunity with beer and food....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve covered Swearin’ on the 12 O’Clock Track before, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting new music from them since that day. Last summer’s self-titled debut from the New York-based emo revivalists—who are fronted by Allison Crutchfield, who used to play in P.S. Eliot with her twin sister, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield—was one of my favorite records of last year, so I was beyond excited to see the band had posted a preview song from their upcoming LP, Surfing Strange, earlier this week....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not a very big fan of contemporary jazz vocalists, but considering this is the second time I’ve written about one in the last few weeks I’m wondering if my aesthetic sensibilities are changing. In fact, I never cared too much for the music of Gregory Porter, but his forthcoming third album, Liquid Spirit (Blue Note), has made a convert of me....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So it got cold out really fast this week. It happens every year, and still, every time it does, everyone takes to their social media to unleash countless “OMG IT’S SO COLD WHY DO I LIVE IN CHICAGO?” updates. I get it, this weather is a total bummer, but don’t hate Chicago for it. Here, take a listen to today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Chi-Ca-Go (It’s My Chicago),” by the obviously local Light Touch Band....

“He came dressed in an overcoat and civilian clothes and sunglasses and a hat, like some kind of character out of a spy book.” CREEPIEST READER HEADLINE EVER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “They throwed the cabinet down,” Ruthie May McCoy frantically told the police dispatcher. “They want to come through the bathroom.” By the time the police got there she was dead. The Reader‘s Steve Bogira explained that McCoy’s 15-story building in the Abbott Homes project was designed so medicine cabinets in adjacent apartments backed against each other and were easily popped out....

If you’ve ever taken driver’s education you’ve probably been forced to sit through videos about the basic rules of the road, like how to proceed when you arrive at a four-way intersection, how often you should check your rearview mirrors, and what precautions you should take while driving in inclement weather. Chances are, at least a couple of these videos tried to address the rules of the road through the lens of entertainment; the clips used the kind of flimsy narratives typically associated with porn videos and starred teens who are supposed to be just like you because they’re interested in pop culture (which ensured that the videos would age poorly)....

It is an inexorable fact that Andersonville will become, over time, one long uninterrupted strip of vintage-furniture shops. The moment I take to the barricades is the dread day that Taste of Lebanon is priced out of the hood; given the constant flow of customers, I’d hope that’s still pretty far off. This little counter-service joint excels at everything it does—falafel, baba ghanouj, a splendid fattoush—but ask just about anybody what they can’t do without here and they’ll most likely tell you: the lentil soup....

Autre Monde | $$$ 6727 W. Roosevelt Berwyn, IL 708-775-8122autremondecafe.net Gene & Jude’s | $ 2720 River Road River Grove, IL 708-452-7634 Find our favorite 12 restaurants out west View Chicago suburban diningâ€���west in a larger map Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Gene & Jude’s hot dog, like a Cezanne, represents the apotheosis of a form, inessentials stripped away, almost the platonic ideal of the hot dog....

A Parallelogram Steppenwolf Theatre COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s a tall order, and that Norris feels he’s got to rewrite the laws of physics in order to fill it is the first sign that he may’ve bitten off more than he can chew. After all, Beckett needed nothing but a couple of clowns on a nearly empty stage to reduce all human striving to deluded farce....

My advice: get a decent meal in you before seeing American Wee-Pie, the new comedy by Chicago writer Lisa Dillman. Huge stretches of its two-and-a-quarter-hour running time depict people savoring cupcakes and talking—lovingly, caressingly—about them. If you’re even just slightly hungry you might find yourself losing focus, thinking ahead to where you can go after the show for something slathered in icing. And then you’re lost. Dillman musters a nice, literate, often deadpan satiric wit, especially when it comes to the new gastronomy....