Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grudgingly, I took a look. Well, OK, it was a piece aimed right at the spot where she and I are as vulnerable as the underside of a turtle. Steinberg’s older son is 18, a high school senior. He’s a good kid. But he’s got one foot out the door. “How do I feel? Proud. Lucky,” writes Steinberg. He’s too adroit a writer to wring out the washcloth, but it’s clear his feelings are a lot more complicated than that....

I’ve always been dramatic. When I was a little girl, maybe two or three, I remember making up stories in the closet. My mother was always trying to figure out who in the hell was in there with me. I’d make up all these voices and play all these characters. Jackie Taylor, 61, is the founder, executive director, and primary playwright for the Black Ensemble Theater. This was literally a landmark year for her and BET: the company moved into its own built-to-order space at 4450 N....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth fame takes the stage at the Museum of Contemporary Art, but now it’s with her new act: Body/Head. She and guitarist Bill Nace just released their debut album, Coming Apart, which the Reader‘s Peter Margasak calls “seriously committed music that seizes fleeting sounds and gives them staggering weight.” Gate—the solo project of Michael Morley of the Dead C—opens the show with a performance alongside Tom Carter of Charalambides....

The Simpsons: Tapped Out I recently got massively addicted to an iPhone game called The Simpsons: Tapped Out. Its premise is fairly simple: After Homer accidentally destroys Springfield through a catastrophe at the nuclear power plant, you have to help him and Lisa rebuild and repopulate the town. You do this by collecting in-game money that’s generated periodically by the buildings you own and by assigning your characters automated tasks like “Shop at Kwik E Mart” that pay different amounts based on how much time they take....

BLACK ON THE BLOCK: THE POLITICS OF RACE AND CLASS IN THE CITY | MARY PATTILLO (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS) Where Chicago Public Library, West Englewood Branch, 1745 W. 63rd Pattillo’s participant-observer study of slowly gentrifying North Kenwood-Oakland began in 1998, when she bought a house at 4432 S. Berkeley. The house provides a point of entry into the history of the neighborhood; she traces NKO’s fortunes from late-19th-century prosperity to 1970s poverty and back to relative prosperity, then focuses on the uneasy position of the growing population of middle-class black professionals, who often find themselves acting as brokers between “the Man” downtown and the “littlemen” back in the hood....

Now that Cook County Board president Todd Stroger has saved his 1 percent sales tax hike, and only has to worry about the state legislature’s attack on his veto power, a grand jury probe of his administration’s spending, and the next election, he’ll be turning his attention to something a little more glamorous. Stroger has his heart set on establishing the first Cook County Film and Entertainment Commission, complete with an executive director’s job any well-connected busboy or Stroger cousin would love to fill....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Sunday night the Buena Vista Social Club returns to Chicago with a concert at Symphony Center. Many of the all-star Cuban orchestra’s greatest voices have died since the group became an unexpected phenomenon starting in 1998—including singer and tres player Compay Segundo, singers Ibrahim Ferrer and Pio Leyva, and pianist Ruben Gonzalez—and it’s been half a dozen years since the group has made any recordings, but there’s still plenty of firepower remaining....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been writing about fashion for the Reader since 1999, and every now and then I have to remind myself of how things have changed since then. There were just a handful of boutiques stocking independent designers and fashion-forward styles—if you wanted a bigger selection, you had to go to New York. (There weren’t many online shopping sites back then either....

In southwest Chicago, there is an honest-to-goodness hill that runs through the Dan Ryan Woods down into Beverly. (I’ve seen another one, too, in Pullman; in this city that’s like spotting a rare bird.) Descending it on 87th Street with the woods to the left, if you’re able to block out some powerful evidence to the contrary, you can almost think you’re coming into town off a mountain, and at the bottom of the hill you’ll find a bar where you should stop, apres-ski, for a drink....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The African Diaspora Film Festival, with films by Africans and hyphenated Africans from around the world, runs all week at Facets Cinematheque. Cliff Doerksen recommends the opening-night feature, Glorious Exit, in which a Swiss-Nigerian actor who’s trying to make it in Hollywood drops everything and flies to Africa to bury the father he never knew. Also reviewed in our sidebar are Gospel Hill, a star-studded drama that marks the directing debut of actor Giancarlo Esposito; Jacques Romain: Passion for a Country, about the Haitian journalist and political activist whose 1944 murder is still grist for the conspiracy mill; and Return to Goree, a music doc in which Senegalese singer and percussionist Youssou N’Dour travels the U....

THE PRESIDENT, ELECTED But I couldn’t begrudge my brother his skepticism. I’d seen Obama up close, and he didn’t bowl me over. I’d heard him show up exhausted at a dinner and give a speech that everyone cheered wildly even though it had been really lousy. I’d winced at the precious Annie Leibovitz holiday card bulk-mailed to constituents a couple years ago. When he ran for his party’s nomination for the Senate in 2004, he didn’t get my vote....

Honey Blo honeyblorecords.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago’s (and perhaps the world’s) only blues/funk bagpiper, Honey Blo studied woodwinds with jazz musician Duke Payne when Payne was his math teacher at Betsy Ross Elementary School. When he saw Payne play the bagpipes during a school assembly, he was hooked. “He was teaching and playing music,” he remembers, “and he had all the teachers, the women, after him....

Benny’s Chop House on a wednesday evening 444 N. Wabash 312-626-2444 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At Henry VIII’s court feasts, guests ate hundreds of oysters before dinner. But re-creating his preprandial oyster orgies could get expensive—unless you go to Benny’s Chop House. On Wednesdays between 5 and 7 PM, the bar at Benny’s lays out platters of beautifully shucked bivalves at 25 cents a pop, usually from the east and west coasts (key, as the BP oil spill is all but guaranteed to make gulf oysters scarce)....

Every August the Film Center presents the Black Harvest Film Festival, a four-week schedule of films drawn from the black experience, and every festival kicks off with a gala shorts program, “A Black Harvest Feast.” The five shorts screening this year all seem like calling-card films, fairly conventional dramas with good production values and sometimes drippy music cues, meant to win entrée into the professional world of TV and movies. But there’s real talent here, especially in two sharp domestic dramas....

The fifth annual Celebrate Clark Street festival is this Sat 7/24 (1-11 PM) and Sun 7/25 (1-10 PM) on Clark between Morse and Estes in Rogers Park. Booked by Sound Culture‘s David Chavez (an alumnus of Uncommon Ground and HotHouse), the festival’s two stages present an eclectic lineup of mostly local world-music artists, with a handful of national and international acts each day. On Saturday the North Stage (Clark and Estes) features Toronto Afrobeat collective Mr....

Crackerfarm Carolina Chocolate Drops Later today the city will announce the lineup for 2013 edition of the Downtown Sound series at Pritzker Pavilion. As it was last year, Downtown Sound is one of the DCASE programs that’s remained strong through the rocky transition from the tenure of superlative music programmer Michael Orlove to the current administration. In the months since last year’s programs were organized, the department has wisely rehired two veterans who worked under Orlove, Jack McLarnan and Carlos Tortolero....

Say you make a business decision that blows up on you—a choice so misguided that the instant it’s announced the world careens a little. Word spreads, Web comments mushroom, and before you know it a global dissection of your blunder is underway. Say also that you run an established cultural institution, and it finally dawns on you that this move runs contrary to everything it stands for. What can you do?...

As Mr. Emanuel says, “I swear a lot.” He also yells a lot, and in his sentences his favorite expletive can serve as subject, verb or adjective. . . . New York Times, November 6 The Federal Communications Commission defines “indecent speech” as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities and organs....

Best Bets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now in its third year, the Umbrella Music Festival—organized by the musician-presenters behind the jazz series at the Hideout, the Hungry Brain, and Elastic Arts—ranks among the city’s most important showcases for international jazz and improvised music and functions as a key complement to the Chicago Jazz Festival. Once again this year the lineup is boosted by a one-night fest-within-a-fest, European Jazz Meets Chicago, at the Chicago Cultural Center....

“You’re as relevant as your last mix.” House music has belonged to the world as a whole for most of its history. But like everything else in club life, Chicago-purist house has its vogues of popularity and wider cultural relevance. The mid-to-late 90s was such a time—just as right now is. The original sound of Chicago house music labels Trax and DJ International has been reintegrated into clubland’s matrix with increasing frequency....