“Jesus Christ, is that Michael Shannon?” I blurted out recently while watching Groundhog Day (1993)—specifically the scene in which Bill Murray delights a young husband and wife by giving them tickets to Wrestlemania. The bit part marked Shannon’s big-screen debut, and since then he’s appeared in more than 40 films, emerging as one of the most impressive young movie actors to come out of Chicago theater. Shannon scored an Oscar nomination playing John Givings, the mercilessly sarcastic mental patient in Revolutionary Road (2008), and ran away with The Runaways (2010) playing silky-smooth rock Svengali Kim Fowley....

The theme of this 20th edition is “Laughter,” and as usual the organizers have brought together an eclectic assortment of writers, artists, scientists, scholars, and performers to address the topic in dozens of programs running through 11/15, including lectures, readings, discussions, and theatrical and musical presentations. Tickets are available via the festival box office at 312-494-9509 or online at chicagohumanities.org; advance purchase is encouraged, as a $5 per ticket surcharge applies at the door....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Cook County Juvenile Court judge has ordered Pitchfork to turn over the raw footage from an interview it conducted with lightning-rod local rapper Chief Keef at a New York gun range in June. Prosecutors asked last month for Pitchfork to surrender the footage so that the court could determine whether Keef had violated the terms of his probation, but Pitchfork protested, citing the First Amendment and the Illinois Reporter’s Privilege Act....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It being the tail end of low tourist season I hesitate to pick on those sad, empty (relatively) high-end restaurants in Oaxaca City’s center. They’re still recovering from social unrest last spring, during which some 20 people were killed in clashes between police and antigovernment protesters, scaring away all the tourists and sending the economy into the toilet. My uneducated guess is that many of the street vendors and operators of the tiny fondas and comedores (market stalls and small restaurants) suffered relatively little from the tourist exodus, since much of their business comes from actual Oaxaquenos who couldn’t or wouldn’t flee when things got hairy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m never going to say that Kedzie Avenue has too many Middle Eastern restaurants, especially since some of the best are distinctive. The gritty, no-nonsense Salam has the best food on the street. Al-Khaymeih runs a close second–and you can take your mom and a bottle there. “Restaurant of restaurants” Mataam al-Mataam is open 24-7, and Semiramis has that powerful toum....

Defying the odds, the mayor has so far avoided the hot seat set out for him by U.S. magistrate judge Geraldine Soat Brown. Last February Brown ordered Mayor Daley to submit to questioning in a civil suit brought by a former death row inmate who says he was tortured and framed by Chicago police detectives. Daley’s resistance has kept the meter running on litigation that’s cost taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees, though it’s a battle the city has no moral reason to contest and slim hope of winning....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My idea is a chain of Barack Obama outlet stores — warm, friendly, one-stop-shopping places where the joy of election night will linger forever. Trader O’s would make a nice name. At a Trader O’s the counters would groan under the weight of all the magnificent collectibles of the ’08 crusade . For instance, the front page of the Wednesday Sun-Times announces, “FREE!...

Curt Cameruci—better known as Autobot of the DJ duo Flosstradamus—has expatriated to Brooklyn, leaving his partner, Josh Young, back in the Chi. Cameruci has his first solo DJ gig in Brooklyn this weekend at Public Assembly. Young, who has spent much of the past two years working with his sister, Melisa Young (aka Kid Sister), is now DJing under the name Young Josh in addition to the more millennial moniker J2K....

Jeff Roberson/AP Photos August in Ferguson, Missouri The national conversation recommended as the antidote to the racial toxins of Ferguson will begin just as soon as the Super Bowl’s been played, or once March Madness is behind us, or after we’ve paid our taxes. If there’s nothing good on television. A friend, Judy Wise, has played a critical role in organizing Facing History in Chicago and London. I’ve been to their annual dinners....

Courtesy of ICP This weekend Amsterdam’s mighty ICP Orchestra rolls through town for a series of performance as a full ensemble and in small groups. The group was founded by pianist Misha Mengelberg (who’s sitting out this tour) and drummer Han Bennink in 1974, and it’s existed ever since with a goodly amount of turnover (past members have included John Tchicai, Peter Brötzmann, Alan Silva, Enrico Rava, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Steve Lacy, and George Lewis, among numerous others), though the current lineup has remained more or less the same for a decade and a half....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrew Bird certainly got people talking with his latest album, Noble Beast (Fat Possum). Back in January Miles Raymer criticized him in Sharp Darts for making fussy, overcalculated music that lacked heart and cited his embrace by NPR and the New York Times as evidence of his middlebrow blandness (though if you ask me, trying to establish guilt by association with those institutions is a bit of a stretch)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week Mines front man Bill Satek made his national TV debut; he wasn’t playing any of the avant-pop tracks from his band’s first album, this year’s Just Another Thing That Got Ruined, but his music was central to his appearance on Judge Mathis. As Luca Cimarusti wrote last week, engineer Brian Sulpizio sued Satek for failing to pay the full cost of recording that Mines album, and the case went live last Thursday afternoon....

Scotland Yard Gospel Choir-er and noted local tortoise owner Mary Ralph was sitting down for an Abe Lincoln tattoo at the Hard Rock Hotel’s Lollapalooza hospitality lounge when Kesha was ushered in ahead of her (though Ralph reports that the singer ultimately chickened out). Ralph adds: “They locked down the place, perhaps so we wouldn’t notice she was dressed in scraps barely covering her private regions.” SCANDY! Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Though not as influential as Ellen DeGeneres or as political as Margaret Cho, Judy Gold has a high profile in the GLBT community. Here she headlines the Human Rights Campaign’s seventh annual Laughing Out Loud, which also features Sabrina Matthews and Andre Kelley. Born and raised in New Jersey, Gold says she felt like an outsider in high school, but not because she was a lesbian: “Six-foot-three plus marching band equals unpopular....

Rogers Park Revisited In regards to: the Rogers Park/West Ridge volunteerism section I enjoyed the depiction of Rogers Park, the neighborhood I live in and love, but I’m troubled because you haven’t included Howard Area Community Center, one of the oldest and most vital community organizations in the neighborhood, as a place with myriad volunteer opportunities. This organization has provided 42 years of service to the Howard area of the Rogers Park community....

Nearly two years ago Chicago lost two of its best pastry chefs when Tim and Elizabeth Dahl quit their positions—at Blackbird and Boka, respectively—had a kid, and headed north for Madison to open their own place. Capitol Square in Tim’s hometown—site of a recent restaurant boomlet—is also the scene of their return to the restaurant world, a “Mediterranean” but largely Italian-leaning casual spot that couldn’t be more different from the relatively rarefied environments they left behind....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s start with a comparison, between Hou’s films and Manoel de Oliveira‘s, that inexhaustible nonagenarian Portuguese. Superficially they’re similar, especially in their commitment to long, static takes, but in terms of film philosophy, the ways in which their works imply a specific view of the world, they’re more like light-years apart. Hou’s the phenomenological “realist,” an artist of interpretable surfaces without symbolic content: his only “revelations” are what the camera immediately sets out in front of you....

Andrew A. Nelles/ Sun-Times Media Rahm Emanuel, back in Chicago Saturday after a ski trip in Utah. He suffered windburn. As you may have read, when it was announced last Thursday that a big chunk of Chicago’s schools were being closed, the city’s mayor was on the very, very far-southwest side. He didn’t have to run for the hills; he was already there. Yes, Mayor Emanuel was skiing in Utah, but it’s not like he doesn’t care....

In November 1937 Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, then American theater’s preeminent acting couple, called rehearsals for Chekhov’s The Seagull. They’d cast a young, little-known actress named Uta Hagen in a lead role and invited her to their 60-acre Wisconsin estate, Ten Chimneys, to work on the play. Jeffrey Hatcher’s new play Ten Chimneys, currently onstage at Northlight Theatre, focuses almost entirely on those few days. After two and a quarter hours of stage time, it’s difficult to say why....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brown Shugga, a seasonal brew from Lagunitas, was created in 1997 as the result of an attempt to rescue a failed batch of Olde GnarlyWine Ale by adding “boatloads of brown sugar”—or so the story goes, anyway. It was a hit and they’ve made it every year since, until last year. Lagunitas, then in the process of building a new brew house, realized that they didn’t have the facilities to brew both their regular beers and Brown Shugga (which requires more time to make than the others)....