Plus: Fourteen Chicago-area Korean restaurants] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Close to 7 PM Sue Chong, a small, fit Korean woman, unlocks the door and apologizes for having forgotten to open it. One large party moves straight to the back and starts rearranging the chairs and couches to form a circle. A couple of people sprawl comfortably on the floor in the middle of it, as if this dark bar with its standard Chicago tavern paraphernalia—Ditka plaque, sailing ship made out of snipped Old Style cans, bottle of Malort—were their dorm room....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Linda Hubbs always loved trains as a kid, so it’s no surprise that her favorite exhibit at the Chicago History Museum is the city’s first elevated train. A whole car of the el, built to bring travelers from Skokie down to the 1893 World’s Fair, stands in the middle of the second floor. Passengers can step inside the train, although a talking statue of Ida B....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Segregation. Chicago’s famously one of the most segregated cities in the country, and its segregation is organized around broad geographic areas. And when you segregate people, you segregate information, which is the fuel of conflict and change. It’s not just that it makes people with power and money less aware of those without, it’s vice versa as well. Does segregation, intentional or not, keep information, and people, from reaching the sort of critical mass needed to create change?...

David Posey, chef de cuisine at Blackbird, challenged Vie executive chef Paul Virant to come up with a recipe using spirulina for this installment of our weekly feature Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Told about spirulina’s history, Paul Virant complained, “Basically, David Posey has given me excrement to use? That’s bullshit. I called him, too, after I got the ingredient, and I was like, ‘Are you serious?...

On December 30, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre in downtown Chicago held a matinee performance of Mr. Bluebeard, a touring show about a potentate who murders his many wives and hangs them from hooks in a secret room. If the story line was gruesome, the production was fabulous—a holiday entertainment for the whole family, chock-full of extravagant scenery and costumes, elaborate musical numbers, swooping aerialists, and a cast of hundreds led by a major star of the era, Eddie Foy....

Rachel Laritz, costume designer at the Court Theatre, lingers in her car with: The Secret Keeper I am addicted to audiobooks and recently finished “reading” Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper and fell in love with the story, style, and characters. The book begins with Laurel, a teen hiding out in her tree house, glancing out of the window to see a stranger walking up the lane. The stranger greets her mother, Dorothy, and Laurel witnesses a shocking crime....

A still from Warhol’s Sleep or the latest ad for Showplace ICON? As my father would say, Chicago has had great sleeping weather lately. The air’s been dry, the wind quiet, and the temperatures only moderately cold. Even when it’s rained, it’s been pleasing, metronomic rain. Unfortunately the city’s theaters have failed to screen any good sleep-inducing movies that might complement the weather. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is pretty dull, all right, but it doesn’t rock you into the sort of contemplative state of which dreaming is a natural extension....

Dennis Mascari was a lifelong Cubs fan, and he wanted to remain one in the afterlife, too. And so he designed a columbarium for the ashes of the most faithful of the north side’s dead—nay, a monument, made of bricks covered with ivy, with a few eerily familiar green seats nearby where mourners could sit and remember their loved ones and contemplate whether a Cubs World Series victory would cause a permanent shift in the nature of the universe....

Part one of two. Read part two here. On a summer day in 1980, 19-year-old Andre Davis stepped off a train 125 miles south of his native Chicago. He expected his visit would last the summer. Little did he know he wouldn’t return home for more than 30 years. Some time spent in Rantoul, his family thought, would be good for him. Friday, August 8, 1980, was steaming. Andre headed over to the Tuckers’ at around 10 AM to waste the day away with Maurice while Sonny was in and out of the house....

Based on a true story, this commanding drama by Steve McQueen (Hunger) is the most uncompromising movie about American slavery I’ve ever seen, which might have something to do with the fact that McQueen is black and almost every other filmmaker to tackle the subject has been white. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northrup, a free man from Saratoga Springs, New York, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841....

The Unspeakable Act The Unspeakable Act, which screens this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center (and with writer-director Dan Sallitt in attendance tonight and tomorrow afternoon), is an opaque independent drama about family ties. The title refers to incest, although the movie isn’t concerned with shock value or sex. Drew Hunt notes in this week’s issue, “In the grand tradition of French director Eric Rohmer, The Unspeakable Act is a story in which transgression is considered but never acted upon....

Bursting with creative energy, this 2012 romantic fantasy by New York artist Terence Nance dances around a single moment in time even as it traces a relationship over years. A few months after falling for the charming Namik Minter, Nance created the short film How Would You Feel?, which revisits again and again the day she telephoned him to cancel a date and he realized their romance would never work out....

The 90s retro revival that’s been building up in various subcultural corners for the past few years has finally spilled over to the mainstream, with teen pop stars rocking Nirvana tees and Dr. Martens and legions of suburban kids following suit. For the greater pop culture it’s mostly been a fashion thing so far, and despite younger artists name-checking 90s artists, the revisiting of a broad range of sounds from the time (from alt rock to rap to R&B) that’s obsessed underground music circles hasn’t crossed over, and the pop charts are still dominated by hyper-futuristic rap stars and slickly produced country balladeers, with nothing remotely grunge-like in sight....

Over the past decade or so, it’s become a totally acceptable thing for loud rock acts to have only two members—the problem is that such an outfit often sounds like half a band. But the Hecks, aka 22-year-old drummer Zach Hebert and 25-year-old guitarist-­vocalist Andrew Mosiman, turn the limitations of the duo format to their advantage. Mosiman plays repetitive patterns on either a two- or three-string guitar (there’s not even a full lineup of strings!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times is reporting that a federal probe into police torture in Chicago is “ramping up.” Back in 2003, it was determined that Burge and other detectives wouldn’t face criminal charges because the statute of limitations had expired. But as part of a lawsuit filed by pardoned ex-death row inmate Madison Hobley, Burge and other detectives declared that they had not tortured suspects–which opens them up for prosecution on the basis of obstruction of justice, if their written testimony is false....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first glance Burke’s Bacon Bar looks like a food truck without a truck, serving slider-size sandwiches, most with bacon, from a window. Meats dangle from a high-tech warmer—including, a bit tongue in cheek, cans of Spam, which authentically turns up on a Hawaiian-inspired sandwich called the Big Kahuna Spamwich. But as a media preview earlier this week revealed, Burke’s Bacon Bar’s truest porky excess comes out in forms that can only work for a group—in particular, a group of people who expect to be in a conference room for a very long time....

Like Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Slow Food International founder Carlo Petrini knows the world is suffering from a ruinous eating disorder and can’t continue to feed itself in pervasively unhealthy, inequitable, and unsustainable ways. But where those exposes were grim enough to drive a reader under the covers with a box of bonbons, the Italian Petrini has a plan with the pursuit of pleasure at its heart....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was something sweet about Ennio Morricone getting a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars on Sunday night, watching him sit impassively with his wife by his side and Quincy Jones one seat over—wearing one of the ugliest tuxedos ever made—and getting emotional when he gave his acceptance speech in Italian. But there was nothing sweet about the performance of “Knew I Loved You” by Celine Dion—a ballad from Once Upon a Time in America that was given lyrics last year and opens a strange new album called We All Love Ennio Morricone (Sony Classical)....

For its first anniversary, the owners of Galerie F, a Logan Square storefront gallery that specializes in silk-screen gig posters and street art, decided they wanted to do a show featuring the work of European poster artists. The problem, says co-owner Zissou Tasseff-Elenkoff, was coming up with a unifying theme: something familiar to both Europeans and Americans, but not so tied to pop culture that the work would be obsolete in six months....

The 13th European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, March 26 through April 1, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening; for a full festival schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brotherhood Like The Believer (2001), this Danish drama follows a young man who falls in with neo-Nazis, regardless that his nature is at odds with the movement’s ideology....