“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Oscar Wilde famously wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan. The Irish authors of Improbable Frequency have put a twist on that quote from one of Ireland’s greatest writers. “We are all in the gutter,” goes the line in this 2004 play with music, “but some of us have an ear to the ground.” The plot focuses on Tristram Faraday, an English crossword puzzle expert who’s been recruited by British intelligence to break enemy codes....

It’s been almost two years since UNO, using its clout as one of the most powerful charter school operations in the state, forced rookie alderman Nicholas Sposato to accept one of its schools in his ward. Because, like most charters, UNO is nonunion. Every new UNO school means relatively fewer unionized teachers in the workforce of the Chicago Public Schools and, therefore, less power for CTU. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The fate of Logan Square’s Mega Mall shopping center won’t be on the ballot when voters in the 35th Ward select an alderman in the February 27 municipal elections. But it remains an important factor in the increasingly heated race between alderman Rey Colon, former alderman Vilma Colom, and challenger Miguel Sotomayor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Colon laughs at the accusation. “I think it’s particularly funny coming from her,” he says....

The Reader’s Choice: Rowley Kennerk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peeking into Rowley Kennerk’s tiny space can make me feel like most other commercial galleries in town are grotesquely provincial in their tastes. Kennerk shows the occasional Chicagoan with a national reputation, but his focus is on New York, LA, and European artists who create intimate experiences with subtle colors, expressive gestures, and humble materials....

More than any other established director who’s waded into digital 3-D—Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders come to mind—Italian horror master Dario Argento seems well suited to the medium. Long before the technology arrived, he made such eye-popping films as Deep Red (1975), Phenomena (1985), and Suspiria (1976), the last of them particularly playful in its use of cinematic space. Argento has never been interested in realism, which is precisely what makes him great, and Suspiria, his first supernatural horror film, leaves behind the semirealism of his earlier giallos in favor of a more illusionist aesthetic....

C: We’ve been reflecting a lot lately now that we have a little bit of time, and it’s been crazy to go from the Floss 1.0 stuff to now. All of the whole 2.0 version with this new movement that’s growing, we haven’t really had much time to sit back and reflect and, I don’t know, absorb all of this. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » J: We’re fortunate enough to have the privilege of experiencing an up and then a down and then another up....

Check out our photos and video recap of Friday’s Lollapalooza performances. See our previews and photo/video recaps of bands playing on: Saturday ·Sunday ·Afterparties Lollapalooza main » Deap Vally1:30-2:15Petrillo Stage As a prolific singer-songwriter in the aughts, Joshua Tillman produced mostly whispery, solemn acoustic songs that catalogued his aches and pains. He was eventually enlisted to drum for concert-­hall megaband Fleet Foxes during their rapid rise through the plaid- and beard-wearing indie-folk ranks, and when he quit in 2012 he seemingly emerged with a desire to reinvent himself—he’s since had a groove in his step and a boutonniere on the lapel of his tweed jacket....

Matei Vişniec‘s plays were banned under the communist regime in his native Romania. These days they’re among the most produced there, and this searing, hallucinatory 2005 work shows why. Refugees with slippery post-Balkan-war allegiances return to their decimated village to start new lives. The town stands beside a forest fed on a century’s accumulation of scrambled human bones, making one mother’s attempt to find her dead son’s body in a wheelbarrow full of dirt seem almost sensible....

At a Seven Hills Winery tasting, winery owner and winemaker Casey McClellan discusses and samples out several wines from the Walla Walla-based winery, including the pinot gris, Riesling, viognier, and merlot. 6:30-8:30 PM, C-House, 166 E. Superior, 312-523-0923, $32. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To celebrate Australia Day TipsyCake’s Naomi Levine leads a tour of her pastry kitchen and serves favorite dishes from her native Australia, including wattle­seed beef burgers and banoffee pie, paired with Aussie wines....

Kevin Warwick, Reader associate editor CHIRP Record Fair When you see Permanent Records honcho Lance Barresi stepping out to take a breather and “get more cash,” you know there are treasures to be had. And when within minutes of digging, you snag a rare copy of L.D. Eye from Michigan weirdo punks the Crucifucks, you know you’ll get a good haul. Three frazzled hours later, you’ve found the Brainbombs’ Fucking Mess, Zeke’s Dirty Sanchez, and a cheap Megaforce pressing of Kill ‘Em All, and it’s only a dozen days until the next paycheck....

Sassafras has historically been considered a medicinal herb—used to treat fevers, inflammation, scurvy, dysentery, and sexually transmitted diseases, among other things—in addition to being used as a flavoring. Sassafras root was traditionally an ingredient in root beer, and in the 17th century, sassafras oil was used to mask the taste of opium in remedies given to children. In the 1960s, however, the FDA banned the oil in mass-produced food and drugs following studies showing that large doses of it caused liver damage and cancer in lab rats (sassafras oil, or safrole, is also an ingredient in ecstasy)....

Surprisingly Stan Brakhage’s Cat’s Cradle (1959) is not included in the Cat Film Festival. This Friday at 8 PM Chicago Filmmakers and South Side Projections will copresent a program of cat-related short films in the parking lot of Filmmakers’ Andersonville location; it runs again on Saturday at 7:30 PM at Cafe 53rd (1359 E. 53rd St.). It contains work by two luminaries of avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage and Joyce Wieland, along with roughly a dozen other experimental pieces made between the 60s and the late 90s....

Andrea Bauer The subject of debate Perusing the Reader‘s new food issue reminds me that there is news in need of reporting on the bagel front. The Reader‘s Tal Rosenberg cites New York Bagel & Bialy as the “only place in the Chicagoland area that makes a bagel that ranks with anything that comes out of New York City.” I am on record as saying the same. New York Bagel was our 2011 Best of Chicago choice, and I wrote, “The bagels here aren’t merely authentic—they’re delicious....

At Saturday night’s screening of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters January is often described as the worst time of year for commercial movies, but I can’t think of a better time to go to the multiplex if you’re a teenager looking for a dim room in which to make out. Just look at this week’s listings for the River East 21. Broken City, A Haunted House, Movie 43, The Last Stand, Parker: titles so generic they all but instruct more discerning viewers to stay home....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sixteen Medill present and former faculty members have signed and released a letter calling on Dean John Lavine to show his hand. They want a “more complete accounting than the dean has thus far provided” of the unattributed quotes Lavine used in a letter to alumni published in the Medill alumni magazine last year–quotes that it’s been suggested the dean concocted....

Record Store Day, now in its fourth year, falls on the third Saturday of April (4/17) and brings together “over 700 independently owned record stores in the USA” and “hundreds of similar stores internationally” to form a sort of one-shot record club that excludes “online retailers or corporate behemoths.” Festivities include free in-store performances, promotional giveaways, and discounts, in addition to a horde of releases and reissues—many of them limited, and some of them superlimited—available only at participating stores....

courtesy Webster & Associates George Jones A couple of weeks ago I listened to a recent reissue that compiled the complete United Artists singles of George Jones, my favorite country singer. I couldn’t remember the last time I had put on one of his albums, but he was the kind of artist who renders such gaps irrelevant: no matter how time had passed, hearing that voice made it seemed like it had never gone away....

The sterility of a doctor’s waiting room can be intimidating—symmetrically arranged furniture, perfectly placed People magazines, and looming plaques of accomplishments act less like a cordial welcome than a direct order to sit down, shut up, and be patient. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dr. Gordon Siegel’s approach, though, aims to put his patients at ease through incessant tick-tocking. At his Midwest Ear Nose & Throat offices on the near north side (3 E....

In these trying times for mainstream media, which Chicago journalists have the most to say to one another but are least likely to say it? My nominees would be the publishers of the region’s ethnic press. Most run shoestring operations, serving readers of modest means who share a common experience as strangers in a strange land yet are divided by such profound partitions as religion, history, neighborhood, and language. It was held last October 27 in Doppelt’s classroom....

BIG DIPPER SUPERCLUSTER: THE BIG DIPPER ANTHOLOGY (MERGE) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today the underground and the mainstream have a different relationship, to put it mildly. “Indie” imprints like Vice and Downtown can give their artists all kinds of perks thanks to major-label partnerships, and to a bitter old fuck like me it seems like green, untested bands are lucking into big-time exposure at an unprecedented rate, whether through record deals, corporate-sponsored tours, or music placement on TV shows and commercials....