Mike Sula Duck soup, Foo Noodle Bar The mighty Horseshoe Hammond goes to great lengths to pull in Asian gamblers, running free, (almost) hourly shuttles between Chinatown and the northwest Indiana casino in addition to less frequent stops at Broadway and Argyle, among others. Its La Cheng Asian Gaming Area, packed with baccarat tables, is designed on lucky feng shui principles, and conceals a hidden noodle bar which recently received a ringing endorsement from L2O chef and high roller Matthew Kirkley, who declared that “the best noodle shop in the Chicagoland area is not in Chicago, nor Illinois....

Kate Bush is a having a real moment right now. The art-witch vibe she perfected back in the 70s and 80s has provided a foundational influence for Grimes and other new artists who’ve been accumulating a whole lot of cultural capital recently, and she has some highly influential proselytizers elsewhere as well. Bush’s effects on the zeitgeist reached a weird high last weekend when more than 300 people gathered in a park in Brighton, England, to set a record for the most people simultaneously reenacting the video to her 1978 UK-chart-topping single “Wuthering Heights....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moon was for many years the pop critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he displayed the kind of broad-mindedness folks often credit Greg Kot with. (He currently contributes to NPR’s All Things Considered.) But Moon did more than pay lip service to jazz, international, and classical music. This book lists his choices by artists in alphabetical order, regardless of genre, so you go from reading about an album by South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim to reading about Raw Power by Iggy & the Stooges, from Memphis Minnie to Yehudi Menuhin....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Already I’ve sat through Edgar Ulmer‘s Strange Illusion (screening at Doc Films Sunday at 7) twice and still can’t remember anything about it. Or hardly anything: one very odd-looking actor (presumably Jimmy Lydon, from review summaries I’ve read), an elaborately gated estate entrance, and some of the most ludicrously awful back-screen projection I’ve ever been witness to … except I adore that out-of-sync matting, as antidote to our official (as in “oppressive”) realist paradigm, arguably one of the “minor glories” that Sarris would call our attention to....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On overcast days I feel that way about restaurant blogging, which boomed in an explosion of populist Internet enthusiasm a few years ago. But the reality was that much of it was done with at least one eye on a career, and many of Chicago’s restaurant bloggers—like Michael Nagrant of Hungry Magazine, Carly Fisher of Chicago Brunch Blog, and, uh, me—have mostly had professional gigs since, while others just faded away after a season, like the subjects of this Reader piece two years ago....

Here’s how recycling in Chicago works now—or, rather, how it doesn’t: Or you can do what most Chicagoans do: say to hell with it. Two years later, Chicago’s recycling programs are a confusing mess—to residents, recycling advocates, aldermen, and even city employees who work on waste management. In April city officials quietly released the results of a pair of studies they’d commissioned to help them figure out how to reduce the amount of garbage produced in Chicago....

Anthony Graffeo’s letter [May 4, responding to the April 20 story “Killed on Camera”] seems to miss the point of the story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before the shot was fired, both Weems and the two black men acted unwisely. After the shot was fired, Weems lied about what had occurred. OPS found out about the lies, and Cline let Weems off with a pat on the wrist and even later promoted him to detective....

This spring’s crop of chef memoirs (cheffoirs?) and other local food books is overshadowed by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas’s riveting but flawed Life, on the Line. Forget NYC chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter—what about the diaries of toques like poor Rick Tramonto or Wayne Cohen? For a former English major like me, it’s been difficult to read any of them without playing the Who’s-More-Human? game: the young superchef who blithely conquers all before him; the deeply flawed, born-again, dyslexic kitchen tyrant; or the bumptious, unknown, self-published executive turned line cook....

QTwenty-one-year-old female here. When we were both 14, my first boyfriend took advantage of me. I wanted to explore my sexuality a little, but things went further than I wanted. One day, we were kissing with him on top of me. We were both fully clothed, and he started rubbing up against me. I didn’t realize he was dry humping me until after he had to leave to clean himself up....

The 15th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 9, through Thursday, March 29, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 15; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beats Being Dead Christian Petzold, director of such German neonoirs as Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008), delivers the first installment of the Dreileben Trilogy, three movies by different directors that function as discrete narratives but are linked by the peripheral movements of a serial killer....

Lee Sandlin was born in Wildwood, Illinois, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and currently lives in Chicago proper. He’s written feature journalism, historical studies, and opera and classical-music reviews—mostly for the Reader, where he has also covered TV. Wicked River is his second book. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is a serpentine route, but it’s not an unusual one. There are countless streams just like it....

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung INFO 312-704-8414 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November COT sent out a brief notice that the double bill would be directed by Ken Cazan and designed by Peter Harrison, the same team that put together COT’s acclaimed Death in Venice a couple years ago. Serban and set designer Leiko Fuseya had “withdrawn from the production after Chicago Opera Theater was unable to realize their concepts for the project....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t realize that the Pitchfork Reviews Reviews guy was at the Pitchfork fest, but now that I think of it, it makes total sense. While he was there the site’s quasi-anonymous proprietor, “David,” sat down with Jim DeRogatis on Jim’s favorite backstage spot (a bench behind what this year was called the Red Stage) and chatted with “the most famous rock critic alive” (David’s words) about the state of music criticism, his personal philosophies, and what it means that he was given a super-VIP “Elite” pass, which were handed out to only a tiny number of people, one of them being Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber....

Walter Cronkite, the veteran CBS anchorman, was often referred to as “the most trusted man in America.” Of course, back then there was only one America (from sea to shining sea), and now there are two—one blue and one red, each with its own news media and its own reality. No one person could hope to win the trust of both these countries, so instead of Cronkite we’ve got Fox News bloviator Bill O’Reilly and Comedy Central satirist Jon Stewart, each trusted by his own viewers and deeply mistrusted by the other man’s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Another new year, and just about time for another of Lars von Trier’s antinomian gifts to the world–which in the case of the recent Palm Springs International Film Festival (January 4-15) happened to be The Boss of It All, a feature von Trier shot (or that shot itself) in something called “Automavision,” a computer-driven technology that purports to eliminate the need for a human cinematographer at all....

Right about now the last thing I want to think about is Limp Bizkit. The Florida nu-metal band hardly ever enters my mind—except through infrequent memories of middle school, which coincided with the group’s peak in popularity—but I can’t get Limp Bizkit off my brain since Sunday. That’s when I heard “Ready to Go,” the band’s new, six-minute long single that includes a contribution from fallen rap idol and Cash Money labelmate Lil Wayne....

By this time we’ve seen enough of Rahm Emanuel as mayor of Chicago to know how he does business—that is, how he says he’s investing in public education as he guts it, or how he claims to be cleaning up the city’s books as he hands out corporate subsidies and puts public assets on the auction block. Yet Lydersen, a prolific writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Reader, remains remarkably dispassionate as she chronicles the mayor’s efforts to close schools, fire teachers, bring NATO to town, shutter mental health clinics, and privatize city operations, to name but a few highlights of his first two years in office....

Occupying the street that shares its name from Kedzie to Diversey Avenue, the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival turns five this weekend with loads of pop-up art galleries and food vendors plus two stages of (mostly) local music. On Friday moombahton disciples Milo & Otis kick out the jams at 5 PM on the Community Stage (Milwaukee and Diversey), followed by Latin-ska band Los Vicios de Papa and Krautrockers Cave. Future-boogie auteur Dam-Funk headlines the Culture Stage (Milwaukee and Kedzie) after sets by locals Jugo de Mango and Bare Mutants....

Ready-to-blow NYC rapper Mykki Blanco’s Twitter feed has lately been full of references to label hassles and increasingly legitimate-seeming threats to leak the finished eight-song EP—his first “legitimate” release since his Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss mixtape put him on the map last year—that he and his team are sitting on unless someone else gets it out fast. Earlier this afternoon he showed that he’s serious by posting a new track, “Bugged Out!...

Somehow I’ve gotten a reputation as a professional againster. People say that I don’t like anything and I don’t mind telling you so; that I’m characteristically unimpressed. It’s true that of all the critical duties I’m responsible for I most hate declaring anything “the best.” (Because what if it isn’t?) I don’t OMG at dinner, I’ve never eaten anything I would vow “to die for,” and the word “killer” as an expression of approval makes me homicidal....