Music Box Films musicboxfilms.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » William Schopf quietly entered the distribution business in 2007 with Music Box Films—an outlet for the same kind of grown-up art-house pictures he’d scoped at international festivals to play at his Music Box Theater. To run the company with him, Schopf enlisted Music Box Theater programmer Brian Andreotti and New York distro veteran Ed Arentz of Palm Pictures and Empire Pictures....

In an age where we do so much of our reading online, the Read/Write Library is a fine tribute to the book as physical object, the physical object as text, and texts as products of their physical environment. Formerly known as the Chicago Underground Library, Read/Write collects anything as long as it’s Chicago-related, including guide books and plays, locally produced magazines like Lumpen (our pick for Best Activist Hipster Magazine in the City Life section) and In These Times, zines of all sorts, chapbooks, and ephemera....

If you can’t smell a rat or two or ten during the first few minutes of Neil LaBute’s In a Forest, Dark and Deep, then your olfactory integrity must be seriously compromised. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bobby comes in out of an ominous thunderstorm and starts laying into Betty about all the guys she fucked around with when she was a teenager. Check....

Koons’s lobster is red, His blow-ups are steel, Of course, Koons’s work isn’t actually made by Koons: that nice float toy he picked up at the dollar store was transformed into a Major Work of Art by 90 elves diligently laboring in his New York factory. What Koons does is “the making of the idea,” Bonami says. “And there is effort in that.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It must be stressful, because Koons has often made it clear that he’s been on a long quest for psychic equilibrium and the carefree masturbation that comes with self-acceptance....

During its 30 years as an ensemble, the Emerson String Quartet has emulated its namesake–Ralph Waldo–by boldly establishing a distinct style. The musicians alternate first and second violin positions, play standing (with the cellist on a small podium), and deliver ensemble perfection that’s truly athletic. This program sandwiches Terra Memoria, by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho–her second quartet, dedicated “for those departed” and premiered by the Emerson at Carnegie Hall on June 17–between two late Beethoven quartets....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s shored up his law-and-order image with dramatic busts of drug smugglers, prostitution rings, and dogfighting operations. A few weeks ago he and his deputies invited fugitives to a hotel to collect “holiday gift cards” and led them away in handcuffs. At the same time Dart has been signaling that he’s aggressively looking out for the little people with crackdowns on child support scofflaws and his brief refusal to evict the residents of foreclosed properties, which made national news....

Gwynedd Stuart A lot less frightening than it looks In this feature Gwynedd Stuart seeks out affordable midday meals that don’t exceed five bucks (*actually seven, with tax and tip). Opening a creative hot dog restaurant in Chicago seems like a losing proposition, mostly because your restaurant will never be Hot Doug’s. This will automatically be treated as a deficiency and people will repeat the refrain like it was the chorus in a pop song about nitrite-laden meats: “It’s OK, but it’s no Hot Doug’s....

The Threepenny Opera The Hypocrites Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there’s at least one place where it’s still possible to find a little passionate Marxism: at the theater, in the plays of Bertolt Brecht. Sure, that passion has to be experienced at least partly as nostalgia these days—but when you’ve got a committed young ensemble led by a director like the Hypocrites’ Sean Graney, who uses the stage as a kind of particle accelerator for actors, even nostalgia can look awfully lively....

It takes confidence to take your time—and you can’t beat confidence for sex appeal. Robyn Mineko Williams, who began choreographing a dozen years ago, is one of five past or present Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performers selected to make pieces for its second annual Danc(e)volve: New Works Festival. Her experience is evident in the slow, simple start to Grey Horses: two guys just walking. Against an aural backdrop that includes snatches of a bittersweet aria, six shades eventually gather and incarnate increasingly dynamic, disturbing takes on passionate connection....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first the pair were just selling tamales, champurrado, and fruit, but eventually they joined forces with another couple, got the kitchen in full working order, and gradually added dishes to a menu that’s become impressively broad for such a small operation: breakfast, mariscos, jugos, licuados, aguas frescas, quesadillas, burritos, gorditas, huaraches, tortas, tacos, and a full page of platillos, including chiles rellenos, enchiladas, steaks, fajitas, and more....

Mitzi Gaynor washes that man right out of her hair in South Pacific. As part of the Reader‘s bar guide, Ben Sachs and I spent some time at the Red Lion on Rockwell near Lawrence, shooting the shit with owner Joe Heinen about the great John Ford; you can read the whole nerdy thing here. This week we’ve got reviews for week three of the European Union Film Festival, including the latest from Anne Fontaine, Ulrich Siedl, and Alain Resnais....

Is Chicago | Theatre Seven at Rogue Theater Company Info 563-505-7645 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Mamet changed the ending after the first production to feature Danny and his loutish chum, Bernie, sitting on the beach, sizing up and harassing the women who pass by. In Marisa Wegrzyn’s new play Diversey Harbor, set in the same north-side neighborhoods explored by Mamet more than 30 years ago, the ex-lovers end up falling asleep together in front of the television after a night filled with troubling encounters....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf, the River North restaurant that joins Maude’s Liquor Bar, Gilt Bar, Au Cheval, and Doughnut Vault in Brendan Sodikoff’s burgeoning empire, is so damn good it renders its own steaks superfluous. So says Mike Sula, who found himself scarfing leftovers that were irresistible despite their congealed state. Notable items among Alinea vet Jeff Pikus’s formidable roster are the bread service (here gratis), a fois gras terrine every bit as good as the torchon at Maude’s, and nontrophy meats such as a softball-size meatball and a slab of beef tongue “so tender that it falls apart if you wink at it....

Now that the Organ has split up, this Montreal four-piece looks like the top contender to become the next all-gal Canadian indie-pop phenomenon. Pony Up! attracted the patronage of Ben Lee early on–he signed the group to his Ten Fingers imprint and in 2004 released a split single with them. Dim Mak, which absorbed Lee’s label, adopted the band and released their self-titled mini LP the following year. The first proper Pony Up!...

Q A few years before my wife and I met, she made porn with her boyfriend at the time. He intended to start a pay-per-view Web site but never launched it. I was a bit upset when she told me, but then I remembered that I enjoy porn, and the idea of seeing the hottest woman I’ve ever met—and am now married to—doing porn might be really enjoyable, even though I wouldn’t want her sleeping with anyone else now....

QHealthy straight male here. The problem is twofold: my girlfriend doesn’t like come in her mouth and she feels that doggy-style is objectifying to women. Therefore, we don’t do either. She says she wants to get more comfortable and try these things. But they never seem to happen—and when I bring them up it turns into a touchy discussion. These are #1 and #2, respectively, on my list of favorite things to do in the bedroom, and I’m not OK with not doing them indefinitely....

You think you know your significant other, don’t you? Well, hah! I say. There’s a reason we call them “other.” Everybody’s got secrets, and some are whoppers. Even if you marry for love, you marry a stranger. One problem with Belleville is precisely that we know something is wrong so early on—i.e., well before Herzog seems ready to acknowledge it. She plays by the familiar rules of the form, gamely dropping hints designed to ramp up our unease, even to the extent of placing a great, big, glittering kitchen knife in easy reach....

QI’ve talked to my girlfriends, my mom, and his mom, but I need some unbiased advice. I’m a 28-year-old woman in a relationship for three and a half years with a wonderful man, also 28. I hit the jackpot: he is loving, sweet, kind, driven, active, handsome, generous, etc. We’re very committed to each other and planning our future together. We’ve lived together for two and a half years. Life is so great!...

The Hyde Park Jazz Festival celebrates its seventh anniversary this Saturday and Sunday, September 28 and 29, with the boldest, biggest, most comprehensive program in its history. Kate Dumbleton signed on as the festival’s executive director in spring 2012, giving her only a few months to put together her first effort, and this year’s event has clearly benefited from the extra planning time—no other fest showcases the breadth of Chicago jazz better....

The new, hour-long Stupormarket is a “low-budget project,” says Seldoms choreographer Carrie Hanson, featuring costumes by her and Goodwill. But its scope is huge—nothing less than an exploration of New Keynesian vs. neoclassical perspectives on our economy. Hanson has combined edited versions of two 2009 pieces—Thrift and Death of a (Prada) Salesman—with lots of new material to create a dance for eight that includes projected, recorded, and spoken texts. Don’t expect detailed statistical analysis, though....