Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But even a sloth’s gotta eat, and eat I did. Christmas Eve dinner this year (quiche, salad, oyster stew) was bracketed by two beverages of note. The first was a Majella sparkling shiraz, produced in lieu of champagne. It was my introduction to fizzy red wine, though it’s old news in Australia and gaining ground over here, and it was delicious: fruity and full-bodied but still refreshingly dry....

Born in Chicago as the faster (and weirder) cousin of juke, footwork music is going global with help from a new compilation dropping this week on Planet Mu, the label run by µ-Ziq frontdude and British dance-music visionary Mike Paradinas. Bangs & Works Vol. 1 features a whopping 25 tracks from a host of local producers, including established acts like DJ Spinn and Traxman and newcomers Tha Pope and DJ Lil Rome....

The first international Cassette Store Day is Sat 9/7, and though this Wolf thinks the idea is kinda silly (ever been to a “cassette store”?), the warm, fuzzy sound of tapes is still worth celebrating. If you feel the same way, you should check out a couple cool local CSD events. A party at Logan Square’s Bric-a-Brac Records from noon till 8 PM includes vendors Mac Blackout (selling custom-painted boom boxes), Already Dead Tapes, Notes & Bolts, Teen River, Nihilist Records, and Plustapes (selling a brand-new release called Weeping Willow from Little Howlin’ Wolf‘s Shadow Drifter project); bands with recent cassette releases play throughout the day, among them Todays Hits, the Sueves, the Funs, and the Cairo Gang....

Q: I fell in love with my second cousin about four years ago at a family reunion. (I hadn’t laid eyes on him since I was a kid!) I was 15 when we met, he was two years older, and we were in a long-distance relationship for three years. We ended things a year ago and I’m going to be seeing him for the first time since our breakup at another family reunion this fall....

Three years ago Dan Schneider, the sole constant member of the Singleman Affair, was riding pretty high. In June 2006 the first Singleman album, Let’s Kill the Summer, had been released overseas by Poptones, a label run by British music-biz legend and Creation Records cofounder Alan McGee. It had begun as a home-recording project for songs Schneider felt were too “wussy” for his other band, Hummingbiird (formerly Pedal Steel Transmission, and now defunct)....

You can read the history of Chicago in the buildings of the South Loop. They show in their bones the successive identities the area has taken on since the Great Fire of 1871: enclave for the city’s super-rich, great rail center, manufacturing district, publishing and printing hub, crowded slums welcoming African-Americans of the Great Migration, and the gentrifying boomtown. Though many of the mansions and industrial buildings have been torn down, a wealth of interesting structures endures....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s long review, J.R. Jones points out the thematic similarities between the new Steve Carrell comedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, but it’s worth noting that the apocalypse has taken place in a number of recent movies. Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (which played at the Film Center last month), Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth (which has yet to receive a Chicago screening), and studio crap like the Transformers series offer fantasies about the end of our planet’s—or at least humanity’s—existence....

Whether by some grand conspiracy or maybe (probably) just coincidence, Chicago’s curators and gallery owners spent 2014 preoccupied with the idea of transformation. Two of the fall’s most highly anticipated shows, “David Bowie Is” at the MCA and “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich” at Catherine Edelman Gallery, starring John Malkovich in Sandro Miller’s re-creations of iconic photographs, highlighted the multifarious incarnations of their subjects. Meanwhile, Chicago continued its love affair with Vivian Maier with three more exhibits from the former nanny’s secret collection of photos....

Q My husband and I have had an open marriage for the last two years. Up until five months ago, it was working beautifully. At that point, however, I was sexually assaulted by a former partner. Since that incident, I can’t stand sex with my husband. I completely flip out when he tries to initiate sexual contact. My skin crawls. I become panicked and feel repulsed. I just can’t handle it....

In 2005, when Songs the Animals Taught Us came out, Roommate had only existed as a live band for a year. Before that it was the solo recording project of Kent Lambert, who’d fled Brooklyn for Chicago a few weeks after 9/11. Lambert had gotten to know a handful of local musicians by the time he started working on Songs in earnest, but only a few of them appear on the album, overdubbing banjo, bassoon, or whatever they could play....

The Chicago Folk & Roots Festival is gone, but the Old Town School of Folk Music isn’t out of the fest business entirely: for 2012 it’s teamed up with the Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce for the first Square Roots festival. Attractions include local food, regional craft beer (participating brewers include Founders, Two Brothers, Metropolitan, and Greenbush), and a diverse array of local and international music on two Lincoln Avenue stages and inside the Old Town School....

Mud pits, banana costumes, ice cream flavor identification . . . these are some of the summer’s more idiosyncratic competitive events. Most require advance registration, with prices increasing as race dates approach. —Sam Adams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago Beachathon A four-mile race along the lakefront involving eight “obstacles,” including hula dancing and bingo. There are prizes for the top finishers in several categories—for those wearing a grass skirt, Speedo, or dressed as a banana—as well as the fastest competitors....

Skyfall marks the 50th anniversary of the James Bond franchise, which has produced nearly two dozen spy thrillers since Sean Connery originated the role in Dr. No. But the new movie, which opened last weekend to staggering box office returns, also represents a different milestone for 007: his first gay banter. About midway through the story, Bond (Daniel Craig) has been captured and tied to a chair by the blond, mincing supervillain Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), who grabs his knees and comes on to him....

In his novel Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor describes lutefisk as “a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. . . . I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I’d be told, ‘Just have a little.’ Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot....

Ray Barney has a basement full of old dance records, on shelves that stretch from the floor to the ceiling, but it’s not his personal collection—it’s leftover inventory from Dance Mania, a Chicago label he ran from 1986 till 2001. Barney and Victor Parris Mitchell (a producer who put out several records on Dance Mania) are relaunching the label, in part because they’ve learned that while this back stock has been gathering dust, original Dance Mania releases have become highly sought after, especially in Europe....

Richard Longworth’s travels through the heartland took him to the newsroom of one of the midwest’s largest newspapers. Longworth, a retired Chicago Tribune globe-trotter who’s now a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, doesn’t want to embarrass the paper by naming it, but its influence once extended far beyond the city it served. Over the past few decades, though, it’s slowly declined—much like that city, and much like the entire midwest....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The effects of factory farming on the surrounding environment–and the people unfortunate enough to live anywhere nearby–are well documented by now (and that’s not even getting into what the whole experience is like for the pig). But this piece, by Jeff Tietz, lays it all out in one revolting package. “Looking down from the plane, we watch as several of Smithfield’s farmers spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks like a public fountain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just finished downloading And Justus for All, the new mix tape by Little Brother and Mick Boogie — it takes a minute, since it’s a 27-song monster and not a mini-album like Talib Kweli‘s recent free download Liberation — and I can already tell it kind of kills. The news that fan-favorite producer 9th Wonder was ditching his full-time status in the group had a lot of hip-hop geeks calling the next Little Brother record a fall-off without even hearing it....

At age 19, John “J2” Mryczko crashed a friend’s motorcycle going 120 mph around a curve. He ended up paralyzed from the chest down, with some movement in his arms and none in his fingers, though he could use his hands as claws. After three months at the Rehabilitation Institute downtown, he moved into the front room of his mom’s house in Morton Grove, where he’s lived for the last nine years....

Every year, sometime after the Chicago International Film Festival announces its schedule, I find myself having the same conversation. A colleague will sigh, “Can you believe the festival isn’t showing such-and-such? It got so many good reviews at [fill-in-the-blank] Film Festival earlier this year.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yet only three of Hong’s ten features since 2005—Woman on the Beach (2006), Night and Day (2008), and The Day He Arrives (2011)—have screened theatrically in Chicago, forcing us locals to watch most of his recent work at home....