Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Can Ozzie Guillen work the same magic? Although Ozzie earned praise for his intuitive approach during the championship 2005 season, ever since he’s been overly devoted to players and their set positions — on the field and in the batting order. The Sox have two players at third and a hole at second, but has Ozzie even considered moving Josh Fields across the infield, the way Lou moved Theriot a year ago?...

Molly Shanahan has been exploring the alchemy of transformation for several years. But in her new The Delicate Hour, inspired by sunsets she watched at an artists’ retreat in rural Pennsylvania, she intentionally occupies an shifting, slippery space. This hour-long quartet for her company, Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, explores the murky territory between light and darkness, gestural and abstract movement, the mundane and the sacred. Mime alternates with pedestrian passages (walking, running) as well as less definable motions and interactions....

Q Longtime reader, first-time mailer. A Congrats on the birth of your son, GGGLLAM, and here, at your request, is my advice for the hard-up teenage boy: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’re having a hard time getting girls. That sucks. I remember what it was like when I was a young teenager and wanted boys and couldn’t get any. It sucked. But the sad fact is that most young teenage boys are repulsive—that is, they’re half-formed works in progress....

THE LITTLE FOXES Shattered Globe Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The central figure, Regina Hubbard Giddens, is one of the great antiheroines of American literature: monstrous but also human, ruthless and cunning but also full of grit, vigor, intelligence, and dark wit. Modeled on Hellman’s grandmother Sophie—a German Jew whose family settled in New Orleans in the 1850s—Regina is deeply frustrated because, as a woman living in 1900 Alabama, she’s relegated to second-class status....

Bub City, a new southern-themed addition to the Lettuce Entertain You brood, is less Nashville than it is Nashville. You know, the TV show: the shiny Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere vehicle, where nuance takes a backseat to the cheesiest kinds of pleasure. Prime-time TV actually provides a good sort of analytical tool to think about this new theme park of a restaurant, which is located on North Clark Street next to something called “Dragon Ranch,” a Billy Dec business that, I can only assume, serves spit-roasted lizard and baked beans from the can....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing,” the First Voice intones. “Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colors and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.” With its brilliant, alliterative rush of vowels and consonants—rolling like the sea that provides the town its livelihood and sometimes claims the lives of its men—Under Milk Wood is a celebration of the sound of the spoken word and a paean to the power of the imagination....

On Easter Sunday, Sofya Hundt’s husband gave her an Easter basket. Contents: one chocolate bunny, one Cadbury creme egg, a couple mini Snickers bars, seven camo-pattern plastic eggs filled with gunmetal-gray M&Ms, and a two-pack of hunters’ turkey calls. “Our first year out turkey hunting!” she wrote later that day on her blog. “How very thoughtful of the Easter Bunny!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A year later she met Jacob Hundt, a new American transfer student from California’s Deep Springs College, in the university cafeteria....

If he hadn’t seen it, Eric Hudson wouldn’t have believed it. Fifteen to 20 young men—gangbangers, he calls them—out on the street as the police cars pulled in. The apocalyptic worldview Hudson has taken away from these experiences is echoed by a dozen or so police officers I’ve talked to over the last few weeks. They don’t want their names used because they fear retaliation, but they’re surprisingly candid about their growing sense of helplessness....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s face it: you’d have to be insane to head out to Lollapalooza this weekend. One hundred and forty bands! Ninety thousand people a day! If you do head out to it, though, the Reader‘s Lollapalooza survival guide—which covers everything from what bands you should see to what you’re allowed to bring in with you to how to make it through the weekend without literally dying—will almost definitely come in extremely handy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never been one to consistently jot down rap lyrics as I hear them, but I do share Greene’s feelings about the transcription process, I just happen to apply it to typing out interviews (it can be time-consuming, but it’s strangely calming and meditative, and it gives me the opportunity to get a heightened sense for how an interviewee uses language)....

A gorgeous poster. Every year the programmers at WHPK, University of Chicago’s community radio station, organize the Summer Breeze fest and manage to pack it full of amazing, oddball rock and punk acts. This year’s festival is no exception, and it’s happening this Sat 5/18 at noon. The lineup features two local bands—hardcore punks Ooze and Geronimo!, who play catchy indie pop—but the real highlights are the excellent out-of-towners. The festival is headlined by off-kilter Detroit garage-skronk group Tyvek, who are also playing Friday night at HoZac’s Blackout....

A holiday hangout in your grandparents’ basement in the wee hours, with inebriated uncles and cousins telling tales of woe and failure (they were drunk then too)—it’s a little like that. Comedian Sean Flannery‘s The Blackout Diaries returned to the 70s-style Lincoln Lodge this past January, having begun there with a short run two years ago before moving to a monthly gig at the Beat Kitchen. It’s weekly now, with a Malort sponsorship to boot (and a podcast launching May 1)....

Rogers Park, Chatham, Maywood—all areas whose lucky residents have easy access to excellent home-style island food. Now Lincoln Park does too. Ja’ Grill chef Errol Gallimore, who came here from Jamaica in 1992, learned to cook from his mother and did time in south-side restaurants before he was tapped to run the kitchen at this comfortable barstaurant. The few faults I found with his food don’t seem to be a result of underestimating the neighborhood’s tastes....

Mike Sula Pierogi with the works, Polak Eatery One way to call attention to your small neighborhood restaurant is to give it a name that could be perceived as an ethnic slur. It’s even better if you’re a member of said ethnicity, and can cover yourself with the old, “It’s ok. I’m _______. I can say that.” Polish-born Damian Warzecha more or less presented that to DNAinfo when he opened Polak Eatery in Humboldt Park, serving, so far, a small menu of pierogi, eggs, and sausage for breakfast and lunch....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m neck-deep in working on the Reader‘s guide to the upcoming World Music Festival: Chicago, which kicks off 9/12—so deep, in fact, that I almost forgot it was my turn to deliver today’s 12 O’Clock Track. Once I remembered, it was pretty easy to pick a song, though, because I was already listening to it. “Karr” is the first track on the digital-only EP Azawan, by the haunting Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali, one of artists performing at this year’s fest that I’m most excited about....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past two weeks I’ve been listening heavily to Houston rapper Scarface, largely due to his 1994 album The Diary, a rugged, faux-operatic gangsta rap album that is at once totally badass and weirdly dated, its gangsta rap cliches sounding cartoonish and overblown nearly 20 years later (you can witness the ridiculousness of some of these songs in Mike Judge’s Office Space, which is required viewing)....

Jason Creps Handsome Family It’s been nearly four years since Brett and Rennie Sparks, the onetime Chicagoans who’ve long summoned the glory of old-timey music for contemporary ears as the Handsome Family, have released a new album, but the wait for new tunes will end on May 14, when the duo release their ninth full-length, Wilderness (Carrot Top). Yesterday the group shared a song called “Spiders,” which is today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mell, the former owner of a spring-manufacturing company, is one of the last of the old-school machine Democrats. His 33rd Ward organization still controls dozens of government jobs, and no one’s been able to put together a serious challenge against him since 1991. Last fall he managed to move state rep Rich Bradley out of the way so his daughter Deb could be slated for the 40th District seat....

Judging by the name, decor, and website, the owners of Royal Coffee are proudest of their coffee. They’re not wrong to be: it’s fabulous—smooth and chocolatey, served with two little biscuits. But it’s only half the draw of this place, the other half being a crazy-good breakfast menu, on which—as in all good breakfast everywhere—butter abounds. Though there are other options, which include American standards like bagels and omelets, I’ve mainly stayed true to two paths: the Ethiopian-style eggs, scrambled with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and spices, and served with injera and a little dish of chile powder; and the combo plates, comprising both veggie and nonveg options....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday afternoon I caught the world premiere of Scrappers, a locally made documentary about Chicago scrap-metal scavengers that screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the Chicago Underground Film Festival. I direct you to Cliff Doerksen’s review in this week’s paper; I also enjoyed the film quite a bit, though I found it a bit too long....