Black cinema has always been relegated to the cultural margins, but how does an artist survive at the margin of the margins? A year and a half ago, UCLA Film & Television Archive presented a sweeping retrospective on artists of color who’ve come through the school’s filmmaking program since the 1970s. You may know about Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep (1977) was named to the National Film Registry in 1990, or Julie Dash, whose Daughters of the Dust (1991) won the same honor in 2004....

In this very special edition of Savage Love, I answer letters from the readers who made the largest donations to the campaigns to preserve marriage equality in California (noonprop8.com), protect same-sex couples in Florida (sayno2.com), and defeat Stephen Harper in Canada. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of our “games” is when I get him almost to orgasm… and then don’t allow him to come....

Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Repertory of New Work is as clever as they come. Not only does the five-year-old program offer selected playwrights a chance to take their scripts through a to-die-for development process (access to the resources of America’s greatest ensemble theater, a full-out staging at the end), it also works as an incubator for patrons. Theater lovers can sign up to be flies on the wall at First Look meetings and rehearsals, learning what goes into preparing a play for its premiere and supplying feedback if anybody asks....

Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, the landmark Supreme Court case that back in 1988 showed the nation’s high school administrators a way to rein in frisky student editors, began with a principal pulling a story about teen pregnancy. The topic’s an evergreen: just last month, Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire made headlines when administrators rejected stories on teen pregnancy, teen drinking, and shoplifting. I haven’t seen the stories, but Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Virginia, has....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most women fear the Monster-in-Law. The TV stereotype is always the mother-in-law, for whom no woman will ever be as good to him as she is. Doris Roberts on Everybody Loves Raymond embodied that image for 8 years on TV — the grasping, sweet-to-your-face, rude-behind-your-back mother-in-law who only wants her son to be happy, as long as she’s the one behind it....

“William” left Graham Correctional Center on an August day in 2008 after serving nearly six years locked up on sexual assault charges. And it wasn’t until the day of his release that he realized a different kind of confinement awaited him on the outside. By his admission, William committed the crime he was accused of: he raped at gunpoint the woman who was his girlfriend and the mother of his child....

Amy Meadows has a thing for miniature chairs. Salesmen’s samples, dollhouse furniture, and replicas dominate a wall in the dining room of the three-bedroom Old Irving Park foursquare she shares with her husband and two teenage children. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meadows keeps duplicates from the chair collection in a plastic tub in the basement, alongside containers holding assortments of folk art crosses, antique hand tools (levels, squares, fold-out rulers, crosscut saws), paint-by-numbers art, and vintage souvenir plates from places like the Pro Football Hall of Fame....

The North Coast Music Festival, held in Union Park from Friday, September 3, through Sunday, September 5, launches this year fully formed as a credible competitor to Pitchfork and Lollapalooza. The newcomer stands apart from those fests by virtue of a relatively strict curatorial strategy. Rather than offer a dizzyingly huge range of genres, North Coast has booked artists who almost all fall solidly into one of three categories: dance music, hip-hop, or jam band....

friday27 LEMON PRETEND This is what members of Triangle–pop weirdos transplanted from Minneapolis to the Bay Area–call themselves when they suit up as part of Oakland’s experimental laptop scene. In this guise, they specialize in DayGlo trashscapes and trancey techno for people who prefer Matmos to Tiesto. Whether it’s actually dance music is debatable: elastic yet strangely static, it’s more like free-riffing fun-house fright music. (Or maybe that’s just the stuff they decided to put on MySpace....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the housing committee meeting Thursday aldermen still had plenty of praise for housing commissioner Ellen Sahli and her department, and committee chairman Ray Suarez still defended the Daley administration’s record even when it wasn’t being attacked. “Chicago has probably, in my opinion, the best housing plan of any city,” he said. But the economy and housing crisis are obviously having an impact....

What’s the story on the effectiveness of the various baldness treatments on the market today? The many products advertised on TV make some pretty amazing claims. Is there any independent research available to compare the different treatments? —T.H., via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 1. Castration. Don’t be a wuss. A real man does what it takes to get results. Male-pattern baldness is thought to arise from a particular version of an androgen receptor gene....

A five-minute bike ride from the Reader‘s former offices at 11 E. Illinois sits the entrance to not only Navy Pier but also to one of the Lakefront Trail’s most confounding intersections for cyclists. Usually congested, the hybrid of sidewalk and bike path that begins at Grand under the Lake Shore Drive bridge and stretches south can be a hiccup for inexperienced cyclists heading east on Illinois to pick up the path....

John Sparks Leo Smith, doing fieldwork in Madagascar Leo Smith, who’s been an assistant curator of zoology at the Field Museum since 2007, has spent the last several months working on the upcoming exhibit “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence,” which opens this Thursday. Smith studies the evolutionary biology of fishes, particularly venomous and bioluminescent ones. He talked to me recently about bioluminescent animals, both the ones in the museum exhibit and the fishes he studies....

The Chicagoland Bicycle Federation [“Where Would Jesus Park?” by Tasneem Paghdiwala, June 22] can ask the churches to contact the local Chicago Public Schools. The schools often allow church parking in their lots on Sundays, as they are closed anyway. If this cannot be worked out for every Sunday during May through October, it could still be once or twice a month. The churches and the CBF and the schools could work together to say this is a “Healthy Chicagoans” program....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reader‘s Mick Dumke was hailed last Saturday night in Beverly Hills. At a banquet attended by many of LA’s most glittering swells, who gathered to enjoy a “gourmet vegan” meal and celebrate the rights of animals, he received a Genesis Award from the Humane Society of the United States. Each year the society honors journalists for work that focuses on animal issues; Dumke was cited for best newspaper magazine feature for a piece he freelanced to the Tribune Magazine before coming on staff here, “Ruffling Feathers: Once Viewed as Crazies, Animal Rights Activists Say Their Message Is Starting to Get Through,” which presented a “new perspective on the animal rights movement, acknowledging the mainstream acceptance of the issues the movement espouses....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While in town a couple of weeks ago for World Music Festival Chicago the great African singer and bandleader Samba Mapangala (a native of the Congo who achieved his greatest fame after relocating to Kenya) went into Delmark’s house studio, Riverside, to cut “Obama Ubari Kiwe (Obama Be Blessed),” a song he also performed during at least one of his festival sets....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Produced by Chicago Film Archives, the short screens tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center, along with Alk’s 1974 documentary Janis, as the opening program of what promises to be a fascinating series, “Howard Alk: A Life on the Edge.” Alk (1930-’82) graduated from the University of Chicago, cofounded Second City in 1959 with Paul Sills and Bernie Sahlins, and later partnered with Albert Grossman to open a north-side folk club, the Bear, whose first act was Bob Dylan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite mounting evidence and often withering criticism, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office never prosecuted Burge. When I asked Alvarez during an interview if she thought Devine, her boss the last 12 years, had looked the other way instead of going after Burge, she said: “I don’t think he was part of any internal cover-up or anything, but when the allegations first surfaced, more could have been done—not just on our part but on the part of the Chicago Police Department....

In Chicago we know them as the members of landscaping crews or restaurant staffs, hotel workers, paleta vendors, the scavengers we see heading through alleys in rickety, high-sided pickup trucks, hunting for salvage. Legal or otherwise, Mexican immigrants seem self-contained, foreign, and anonymous. We debate their origins endlessly, yet haven’t the first notion who they might be. But when their travels led them to Corinth, King Creon offered Jason his daughter, Glauce....

Newgard Neighbors Sale Newgard Avenue between Devon and Pratt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who doesn’t love a neighborhood-wide garage sale? Hundreds of households packed into a four- or five-block grid, all opening their carports and yards to the traffic of used goods. In just a few hours and without using a drop of gasoline (although it helps to own a rolling cart of some sort) you could furnish a dorm room, clothe a toddler, or fill out any mid-90s-leaning CD collection....