“The freedom I knew at the Chicago Reader is something I suspect I will never recover, mingled as it was with the energy of youth and the excitement of charging headlong into uncharted territory.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adlai Stevenson III had almost unseated Governor Jim Thompson in 1982. He lost by a few thousand votes he hoped to make up in the rematch in 1986....

Black metal has been rife with purists since it first emerged as a distinct subculture in Norway in the early 90s, and many of its most devoted fans still insist that it has to come from Scandinavia to be considered “true.” Ten years ago this faction was influential enough that American black metal was widely considered a knockoff or even a joke, but today the music’s audience is so much larger and more diverse that the zealots no longer have that kind of pull....

Zed 451 739 N. Clark 312-266-6691 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I enjoy an endless array of grilled proteins as much as the next person, but if I’m going to pay $44 for it—not including drinks and dessert—I would prefer not to be served by waitstaff in gaucho outfits or develop atherosclerosis before the check comes. Not only does Zed 451 mercifully skip the costumes, it also serves artery-sparing fish, chicken, and game in addition to the usual slabs of steak and sausage....

Open since October 2011 in the Music Garage and run by industry veteran Victor Salazar, former general manager of the Drum Pad in Palatine, Vic’s Drum Shop seems determined to make up for all the years the city didn’t have a dedicated drum store—and in grand style. The shop’s eight rooms (a ninth, for drum hardware, should be open by the time this is published) contain a dazzling quantity of inventory: the kit showroom holds 130 complete drum sets, any one of which can be set up and played; the two cymbal rooms shine with close to 1,500 models, all of which customers can test; and the stick selection boggles the mind, with 800 varieties in stock....

One Thing, and Everything Else When director David Almaral and composer Joshua Dumas started adapting Raymond Carver’s short story “Gazebo” for the stage, they envisioned acting, singing, narration, and an evening-length score. But how to classify the thing they were cobbling together? It wasn’t a musical, really, or an opera: only one character would sing, and her songs would be limited to brief, internal monologues. Then they stumbled on an article about semi-opera, a Restoration-era form that combines dramatic scenes with masquelike musical pageants....

West Town Bikes 2459 W. Division 773-772-6523 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » West Town Bikes, which calls itself a “community bicycle learning workshop,” offers classes and workshops for adults, many of them free, along with youth programs like a bike club where kids can pimp their own rides. One of the most useful programs is open shop, Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons, where you can use the shop’s tools to maintain your own bike....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Sunday at 7 PM, Doc Films will present a program of works by Chick Strand (1931 – 2009), one of the country’s greatest female filmmakers. Strand earned her degree in ethnography in the 1960s while organizing avant-garde film screenings in the San Francisco area; she was also instrumental in the founding of Canyon Cinema, the long-running experimental film distribution company....

The folks at Dream Theatre won’t be producing their annual Halloween show this year. What with two of the storefront company’s principals getting married in October, they decided that a fifth staging of Anna in the Darkness—the tale of a schoolteacher cornered by a whole town full of sadistic fundamentalists—was one project too many. But they’re not ceding the holiday entirely. The next show of their regular season sounds even more surreally grotesque than Anna....

Reenacting historic battles onstage is risky. If the cannon blasts and bayonet jabs aren’t real enough, the whole thing comes off looking lame. (Think of the Monty Python sketch in which the ladies of the Batley Townswomen’s Guild simulate Pearl Harbor by pummeling one another with handbags.) So what should we expect when French-Austrian performance collective Superamas makes its Chicago debut with Empire (Art & Politics)—a show that starts with nothing less than the Battle of Aspern-Essling, a bloody 1809 clash between the armies of Napoleon and Archduke Charles of Austria?...

Ministry of Fear, which comes out today in a new digital restoration from Criterion Collection, was not fondly remembered by its director. Fritz Lang needed to deliver one more feature to Paramount Pictures in order to complete a contract, and the producer-screenwriter of this one, Seton Miller, wouldn’t let him have his way with the script as he usually did. After the film was released in October 1944, Lang partnered with actress Joan Bennett and producer Walter Wanger to form an independent production company that would create some of Lang’s weirder, more sexually obsessed Hollywood films: (Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window)....

Hari Kondabolu is a member of the unconventionally diverse group of writers and performers for Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, a show that’s changed the paradigm of what kind of people lead conversations about race, class, and politics on television. Like his boss, Kondabolu tackles these issues viciously: in a 2011 Spin magazine story about his brother Ashok’s now-defunct rap group, Das Racist, he described the audience at a gig at the Sasquatch!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Aimee Levitt reported last month, some expensive technical problems have caused the Patio Theater of Portage Park to be closed for the foreseeable future. On Saturday, though, the owners plan to hold a last hurrah with two free screenings of It’s a Wonderful Life at 1 and 5 PM. If you can brave two hours in the cold, I recommend going, even if it’s just for the architecture....

Lucky Dragons are a band, but they’re more than that—they’re an art project, a social experiment, a magic show. The LA-based duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara use an unconventional setup that works to dissolve not only the barrier between performer and audience but also the barriers between audience members. Rara sings, dances, and delivers vocal incantations, and either band member might play a simple flute, a melodica, or handheld percussion; Fischbeck often tends to a laptop on the floor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As some of you may have heard we had to cancel our show last evening in Iowa City. We were finishing up the last few bars of ‘Off the Record,’ and just like any other night we were all having a great time. Jim went to get closer to the audience on his side of the stage, and as he moved forward to step onto the sub-woofer the lights darkened, and he inadvertently stepped off the stage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yuppies are a garagey indie-rock band from Omaha, Nebraska, and they play two shows in Chicago tonight while on tour in support of their excellent, freshly released, self-titled LP. The record came out last month on Dull Tools Records, a label run by Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts, which is funny because Yuppies share endless sonic similarities to Courts....

In addition to opening night on June 14, the 19th annual, expanded edition of the festival includes two programs of French films (see capsules on The Virgin’s Bed and Vite/Deux Fois), two one-person shows, and six programs of shorts. Most of the work is excellent, but what’s distinctive is the variety–even the weak films are innovative. Programs run through Sunday, June 17; all the ones listed here are at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Minutes before I started writing this post, the military wing of Hamas, the Gaza Strip’s ruling political party, flaunted a video of a captured Israeli drone on Twitter. This was part of an ongoing propaganda campaign that seems unique in this brave new digital world: military and paramilitary groups were tweeting PR about (what is surely at this point) a war in real time....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Pittsburgh duo Zombi haven’t toured in damn near seven years, but when bassist and synth player Steve Moore and drummer Anthony Paterra got the opportunity to schlep around the country for a dozen days with Italian prog soundtrack masters Goblin (they don’t meet up till after Zombi’s Chicago date, alas), it was clearly time to start packing the Moogs,” writes Miles Rayer in Soundboard....

Restaurant listings are culled from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 4,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are reviewed by staff, contributors, and (where noted) individual Reader Restaurant Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the Raters’ collective opinions are best expressed in the numbers. Complete searchable listings, Raters’ comments, and information on how to become a Rater are at chicagoreader....

Call him Legion, for he is many. And call him the rightful heir to Prince’s place on the pop charts, because he’s that too. Pretenders to Prince’s throne have made better music, or at least better-respected music, than R. Kelly, but none has projected anything like His Purple Majesty’s multilayered fruitcake of a persona, which is as much a part of his appeal as his skills. On that count, Kells may even have Prince beat....