Courtesy of Penrose Brewing It’s a good thing Penrose gave me some photos, because when it’s cloudy this time of year my apartment never gets light enough for a decent shot. Penrose Brewing‘s bottle rollout, which began this summer with four-packs of P-2 and Proto Gradus, has been a little spotty so far—not that I’ve been keeping a logbook, but it feels like months since I’ve seen any of their product in my neighborhood snooty-beer stores....

Fruit of the vineWine bars The Bluebird1749 N. Damen | 773-486-2473 Outfitted with fancy chandeliers, cozy fireplaces, and lots of dark, pretty wood, Debra Sharpe’s reincarnated Cru Cafe & Wine Bar exudes all the elegance and luxury you’d expect of the Gold Coast—and at a commensurate price. Not surprisingly, the wine list is the centerpiece, with more than 50 wines, ports, brandies, grappas, and sakes available by the glass or in flights of three, plus 30 half-bottle options and another 400-odd bottles in the cellar....

Sterling, Poison Arrows, Che Arthur Three INFO 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When you listen to the record, it’s not too hard to guess what might’ve influenced the band. Adam Reach’s straightforward, stomping drums often suggest old punk and hardcore–though they’re sometimes so compressed and distorted they sound like a drum machine, recalling big-and-beaty 90s electronica. Guitarist and front man Justin Sinkovich, formerly of Thumbnail and Atombombpocketknife, sings in a sour, sullen voice, his minimal approach to melody just a notch above spoken word, a la Big Black or Slint....

Buying Carol Briggs came to art collecting more or less by chance. It was the early 80s. She was a school nurse, working with pregnant and parenting teens, and her young son played in a baseball league in Hyde Park. They lived in Chatham. Briggs wasn’t allowed into his practices, but neither were they long enough that she could simply drop him off and go home, so she spent the time wandering around the neighborhood....

If the two premieres offered in “Free/Bound” are any indication, the Dance COLEctive’s Margi Cole favors working under pressure. The new solo she’s dancing, Leaving and Wanting by Molly Shanahan, was created during a heat wave last summer, in a studio-cum-hotbox on the top floor of a Park District field house. They had only ten days together, and Shanahan’s life was in upheaval throughout: not only was she packing to leave Chicago for grad school but her mom was dying....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t ask me how, but I recently had a chance to resee Jack Webb’s Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955), a terrific, atmospheric, period noir in Cinemascope and WarnerColor about a cornet player (Webb) in a Dixieland band in 1927 Kansas City (after an evocative prologue in 1915 New Orleans and 1919 Jersey City showing us where and how Pete Kelly came by his cornet)....

“It was for everybody, not just me, the crime of the century,” declares former New York mayor Ed Koch in The Central Park Five. The crime Koch refers to was the brutal rape of Trisha Meili, a young, white investment banker jogging through Central Park in April 1989, but the movie, which opens Friday at Music Box, alleges another sort of crime, one that’s extended well past the century. Five teenagers—four black, one Hispanic—were convicted of the rape and served five to seven years in prison, but in 2002 a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes came forward and confessed and DNA evidence confirmed his story, exonerating all five men....

It’s not a mystery what Disco City is. “Records. Tapes. Video.” Says it right on the sign, under an illustration of five anthropomorphized record albums in white shoes and oversize gloves serenading the street below. The enduring mystery is why the hell the store has two signs, one that calls it Disco City #8 and another, inches away, that claims Disco City #7. To further complicate matters, Yelp lists it as Disco City #6....

Just when the public has finally begun to show signs of seeing through the fog that surrounds tax increment financing, the state has floated the idea of a rigging up a new kind of TIF. When Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company, vowing to break it up and sell off the pieces, one of the most valuable pieces was the Cubs, Wrigley Field included. In January former governor Jim Thompson, chair of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, revealed that Zell had come to him and Governor Blagojevich with a proposal to have the state buy Wrigley and use public money to pay for its makeover....

You won’t often catch me enjoying sweet potato and mayo on my pizza, but I do get excited when skewed foreign incarnations of American fast foods slingshot back to the States—as they have at the purveyor of the aforementioned delicacy, the chain Cheogajip/Pizza and Chicken Love Letter, whose wild success in South Korea prompted it to stake out a toehold in a Niles strip mall in early 2008. But even more than straight versions of ethnic cuisine, these hybrids seem to have a hard time attracting customers outside the target immigrant community....

This summer guitar-pop avatars the dB’s released Falling off the Sky (Bar/None), not only their first album in 25 years but also the first in three decades with founding guitarist, singer, and songwriter Chris Stamey. The two classic LPs the band released in the early 80s, Stands for Decibels and Repercussion, would influence countless future groups with the sweet-and-sour push-pull between the classic melodies of coleader Peter Holsapple and the wobbly, off-kilter tunefulness of Stamey (the latter is a bit reminiscent of Alex Chilton, with whom Stamey played before launching the dB’s)....

theexpiredmeter.com Mike Brockway used to get a lot of parking tickets. “Some of them were just me being stupid, but a lot were issued improperly,” he says. “And 50 bucks is a lot of money.” (That’s back when the fines were that low.) So he started contesting them, which forced him to study the city’s confusing regulations. “Improbably, I got really good at fighting and beating tickets, and people started asking me for advice....

In the race to win public benefits from Chicago potentially hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2016, Lake County residents have been given an incredible head start. With the help of private funding, a small farm field owned by the Lake County Forest Preserve District (LCFPD) would become a world-class equestrian facility during the 2016 Games, and afterward be converted into a unique community asset [“They Say Nay” by Ben Joravsky, July 6]....

IN THE CONTINUUM GOODMAN THEATRE INFO 312-443-3800 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Compared to their early theatrical counterparts, black women with AIDS have been nearly invisible onstage, but In the Continuum, written and performed by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter, places them center stage. Well received off-Broadway in late 2005, it’s now being given its local premiere–with Robert O’Hara’s original deft staging–at the Goodman....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s come to my attention that you don’t understand what the word irony means. It’s OK, no big, I actually have no idea either. This was pointed out to me earlier this year by a “friend” (put in ironic quotation marks because he’s not, per se, a “friend,” actually my boyfriend—am I doing this right?) after he’d read something I’d written in which I’d misused the term, or that’s what he thought....

Q My 13-year-old son came out to us this morning. He plans to tell his brothers in the next few days. We love and accept our son, and this news isn’t surprising (but when will the stereotypical neatness kick in?), but we do have some concerns. He has, apparently, already made the news public at school. Any pointers you can give? We want to make sure he knows that we love him and don’t care about his sexuality, while at the same time preparing him to deal with those people who do....

If you hung out in Chicago clubs six or seven years ago, you probably noticed that the city’s underground music scene seemed to be undergoing an invasion of weird kids from Columbia, Missouri. In broad terms they almost fit into the dance-punk thing that was the flavor du jour at the time, but the music they made was noisier than the Rapture-lite Gang of Four disco going around, and they dressed in a proudly trashy way that made electroclash fashion look weaker than it already was....

The bedroom Loren Billings no longer sleeps in remains as it was when she lost her husband in 1998—the floor thick with Persian rugs, the classic movies (La Dolce Vita, Citizen Kane, Richard III) racked beside the television. And at the head of the bed they once shared, the bed in which he died, Loren has propped up amid the throw pillows a black-and-white photograph taken of the two of them when times were good....

In early February production duo Flosstradamus—Josh “J2K” Young, who lives in Chicago, and Curt “Autobot” Cameruci, who’s left for Brooklyn—finished mixing a song called “Total Recall.” After spending the better part of a decade building a reputation in the international dance-music scene as DJs and remixers, they’d decided to focus on their own compositions—in November they’d released their first EP of original material, Jubilation, on the Fool’s Gold label. (Jubilation 2....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can’t call Nilssen-Love a secret weapon, because his genius is so obvious; he constantly pushed the music forward, changing up grooves and sidestepping between fractured patterns without once losing the flow. The true surprise was Terrie Hessels of the Ex, a self-taught guitarist who’s learned to manipulate his anti-technique to create a compelling lead voice. A few months back I blogged about some recent recordings by Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, a former Chicagoan who’s relocating to Austin, Texas....