Setting up camp in all four theaters at the Stage 773 complex on Belmont, the annual Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival returns for its 11th edition with a whopping 162 performances by 138 troupes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sketchfest came from the brain of Brian Posen, who still produces it. He’s also artistic director of Stage 773, program head at Second City Training Center, and a member of the Reader‘s 2008 pick for best Chicago sketch group, Cupid Players, which will perform on both of the fest’s two weekends (Sat 1/7 and 1/14, 8 PM)....

Julia Thiel I recently got a sample bottle of the Deschutes/Great Lakes collaboration Class of ’88 Imperial Smoked Porter, and when I decided to try it alongside the Deschutes Inversion IPA, I expected the porter to be the more interesting of the two. And it’s excellent—more on that later—but it was the IPA that really impressed me. The label says, “Paradise is stumbling upon our whole flower hop room and inhaling....

QI am a college-age gay male. Last year I dated two guys. The first—let’s call him Mitt—I dated for five months. He broke up with me, and it hurt as much as breakups do, but I got over it. A few months later, I dated another guy—let’s call him Paul—for a month. I really liked him, but he broke up with me too. Then I found out that two days after breaking up with me, Paul started going out with Mitt....

Are you sure you have your cell phone? Your wallet? Your keys? Did you lock the door when you left home this morning? Turn off the stove? Turn off the flat iron? If, on the other hand, you’re mopping your kitchen floor ten times a day or heading to the sink for your 80th hand-washing, hoarding every plastic bag you ever got at Jewel, and lying awake at night counting the lights in neighboring buildings, someone close to you is probably suggesting that you see a doctor, get a diagnosis, and take a pill to fix your obvious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With attendance steadily decreasing, specialty movie houses around the country are closing up shop. The corporate chains aren’t faring much better. Naturally, a fair amount of discourse has arisen as to what could be behind the public’s apparent insouciance toward moviegoing. Conventional wisdom points to a number of contributing factors, but if you ask me, one needs to look no further than the behavior of contemporary audiences....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Looks like the folks in Animal Collective don’t hold grudges against media outlets that give them negative reviews–they’re at the top of an early partial list of performers at the Pitchfork Music Festival, which returns July 18-20. The rest of the lineup combines head-slappingly obvious choices (Vampire Weekend, No Age) with left-field radness (Extra Golden, Spiritualized) in the special way that’s the Pitchfork fest’s trademark....

courtesy Roscoe Books Erika VanDam was never the sort of person who chose a career based on what she loved. Nonetheless, she mostly enjoyed her job in ad sales until she had a baby last year and discovered it did not provide the sort of flexible schedule that would suit a new mother. Maybe, she thought, it was time for a change. She sat down with her husband and made a list of things that she enjoyed: shopping, stores, her neighborhood of Roscoe Village, and books....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve had plenty of strange ingredients for the Key Ingredient challenge over the last couple years, but Ryan Poli of Tavernita was the first to get one that he had to kill himself. Eels are usually sold live, and that’s exactly how the ones that Poli ordered arrived: slimy and slippery and full of life. He discovered just how lively they were when one—I think it was the one he’d dubbed Bocuse—slithered right out of its shallow container and fell on the kitchen floor....

With the recent discovery of seven letters in an attic in Litchard, Massachusetts, we are able to significantly advance the scholarship concerning the early relationship between the author Robinson Day (who wrote the seven letters) and the poet Mary Irwin (who received them and, it appears, secreted them in a shoe box, which was in turn placed inside a hatbox and stored on a high shelf in the attic of her mother’s house in Litchard)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to iTunes I added New York rapper Le1f’s Dark York mix tape to my library more than a month ago, but I only listened to it for the first time today. Now I really wish I hadn’t let it get temporarily lost in the never-ending flood of music coursing through my downloads folder, because I really like it and wish I’d heard it in time to write about Le1f for Soundboard....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Simeon won its second straight boys’ Class AA state basketball championship last weekend, and it couldn’t have done so in a more distinctive fashion. Star Derrick Rose, who had literally carried the Wolverines to the Public League title and the state championship last year, didn’t score a single field goal in the 77-54 final over O’Fallon at Bradley University in Peoria....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weis is white, and now that he’s winning praise for surrounding himself with a diverse group of experienced cops, it’s almost hard to recall that plenty of black leaders were dismayed last fall when Mayor Daley picked him for the top job. Daley, these leaders believed, should have named an African-American as Phil Cline’s successor—if only to show he understood police relations were at a crisis point in some of their communities....

One of the Candid Microphone comedy records The night after Edward Snowden claimed responsibility for one of the biggest leaks in U.S. history—concerning the National Security Agency’s surveillance of countless civilians at home and abroad—the Northwest Chicago Film Society screened a Candid Microphone short from 1952 as a lead-in to Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Like the long-running TV series Candid Camera (which first aired in 1948), Microphone was based on a popular radio show in which comedian Allen Funt played pranks on unsuspecting people and used hidden equipment to record the results....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the things that attracts me to so much of Norway’s adventurous music scene is how porous the lines between genres are, if those boundaries exist at all. It’s almost more typical that musicians work primarily in the spaces between jazz, rock, and experimental sounds than squarely within any one of them. Drummer Gard Nilssen is an excellent example of this kind of fluidity, and on 12/10 he’ll show off that versatility when he plays in two of his working bands at Jerry’s Sandwiches, playing modern jazz with Cortex and bruising prog-rock with Bushman’s Revenge....

Bonsoiree When Chenier and Shin Thompson opened Bonsoiree last September, it was an awkward hybrid: part casual BYO eatery, part gourmet take-out shop, part catering kitchen. But an unadvertised fourth offering, Saturday “underground dinners” like this one, quickly became its calling card–though calling them “underground” is a bit of stretch. At $55 they’re a steal, and diners have to be on the restaurant’s mailing list to get invited, but they’re hardly secret, as the menu for each meal is posted weekly on the Web site....

Tony Wade has always been surrounded by violence. He was raised by his grandfather in Greater Grand Crossing on Chicago’s south side, a working-class area that began losing businesses, jobs, and people in the 1970s. By the time Wade was a kid, in the 1990s and early 2000s, very few weeks passed without an armed robbery or burst of gunfire in the blocks circling his home. Wade’s grandfather did what he could to keep his grandson out of trouble—he sent Wade to Catholic schools, pushed him to excel in his studies, required him to attend church on Sundays, and taught him to work in his carpet business....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two sides have done their preelection skirmishing in private, the employees refusing to say why they seek a union or who their leaders are. I respect their discretion; things said publicly during labor struggles tend to be the wrong things, not easily walked back after the dust has cleared. A public document filed with the NLRB by Chicago Public Media on December 4 supports this point; it shows management trying to fight off a union with arguments that in the eyes of some employees might make a union seem all the more desirable....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you want a better sense of where the McChaos campaign’s frantic pinata politics strategy originates, the compelling-looking documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story is screening three times this week as part of the Chicago International Film Festival. The difference between Atwater and Rick Davis, of course, is that Atwater 1) played on real fears (violence, antisemitism), not things that weird pundit robots pretend to be afraid of out of boredom (old pastors) 2) was a charismatic, bloodthirsty professional political operative and not an awkward lizard-faced lobbyist whose demeanor can best be described as “overwhelmed....

Barbara Gaines is a great leader, no doubt about it. She took a little Lincoln Avenue storefront theater—not even a storefront, really, but a rooftop-patio-over-a-bar theater—and built it into a big-name, big-budget, high-prestige cultural institution with a well-earned reputation for connecting Chicago to the international theater community through its World’s Stages program, which I dearly love and sincerely respect. I think about what she’s achieved every time I walk into her wood-paneled temple to the Bard on Navy Pier, Chicago Shakespeare Theater....

West Lakeview Liquors 2156 W. Addison 773-525-1916 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best, not biggest. It’s hard to compete with Binny’s when it comes to inventory, but West Lakeview Liquors, like In Fine Spirits and Drinks Over Dearborn, has a lovingly curated selection—and unlike those places, it crams bottles onto every inch of shelving, sometimes with a second row of beers on a sort of terrace behind the first....