Will Miles and Clark Jones are old friends. They met as freshmen at Whitney Young, attended college together, and have been producing Two Black Dudes and an Open Microphone at the Town Hall Pub since 2008. Their love for one another and their deeply personal insults drive an unpretentious open mike that over the years has seen drop-ins from the likes of Hannibal Burress, Neal Brennan, and Eric Andre. What the pair have done special in the comedy scene, though, is provide a comfortable space for black comedians from the south side to perform in—and perhaps encourage some of the audience to travel out of their comfort zone for a show....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A guy I met long ago when he had one of the coolest jobs in the world — covering Europe from London for United Press International — died Friday morning after several years of failing health. Most people who’d heard of Dick Sudhalter knew him as a jazz trumpeter who made a handful of elegant CDs and as a major author on jazz subjects — he wrote biographies of Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael and the massive, somewhat controversial (simply because of its subject matter) Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945....

John Patrick Shanley’s thought-provoking, Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, dramatizes the dilemma faced by Sister Aloysius, the school’s crotchety, arch-traditional principal, who suspects the parish priest of molesting a 12-year-old boy–the school’s first black student. Aloysius, played by the superb Cherry Jones in this touring version of the 2005 Broadway hit, has no proof; all she has is the certainty that is the bedrock of her calling....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the partnership of a Hong Kong (via Toronto) chef and a suburban restaurateur, this big, bright, gaudy second-floor banquet hall is the latest of the many new and interesting Chinatown restaurants that have opened over the last year or so, rivaling only MingHin in size, if not execution or tasteful design. It has a deep Cantonese evening menu, but of primary interest is its similarly extensive dim sum selection, available only until 4 PM each day....

A year and a half ago, Gossip Wolf reported that Chic-a-Go-Go puppet cohost Ratso—often seen in the company of Roctober magazine’s Jake Austen—was starting a garage band called Ratso & the Rabbits with clothing-optional punk Nobunny and Milwaukee drum freak the Rhythm Chicken, both of whom wear rabbit masks. They’re making their long-awaited debut on Fri 11/30 at the Roctober 20th-anniversary party at Bottom Lounge. Says Ratso: “Last year I started taking punk singing classes online from Phoenix University but ran out of money two credits short of my certificate....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s much the same here in Chicago, with a little twist–here we get things but pretend we’re not paying for them. We pay for things we really need, like schools, parks, police, fire, garbage collection, and snow removal. But on top of that, we also pay for the things Mayor Daley wants, like 7,500 condos or rental units on the south lakefront, a big underground hole at Block 37, and a Streeterville headquarters for the Park District....

Leor Galil, Reader music critic Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No Anchor, Real Pain Supernova (self-released) These Australian dudes combine lumbering, sludgy doom and 90s indie rock into one searing, brutal album. To continue with the album title’s Oasis riffing, these guys are looking forward in anger. Next up: Shake Shop owner and drummer for Tyler Jon Tyler Tom Cassling is obsessed with ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the transgression of disliking The Avengers, I recently found myself on the business end of several dozen hateful comments. Some were sent directly to my e-mail address, but most were left in the comments section of my online review, on proud display for the public like so much toilet paper on a front lawn. (I suspect they’ve polluted other virtual spaces as well, but there are better things I can do with my time than to look for them....

Less than two months after Apple announced that its iTunes Music Store would start offering DRM-free music files as a premium option, its unimaginatively named iTunes Plus is now online, offering unlocked AAC files for just a bit more money (average price seems to be around $1.49 a song). They’re unlocked, yes, but Apple still includes a pretty crafty security feature: encoding files with the purchaser’s name. (Presumably, this is why you have to update your software to access iTunes Plus....

The festival ran from 1982 to 1996, right? Truck Turner I was studying music back then, and it was through that I got the cinch of doing things for yourself, creating something for yourself. But what really got Blacklight going was this festival [held] at South Shore High School in 1981. It wasn’t run very well, it was a little disappointing, but it showed a lot of the films that had come through the Black Filmmakers Collective, which was run by Warrington Hudlin, whom I’d met a couple of times after I came back to the country in 1979....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steven Soderbergh seems to have modeled this crowd-pleasing tale about male strippers in Tampa on such gritty 1970s comedies as Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry and Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears, whose broad comedy was undercut by an unsentimental view of economic recession. The primary characters here are a vain up-and-coming stripper (Alex Pettyfer) who sleeps on his sister’s couch because he can’t afford his own place, a burgeoning entrepreneur (Channing Tatum) who manages three separate businesses when he isn’t stripping, and a seemingly dimwitted emcee (Matthew McConaughey, often hilarious) who turns out to be a shrewd accountant....

All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. This year’s nominees for best short documentary are no bowl of cherries: Redemption deals with people who collect recyclable cans and bottles to survive, King’s Point looks at all the lonely people at a seniors-only condominium in Florida, and Open Heart is about Rwandan children undergoing cardiac surgery....

Since 1976 Chicago has been home to overlooked ska and reggae treasure Charles “Organaire” Cameron. The 72-year-old bandleader, singer, and harmonica player grew up in Jamaica and recorded in the 60s with the likes of Bob Marley, Toots & the Maytals, and Jimmy Cliff. He hadn’t released music on CD in nearly ten years or on vinyl in decades till 2014—earlier this year he went to Minneapolis to record with young band the Prizefighters, and with the help of Reader contributor Chema Skandal, Jump Up Records, and Colibri Recordings (a Mexican label dedicated to Jamaican music), he’s made three new seven-inches....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But from the moment Peggy takes her place in Ellen’s car to head to lunch, she knows something’s up. Her son, Warren—a schoolteacher who should be at work—is in the backseat. As they ride to the restaurant, forced cheerfulness, miscommunications, and tortured silences show a family worn down by obligatory intimacy. Shinner overlooks the importance of Four Places‘ key animating event: before the action of the play starts, Ellen and Warren have already made arrangements that will rob their mother of her autonomy and most of her dignity....

Read Harold Henderson’s blog, Daily Harold, at chicagoreader.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » [snip] Thanks for nothing. John Nichols summarizes University of Wisconsin findings from the month before last month’s election (the nation.com/blogs): “Local newscasts in seven Midwest markets aired 4 minutes, 24 seconds of paid political ads during the typical 30-minute broadcast while dedicating an average of 1 minute, 43 seconds to election news coverage”–and most of that was horse-race news....

I’m sitting in a dimly lit recording booth, about the size of an elevator, at a small table opposite my friend Brenna. The only things between us are a couple cups of water, our microphones, a lamp, a box of tissues, and my notebook. The setup is designed to encourage meaningful eye contact. “So,” I ask, “when did you meet Greg?” The conversations range from mournful to celebratory, painful to funny....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not saying you’ll never see a bad picture by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, but I’m pretty sure you’ll never see a naïve one, certainly not in the pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair. So just now people are talking about her cover for the April Vogue: a bellowing LeBron James, basketball superstar, one arm around the waist of a delighted Gisele Bundchen, supermodel....

The International Voices Project offers a glimpse at the world stage, presenting concert-style readings of eight plays from just as many countries. Each script is performed in English, though only one—The Almond and the Seahorse (see below)—started out that way. In the spirit of international dialogue, a talk-back with the cast follows each show. This year’s IVP opens with a dark Swiss comedy, Reto Finger’s Dog Paddle, in which breaking up turns out to be really, really hard to do (Thu 3/7)....

In 1948, Marshall Field III merged his Sun, the paper he’d launched seven years earlier with FDR’s blessing to oppose the isolationist Tribune, and the Times, Chicago’s first tabloid, which he’d bought the year before. Field was a Democrat, and his new paper backed Harry Truman for president. But in 1950 Field turned the paper over to his more conservative son, Marshall IV, and the Sun-Times wouldn’t endorse another Democrat for president until Lyndon Johnson in 1964....

I have this verbal tic that annoys the shit out of my boyfriend. When I’m headed to Chicago—to visit family, to bury family—I’ll tell people I’m “going home.” I’ll skirt the edges of the old neighborhood. I’ll visit the big antique mall in an old Jewel grocery store on Broadway, or go slumming at the Granville Anvil, or head to Hollywood Beach. But I honestly can’t remember the last time I made it into the heart of my old neighborhood, the last time I got off the train at the Morse el stop, or rode the Clark Street bus further north than Foster....