Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s long review I look at Susan Ray’s new documentary Don’t Expect Too Much, which focuses on the last years of her husband, director Nicholas Ray. The movie screens at 7 PM tonight at Block Museum of Art, along with a restoration of Ray’s unfinished final feature, We Can’t Go Home Again. But this isn’t the first documentary to look at Ray’s two-year stint as a film professor at State University of New York at Binghamton in the early 70s....

For some folks the only thing worse than an accordion is two of them, but if anyone can convert squeezebox haters it’s these Poles, who specialize in three-accordion arrangements that never even flirt with the polka feel you might expect. On their most recent album, Play-Station (Asphalt Tango, 2005), they take obvious delight in tackling genres they’d seem to have no business messing with. “You Dance” is a dead-on techno track, its insistent four-on-the-floor pulse carved out by a hypnotically speedy low-end figure and trimmed with ravey squiggles and abstract splashes that mimic the scratching of a nimble turntablist; “Game Over,” meanwhile, is a surprisingly good collage of video-game sounds....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wasn’t as shocked as some of my peers when I learned that Twentieth Century Fox was remaking Dog Days, Ulrich Seidl’s discomforting fiction-documentary hybrid from 2001, and as a children’s film no less. Scattered throughout Hollywood history are unlikely remakes of foreign classics: Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai inspired the pulpy western The Magnificent Seven, Steven Soderbergh converted Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (made famous by Andrei Tarkovsky’s art-film adaptation) into straight science-fiction, and Chris Rock recently fashioned a comedy vehicle for himself out of Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A free-spirited young Iranian woman begins to explore a secret sexual relationship with her best friend, while her older brother finds new power inside their liberal, middle-class family by aligning himself with the thuggish morality police of the Islamic Revolution. Despite his own carefully concealed drug abuse, the brother takes it upon himself to install hidden security cameras inside the family’s home so he can monitor everyone’s activities, and his arranged marriage to his sister’s friend sets the two siblings on a collision course....

QI recently ended a relationship that lasted a year and five months. While I loved this woman, for much of the relationship she was, to varying degrees, depressed. I tried to be as helpful and patient as possible with the hope and expectation that she would get better. I got her into counseling. We went to couples counseling together. She got on medication. I encouraged her to eat well (I cooked her many healthy meals) and exercise daily (which she was never able to do)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a motion [PDF] filed with the Illinois Pollution Control Board, which essentially functions as a state environmental court, district attorneys argued that new water pollution standards proposed by the Illinois EPA would cost Cook County taxpayers billions of dollars “without any demonstration that it will bring about any appreciable improvement in water quality or benefit to public health....

The 30th Taste of Chicago comes to Grant Park from Fri 6/25 till Sun 7/4, serving food from more than 50 restaurants and hosting music on four stages: the Petrillo Music Shell (northeast of Columbus and Jackson), the Taste Stage (Columbus and Balbo), the Best Buy Stage (Jackson and Lake Shore Drive), and the Fun Time Stage (southwest corner of Columbus and Jackson). The big names at Petrillo include a wide assortment of old-school hip-hop and R & B artists, mid-90s alt-rock staples, snoozy singer-songwriters, and even contemporary indie darlings, among them Salt-n-Pepa, Bell Biv Devoe, Gavin Rossdale, Los Lobos, Mat Kearney, Emily Osment, Trey Songz, Rob Thomas, the Steve Miller Band, and Passion Pit....

In January the Poetry Foundation picked Robert Polito—poet, professor, biographer, and critic—as its new president, following the retirement of inaugural president John Barr. We asked the brand-new boss what’s in store. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Right now I am most excited by the staff at the foundation, and getting to know them—everyone here is so smart, talented, and steeped in poetry. Outside of our radiant new building, I want to move our national cultural conversation about poetry beyond life enrichment to include the vital close reading skills and other critically alert habits of mind that come from reading and writing it....

If it had been a rave there would probably have been a chill-out room somewhere with seating, ambient music, and possibly even air-conditioning. But the Hard Festival’s Chicago stop at the Congress Theater last Friday wasn’t a rave. Raves don’t have ATMs or snack bars or 6 PM start times, or at least the ones I went to in the late 90s didn’t. So overheated dancers taking breaks from the sweltering main room had to make do with sprawling on the cool marble of the staircase in the lobby....

Q I’m a 21-year-old gay male. My friend “Marcelo” is friends with “Chad.” Everyone who meets Chad assumes he’s gay. Never had a girlfriend, a dance major, dyes his hair blond/green/purple, got up at 2 AM to watch Kate marry William—I could go on. Over four years at college, this situation has gone from funny to sad, as we realize he may never come out and could pull a Marcus Bachmann and live a miserable life with a miserable wife....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When writing about Leos Carax, Reader emeritus film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has often compared the director to Jean Cocteau, another French artist who approached filmmaking as a vehicle for autobiographical poetry. Cocteau, of course, did much more than make movies: he wrote poems, novels, essays, and plays, choreographed ballets, and worked in a variety of visual arts. In all of these forms, he advanced a symbolist aesthetic that drew from classical mythology as well as his own dreams....

This New York band is among the most accessible avant-prog acts going, and for one simple reason: no matter how far-out their unpredictable song structures, no matter how rich their dissident dissonance, no matter how jittery their pattering vamps or abrupt their metric and textural shifts, they utterly lack the diddlier-than-thou machismo that makes so many similar bands seem outright hostile to their audiences. The new Arms (Planaria) is Zs’ first studio full-length in more than three years, but they’ve certainly kept busy–last year they released a three-inch CD and a live album and contributed to a Tzadik disc compiling interpretations of Earle Brown’s works, and the other projects involving members of the collective are too numerous to list here....

For most of this month, visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art have been greeted by a low drone coming from somewhere north of the building’s main hall. If it happened to be a Tuesday evening or a Saturday afternoon, they might’ve heard other noises—drumming, snippets of narration, fingerpicked electric guitar—weaving in and out of that drone. And if they followed the sound to its source in the McCormick Tribune Gallery—on the main floor, near the spiral staircase—they might’ve found one or more musicians performing to an audience of a few dozen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oscar Antonio Rivera Jr.—whom I interviewed for this year’s People Issue, published today—runs Bikes N’ Roses, a bicycle mechanic program for youth in Albany Park. Or at least he’s trying to. The program has been endangered ever since its summer funding ran out, and he’s been scrambling to try to find grants or other sources of funding. To that end, Bikes N’ Roses is hosting a fund-raiser this Saturday from 6 to 10 PM at its storefront (4749 N....

Persimmon Solera from Purgatory Cellars whiteowlwinery.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lots of Illinois wineries make sweet wines from fruits other than grapes, but Brian Neighbors of White Owl Winery/Purgatory Cellars in Flat Rock wanted something really unusual, so he turned to the persimmon trees he climbed as a boy 40 years ago in the woods on the family farm. Like a Spanish sherry except for the main ingredient, his Persimmon Solera (developed with his father, Ken) starts with persimmon wine fermented from a combo of fruit grown on the property and more gathered wild by Illinois and Indiana locals in the fall....

For their adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s 1953 flop Camino Real, Calixto Bieito and Marc Rosich received permission from the playwright’s estate to futz around with the script to their hearts’ content. As if determined to make the estate regret this decision, the adapters have inserted into the proceedings a figure called “the Dreamer” who resembles Williams at his absolute worst. In Bieito’s staging for the Goodman Theatre, he’s played by Michael Medeiros, who speaks with a southern drawl and has Williams’s round face, thin mustache, and drowsy expression....

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photos Jesus “Chuy” Garcia turned in his nominating petitions on Monday. I can think of nine million reasons Jesus Garcia can’t beat Rahm Emanuel, a number that grows daily as the gifts to the mayor’s campaign fund roll in. On Monday, Emanuel’s committee reported the arrival of a contribution from billionaire former hedge fund manager (and charter school advocate) John D. Arnold, who lives on Lazy Lane (really) in Houston, but cares enough about the mayor’s race in Chicago to put a hundred grand down on Rahm....

Abyssinia Restaurant One of few Ethiopian restaurants in town to serve breakfast, Abyssinia offers the traditional foul (fava beans), kinche (cracked wheat), fir fir (injera mixed with beef stew), and scrambled eggs with tomatoes, onions, and jalapeño; you can also order a combo of three. The lunch and dinner menus also feature some dishes unusual locally, like shiro stew, made with powdered peas, and dullet, lamb tripe and liver mixed with seasoned beef....

About a month ago I called on the citizens of Chicago to revolt against our screwed-up tax system by filing lawsuits—but I never dreamed it would happen this way. On August 20, in the midst of the fuss state senator James Meeks has raised about the spending gap in education funding, the Chicago Urban League filed suit against the state, seeking to overturn our system of financing public education. Represented by legal powerhouse Jenner & Block, the league has been egged on by none other than Mayor Daley—the irony of which I’ll get to in a bit....

Leor Galil,Reader staff writer Lemuria, “Ruby” This emo three-piece from Buffalo, New York, has steadily risen to the top of the nation’s underground punk scene since forming nearly a decade ago, and even hip music sites that generally refuse to acknowledge any band branded with the E-word have shown Lemuria’s recent third album, The Distance Is So Big (Bridge Nine), a bit of love. My favorite cut is album closer “Ruby,” whose massive, chugging postpunk hook reminds me of the best songs that Distance producer J....