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Created by TV auteur Matthew Weiner and positioned somewhere between period piece and soap opera, Mad Men inspires loyalty and scrutiny in equal measure. It’s also inspired blogs, books, clothing lines, theme parties, college courses, a Mad Men Yourself web app, and countless Halloween costumes—and now a collection of academic essays. In Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, editors Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A....

The big-name cast of Resnais’s latest includes Michel Piccoli and Matthieu Amalric (both pictured). At first glance, the title of Alain Resnais’s latest feature, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, seems like a self-effacing joke. Resnais is 90 years old and could retire—indeed it had been speculated last year that the film, which screens again tonight at the Siskel Center’s European Union Film Festival, would be his last. But a quick search on IMDB reveals that Resnais is already working on another movie (his fourth adaptation of an Alan Ayckbourn play, currently titled Aimer, boire et chanter), so there goes that hypothesis....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Remember the Rascals? Maybe not, if you were born after, say, 1958. Starting out as the Young Rascals, the quartet led by Felix Cavaliere produced some of the sweetest, best-natured, soul-tinged rock songs of the 60s, including “Beautiful Morning,” “Groovin’,” and “People Got to Be Free.” They held on to their East Coast urban ethnic roots well into the Beatles era....

Yep Right about now is when the amount of yuletide spirit filling the airwaves can make just about every day feel like Christmas, which must be a delight to at least a substantial part of the population. But it can also be more than enough to make you want to rage against the manger scene, and with every posi Christmas song it’s fun to take refuge in the odd, nasty, and rebellious music made by folks who put this holiday in their crosshairs....

Violence that arises from despair is the worst kind. There’s no rage, no fear, no anger, nothing to expend or exhaust–the violence might as well go on forever, and it doesn’t matter to you whether you end up with a bloody nose or dead in the street. Noise artist Dominick Fernow, aka Prurient, commits himself so thoroughly to this breed of detachment that the absence of feeling becomes a kind of perfectly pure passion, a Zen nihilism....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you didn’t catch one of the two Chicago performances by the Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria with the Ex—last night’s gig at the Logan Square Auditorium was really something else—you’ve got one more chance, sorta. On Wednesday the free-form New Jersey radio station WFMU will broadcast the band’s concert at Damrosch Park in New York live. Even better, the bill also includes Extra Golden and legendary Ethiopian singers Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete performing with the Boston jazz group Either/Orchestra, which has folded Ethiopian gems into its repertoire over the years and is the only American group to have a release in the mighty Ethiopiques series....

Gwynedd Stuart Scratch Burger, scratch-made fries You’d be surprised how crowded Scratch Kitchen can get on a Wednesday night. Or, no, maybe you wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a burger place with a gimmick. People love that. Who might’ve been surprised: the restaurant’s management, who only had three people on the clock—a cook, a server, and a busperson—for the bulk of the evening shift. Well, four people, actually. About 45 minutes after my dining companion and I arrived and took seats at the bar a couple weeks ago, one of the owners materialized, explained that he was “running late,” and took our order....

Green Metropolis David Owen (Riverhead Books) To be fair, this sort of shortsightedness isn’t a purely local phenomenon, or a governmental one. Journalist and author David Owen says most of us have been lulled into believing we’re just a few rooftop gardens, hybrid cars, and locally grown meals away from having this environmental thing licked, when a real solution, the kind that might still avert catastrophe, is going to require radical shifts in our thinking and culture....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The blaxploitation genre is sprawling and comprehensive. It embraced various film styles and fostered entire careers for actors and directors like Larry Cohen, Gordon Parks, Fred Williamson, and of course, Kelly. Not every example of the canon is worthwhile—rampant amateurism renders much of blaxploitation nearly unwatchable—but the best examples constitute some of the most nimble and entertaining, but also serious and socially aware, American cinema to date....

Tiffany Gholar’s studio in the Fine Arts Building is a riot of color—magentas, oranges, yellows, and greens detail cabinets, surfaces, and windowpanes. Even her outfit complements the room’s palette. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago native discovered her knack for color concept in an unexpected way: “I was working at Nordstrom in the accessories department, helping people match different accessories to outfits,” she says....

Part of a 40-week series in which we take a look at a specific year in Chicago history via the pages of the Reader. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Life and Death of Bobbie Arnstein By Pat Colander In his day, Hef was a Chicago media personage very much like Oprah is now—someone familiar but mysterious who filled our longing heads with the secrets of the well-lived life....

WIGS Julia Stiles as mother, prostitute Blue There’s a Lifetime movie called Deadly Encounter about a young mother and restaurant hostess who is stalked, harassed, and nearly killed (repeatedly) by a shadowy man who has the uncanny ability to be wherever she is at any time. There’s a dramatic final showdown where her tormentor finally reveals his motives: she cut him off in traffic. She shoots him. The end....

Carousel Court Theatre Some audiences are inclined to think of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows as contrived, simplistic Americana. But in recent years artists have challenged these assumptions by sweeping away the layers of corn and cuteness accumulated over decades of dinner-theater productions. Last year the American Theater Company presented a revival of Oklahoma! that exposed the show’s grit and vigor through unorthodox portrayals and inventive musical direction that emphasized the influence of folk and country/western music on Rodgers’s score....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in June, the cronut arrived in Chicago, or, rather, in Chicagoland, at Gür Sweets Bakery in Elmhurst. But city bakers were determined not to be outdone, and by the middle of July, there were variations on the doughnut/croissant hybrid at Alliance Bakery, La Boulangerie, Glazed and Infused, and West Town Bakery & Diner. It was indeed an embarrassment of riches, which might explain why, now that the initial rush is over, you can simply walk into one of these establishments and buy yourself a cronut, or croughnut, or doughssant, or whatever name the pastry makers had adopted since Dominique Ansel, the New York baker responsible for the original incarnation, had trademarked the name “cronut....

facebook.com/OffColorBrewing After four years of scheming, former Goose Island “innovation brewer” John Laffler and former Two Brothers brewer Dave Bleitner are finally in business, juicing up obscure or borderline-extinct traditional European styles with the anything-goes creativity of American craft brewing. They’ve chosen a grain mouse as their mascot, and their two year-round beers are a kottbusser called Scurry (“like an ale version of a dunkel,” says Bleitner) and a gose called Troublesome (similar in flavor to a Berliner weisse, which they’ve also got on deck)....

blushingpoppy.org To some folks—like the lunkheads who scorn men in tights but couldn’t do a barrel turn if their lives depended on it—all dance is weird. But whatever oddity they might see in, say, ballet, butoh goes way beyond it. Early practitioners of the form, born of the anger and despair of post-WWII Japan, painted their bodies chalk-white and were inspired by the likes of Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade....

The Dressing Room Shoes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I always thought one of the best things about the Dressing Room, the Lincoln Square women’s clothing boutique, was its collection of cute shoes. I guess I wasn’t the only one: its owners just opened an offshoot devoted to footwear, bags, and other accessories a few doors down. Certain concessions must be made to the neighborhood demographic, so don’t let the rack of Crocs by the front door scare you off—there are plenty of better-looking options for comfortable footwear, including basic sneaks by Superga in sage, burnt orange, and black ($82....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first that seemed like an odd stylistic quirk, but it’s actually a feature. Their implicit logic — never stated outright for obvious reasons — is that if activists exaggerate storm and flood fears, or slap their prefabricated solutions (solar! conservation! organic farming!) onto this problem, then there must be no problem after all. The logic is laughable, but it allows the authors to blur the distinction between sensation-mongering activists and professional climate scientists....

Political activist Jay Stone recently sent out a press release seeking recruits for his latest crusade against Mayor Daley. In it he blasted city officials for awarding a $40 million, five-year “pinstripe patronage” contract to Aon Corporation to help the city make sure hiring is free from patronage and political favoritism. It seems fair to wonder about that deal, as Aon’s founder and retired chairman, Patrick Ryan, is heading up the mayor’s efforts to bring the Olympics to Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve known for a while that the Internet is good for at least a dozen different things, including watching cat gifs, watching pornography, and buying vintage country-music concert tees (which, considering the vicissitudes of a freelancer’s income and the fact that I just moved to the sixth most expensive city in the world, maybe I shouldn’t be buying, even if they were a remarkably good deal as far as vintage concert T-shirts go)....