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Juris Jurjevics Rosa Jurjevics and Laurie Colwin ca. 1990 To her devoted readers—and there are many—the writer Laurie Colwin’s tastes and habits are nearly as familiar as their own. Colwin was a traditionalist. She cooked with utensils she picked up in flea markets; served meals, particularly old-fashioned English tea and nursery food, on mismatched antique china; and, even in the age before Whole Foods, went to great pains to find organic food instead of processed supermarket products....

Henry Darger, Throw-Away Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider ArtistBy Jim Elledge (Overlook Press) Henry Darger was born in Chicago, probably in 1892, into a poor Catholic family and a rough circumstance: when he was an infant his parents moved to West Madison Street, around Halsted, which Elledge describes as “one of Chicago’s most notorious vice zones.” His mother died in childbirth when Darger was three years old and his father descended into alcoholism and destitution....

When things like tomatoes, corn, blackberries, and asparagus appear on menus around this time of year, it’s like spotting the Easter Bunny in August. By now most new restaurants within certain price ranges must at least pay lip service to the idea that they serve some in-season local food, perhaps produced with a measure of respect for the environment and/or animal welfare. Howells & Hood, a huge, copper-clad beer hall on the first floor of the Tribune Tower, is no different, but the group behind it has taken the extraordinary step of installing Scott Walton as executive chef in collaboration with their own corporate one....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year Brazilian singer, guitarist, and composer Joyce (who recently decided to start using her full name, Joyce Moreno) released Ao Vivo (EMI, Brazil), a live record of material spanning her four-decade career. Like most of the albums she’s made since the late 70s, it’s in a sophisticated jazz-bossa nova mode–ever since her 1977 move to New York, where she started working with jazz folks like saxophonist Michael Brecker and arranger Claus Ogerman, that influence has marked her sound....

Riled Up About Ronny’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Generally agreed . . . the place was a novelty for how actually shitty it was, beyond normal dive-bar standards. It was fun once in a while though, when a band you knew was playing. In its defense, it had been fixed up a bunch in recent months (at least the performance space). I talked to Ronny (?...

When the Rocky Mountain News was declared dead on Friday, February 27, after 150 years of publication, the remains included a Web site. Abandoned by the parent company, E.W. Scripps, rockymountainnews.com sits there just as the paper left it four months ago, a death mask of the Rocky. That’s because on June 8 Scripps made the jubilant announcement that it was finalizing an agreement with the Denver Public Library “to ensure responsible stewardship of the storied newspaper’s archives and artifacts....

For the fourth year in a row, Music Box and the Film Noir Foundation present a week of little-seen noir relics. Noir City: Chicago favors titles that aren’t available on DVD, but there are always a few old favorites as well. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friday’s opening-night program pays tribute to Peter Lorre, whose chilling performance as the serial killer in Fritz Lang’s M set him up for a long career as a tormented soul in Hollywood movies....

Shawn Christensen and Fatima Ptacek in Curfew 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. The films I’ve reviewed in this series thus far (Asad, Henry, and Death of Shadow) have been relatively tame in subject matter. So I was taken aback when Shawn Christensen’s Curfew opens with Richie, a gaunt, wiry-haired guy—played by Christensen himself—wading in bloody bathwater, halfway through with slitting his wrists....

I could announce that the best restaurant to open in Chicago in 2014 was the Jerk Taco Man’s Jamaican Jerk Shack and I’d feel pretty good about it. There was nothing simple or minimal about Joe Fish, Rosebud Restaurants’ brassy Italian seafood house with massive portions—a “throwback” to a time when to eat out was to be part of a performance. Paul Kahan and One Off Hospitality opened an Italian seafood spot too, Nico Osteria, which Reader editor Mara Shalhoup called “simultaneously rustic Italian and refined Italian....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grand Forks Daily Herald, November 25, 1883. Now there’s a headline to stir the blood, all quivering as it is with walrus-mustachioed dudgeon and outrage and all good stuff like that. But the tragedy behind it is anything but “unparalleled”: We’ve got a father (fella named Finzer, in Pittsburgh) who’s unable to provide for his family (too sick to work) who solves the problem by murdering his dependents (a wife and two kids in this case) and then himself....

QI recently discovered, accidentally, while moving things out of my 16-year-old son’s room prior to a renovation, a cache of my sex toys that had mysteriously disappeared over the past year. While I’ve wondered how it was possible to misplace a glow-in-the-dark crucifix-shaped dildo (complete with Jesus in relief), it never dawned on me that it might be an inside job. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » AYou’re gonna have to have a long talk with the little shit, DAD....

Two annual fairs, SOFA Chicago and the Intuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art, shacked up together at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall in 2010 and ’11. This weekend SOFA (aka Sculpture Objects and Functional Art) will be going it alone. But there’s still plenty of Intuit DNA to be found in lectures like Outsider Art 101, given by Henry Darger maven Michael Bonesteel (Fri-Sat 2 PM), a panel on the urge to transform one’s surroundings titled Sculptural Environments in Self-Taught Art (Fri 4 PM), and two special exhibitions: “A Glimpse at Outsider Art” and the Mr....

Shawn Brackbill Northampton, MA indie rockers Speedy Ortiz Speedy Ortiz is a quartet from Northampton, Massachusetts, exploring a subspecies of alternative rock that has yet to get much traction in the ongoing 90s revival—namely the slightly skewed art-pop of groups like Helium and Polvo that straddled the blurry border between Dischord brand posthardcore and Pavement-style indie pop. It just so happens that Helium and Polvo are just about my two favorite bands from that period, so it wasn’t hard for their recently released LP Major Arcana (Carpark) to become one of my favorite rock records of the year, full of stoner-fuzzy guitars, slanted pop hooks, and deeply infused with a catchy occult vibe imparted by front woman Sadie Dupuis’s tarot-referencing lyrics and overall witchy presence....

For our cover story on Robert Ryan, see J.R. Jones’s The Actor’s Letter: A reminiscence from film noir icon Robert Ryan, newly unearthed by his daughter, sheds light on his Chicago childhood – and his family’s connection to a tragic chapter in the city’s history. For more on Ryan’s filmography and an appreciation of his work, see “The Essential Robert Ryan.” I was born on November 11, 1909, in Chicago, Illinois....

With Chicago hosting the “Summer of Rod Blagojevich” festival at the exclusive Federal Courthouse Bar & Grill, Blago gear couldn’t be more topical. Many such gifts are on the market, but none will enable dad to keep the Gov in constant view like these comfortable shoes. (Zazzle, $72) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Speaking of palling around, you remember how President Barack Obama used to pal around with Bill Ayers?...

The trick with Oscar Wilde is not to sound like you’re just reciting clever lines, precisely because that’s all you’re doing; this requires maintaining breakneck speed without ever appearing hurried, an approach akin to certain modes of salesmanship and seduction. This skilled ensemble nimbly negotiates the epigrammatic machine-gun fire of Wilde’s theatrical masterpiece–which prefigured not only screwball comedy but the whole idea of Cary Grant–just so. Things lose steam near the very end, but pointy Ryan McCabe does sharp mug work as dissembling Bunburyist Jack, Sarah Fineout is captivating as ward Cecily, and as bounder Algernon, a pitch-perfect Nate White resists the criminal temptation to not steal the show....

thursday1 Thursday1 Box EldersSpoon Friday2 Dillinger Escape PlanGilberto GilHigh on Fire Saturday3 TobaccoXiu Xiu Monday5 Small Black, Washed Out Tuesday6 Love Is AllOrquestra Contemporanea de Olinda Wednesday7 Little WomenTitus Andronicus SPOON Though I like Transference (Merge), Spoon‘s seventh and latest album, it’s the first where they seem to be treading water. Sometimes they try to jostle their sound into a new configuration—the openings of “Before Destruction” and “Trouble Comes Running,” for instance, are calculatedly lo-fi, in contrast to the top-shelf production elsewhere—but those efforts mostly just draw attention to themselves....

The Dil Pickle Club was beautiful. So was Urbus Orbis. And Maury’s bookstore. And Logan Beach. And Ralph Clarkson’s tenth-floor studio in the Fine Arts Building. It was like Paris in the 20s! Everywhere there were people making art. You can still get a sense of it by flipping through Ben Hecht’s memoirs, or a novel by Henry Blake Fuller, or by looking at an old photo of a group of drunk-looking adults sitting in school desks in a nightclub, or listening to Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville....

[Editor’s note: Tribute closed in 2011; Brasserie by LM took its place in early 2012.] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shortly before the restaurant was to open, executive chef Brandon Baltzley—who conceived and crafted the original menu—stepped down and headed into rehab. Sous chef Lawrence Letrero (Perennial, Karyn’s on Green) took over, accepting the very difficult challenge of editing Baltzley’s ambitious vision to suit his own style....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the items on today’s meeting of the City Council finance committee was a measure that would require about 3,700 nonunionized city workers to take a total of 15 unpaid days off by the end of the year. City budget officials said that would save up to $14 million. They also said that if they can’t come to an agreement with labor leaders they’ll slash 1,500 unionized jobs in the next few weeks to save millions more....