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The Bluebird This late-night lounge/wine bar/gastropub from the owners of Webster’s Wine Bar is a pleasantly understated space, outfitted in a sort of rustic-minimalist vein, with tables made from old wine casks and stools reminiscent of high school chem lab. For the most part the starters are great—lots of cured meats and funky cheeses, salads, flatbreads, and so on. The classic frites, simultaneously crispy and floppy and served with little cups of addictive curried ketchup and garlic aioli, are no-brainer perfection....

Dan Beachy-Quick, an instructor in the writing program at the School of the Art Institute, introduces his third book of poetry, Mulberry (Tupelo Press), by calling the silkworm weaving its cocoon from a single thread a metaphor for the book, a construction in which he can bide before later emerging, changed. Others bide there too, notably the Puritan diarists Beachy-Quick cites in his notes, who in America perch at the lip of a dark continent, testing their virtue, their selves, against the strange nature enveloping them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the passing of Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch is sad for probably a couple dozen distinct reasons, I find it’s possible to be less bummed about it by concentrating on the example he set with the way he lived his life—that is, wringing every drop of joy and love and everything else that makes life worth living from every experience he encountered, so that he packed at least two lifetimes’ worth of all those things into the abbreviated time he spent on Earth....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re not cross-marketing at the moment,” Malatia told me when the current pledge drive began. “But it’s nothing we’re hiding.” When WBEZ asks for your money and Vocalo doesn’t come up, that’s a “marketing strategy,” not secrecy. “When we do talk about spending the money,” Malatia says, “we say if you want a complete list of our investments it’s on the Chicago Public Radio Web site....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s how you ask the question. With the announcement that Michigan’s “Dr. Death,” Jack Kevorkian, will be released from prison on June 1 after eight years behind bars for second-degree murder, the AP asked the public what it thinks today about a right to die. With the proposition that “Sometimes there are circumstances where a patient should be allowed to die,” 68 percent of the thousand adults polled agreed....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now they’re fighting over Roland Burris’s Senate appointment, of all things. I’m getting calls from black people saying, “It’s our seat!” and from white people saying, “How dare they say it’s their seat?!” I try to tell both sides that white, brown, black, or green, it really doesn’t matter who goes to the U.S. Senate–nobody who gets in would do anything to change our lives under Mayor Daley and Illinois House speaker Michael Madigan....

Bill Ivey Info 312-855-3105, artsalliance.org Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Ivey’s paper, “America Needs a New System for Supporting the Arts,” which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that rotten feeling in his gut was brought on by the “disconnect” between the NEA, which concentrated on moneygrubbing for nonprofits, and the reality of the larger arts world, which was being transformed by the influence of big business on government policies....

Cynthia Consentino About seven years ago Cynthia Consentino read a study that has figured in much of her work since: five-year-olds were asked which animal best represented them. “The boys identified with animals that were predatory, and the girls with animals that were cute and cuddly,” she says. “One girl even answered with a flower. I thought that there would also be girls who wanted to be tigers, but then I remembered loving playing a flower in a school play at that age....

Over a decade’s worth of albums and 12-inches, this Berlin-based electronica act–mostly one Robert Henke, plus the odd collaborator–has navigated a theoretical space between the nightclub and the computer lab. Henke’s latest project, however, skews toward the latter, and carries an incense-laden whiff of the temple as well. To make last year’s Layering Buddha, Henke recorded sounds from the Buddha Machine, a $30 device by Beijing sound artists FM3 that plays low-res preset loops, and then chopped, spliced, and spun them into long, droning tracks that glorify the limitations of their source....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday afternoon, the Chicago Plan Commission approved an overpass for the Lakefront Trail that should ease congestion near Navy Pier. Just south of the pier, the path is currently routed along a sidewalk next to the busy lower level of the Lake Shore Drive bridge over the Chicago River, and is a nightmare to bike on because it’s usually jammed with pedestrians, cyclists, and in-line skaters....

Former Molly Shanahan/MadShak members Lucy Riner and Michael Estanich debut their dance-theater troupe with Portraits Tryptich, a program of three pieces set in carefully imagined and represented surroundings. Estanich and Riner locate their moody, jointly choreographed duet “Abbot & Viv” in a living room, with chairs, lamps, and a long, low table that acts as a stage within the stage, focusing the action (and at times suggesting a bed). Even more evocative is the delicate glass bowl that Riner and Estanich balance on their heads or backs, pass back and forth, or hold in common—a locus of power that they manipulate and compete for, risk and cherish....

Bakin’ & Eggs If bacon has officially jumped the shark, someone forgot to tell the folks behind Bakin’ & Eggs (also the owners of Lovely: A Bake Shop). At this breakfast and lunch spot, you can get it on anything from a burrito to a biscuit—even the waffle involves bacon. It’s a good thing it’s done well, or the bacon flight might seem a little over-the-top; as it is, you’d better have either a hearty appetite or plenty of reinforcements if you plan to attack the five large rashers of jalapeño, honey, mesquite, cherry, and maple-pepper bacon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the title of Catherine Trieschmann’s Crooked suggests, there’s nothing straightforward about being a teenage girl—especially when you’re navigating religion, sexuality, and mental health in the Bible Belt. What is straightforward, says Kerry Reid, is the precision with which director Sandy Shinner and her Rivendell Theatre Ensemble cast dissect the often terrifying world of female adolescence. Dark elements of the human psyche are also unpacked in Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie, staged by Focal Point Theatre Company....

Residents of Albany Park say they were blindsided by news last spring that their Chicago Public Library branch, on the corner of Foster and Kimball, would soon be closing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The project will leave Albany Park without a branch for the duration of the two-year construction period, and will also take down 20 affordable-housing units next door. It’s billed at $15 million....

The recent drama Children of Sarajevo closes the fest on Saturday night. You can see a lot of the world this weekend simply by going to the movies. Tonight marks the beginning of a three-day symposium on India’s parallel cinema at the University of Chicago (which I noted yesterday), the Chicago Latino Film Festival starts tomorrow at 600 North Michigan, and in Edgewater the eighth annual Chicago Festival of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film runs tomorrow and Saturday at Loyola University’s Sullivan Center....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never developed much of a taste for the music of Frank Zappa—sacrilege in some quarters, I know—so I didn’t really get familiar with longtime Zappa keyboardist Don Preston until I heard him on some great 80s records by Los Angeles clarinetist and bandleader John Carter, in particular the expansive live quintet album Comin’ On (Hatology), with coleader and cornetist Bobby Bradford....

When you’re staging an opera, dispensing with the singing to focus on the plot is a risky proposition. After all, the singing is pretty much the point, and the plot is usually, as my grandmother would say, nuttier than a sack of pecans. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Conceived and codirected by Blake Montgomery and Joanie Schultz, the Building Stage Ring cycle is far shorter than the original at six hours, including two intermissions and a dinner break....

There’s a moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the alpha ape flings a bone into the air and it turns into a space shuttle. Roger Ebert calls this the “longest flash-forward in the history of the cinema.” Following the saga of Gizmodo and the Apple iPhone I came across a worthy rival. “He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the last quarter-century far more people have been pulled out of poverty than ever before in the history of the world. Largely that’s because of the economic success of Asia, and it should give pause to critics of globalization,” writes Nicholas Kristof in the New York Review of Books. “In fact, it’s precisely because of globalization that hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, and Malaysians are moving into the middle class....

George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman in Voyage to Italy When the Music Box Theatre presented its 70-millimeter series a few months ago, I was most impressed with those movies that used the large-scale format for metaphysical reasons. “The high-resolution film renders things with such specificity that even minute details appear to have been prearranged,” I wrote, going on to say that The Master, 2001, and Playtime took advantage of this quality to “ponder whether everything may be part of some mysterious cosmic order....