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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year sure was tough on the American wallet. Perhaps 2009 was the year that you gave shoelaces and tissue packets to your loved ones as birthday presents, trading in your own convenient Kleenexes for cloth handkerchiefs that you laundered using rainwater collected in a bucket on your porch. Maybe you downloaded a recipe or two for a dollar-stretching dish like pretzel soup, or something involving a pig’s foot....

Maybe you’ve stumbled into Greg Burhop’s apartment during an art walk. Or maybe you’ve couch surfed in one of his lofted bedrooms. Or maybe you’ve attended his board game night—and played Knock Down Barns, the game he invented. Whatever the incentive, Burhop’s space is built for communal gatherings, and he has many. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A fourth-generation Evanston native, Burhop relocated to Pilsen in 2009 (he continues to work for his family’s seafood market, Burhop’s Seafood, located in Hinsdale and Glenview)....

I used to have this theory. It was about $12 entrees—or $11, or even $14; basically the price range that to your grandparents connotes a respectable meal, but nothing too extravagant. The theory held that $12 was low enough to exclude ingredients of any particular quality—no grass-fed anything, growth hormones galore—and yet was more than you should be paying for whatever middling rendition of fettucine alfredo was available for that price....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Kass has a lot on his mind. America’s in turmoil, and he’s got deep misgivings. But instead of a stool in a dimly lit coffee house, Kass had to settle for page two of the Sunday Tribune, a venue where the lights are bright and logic comes first. “On those nights when they were young,” he wrote, “they smoked pot in the streets and listened to Dylan in the car and dreamed of the risks they’d take....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sabine Gruffat’s I Have Always Been a Dreamer (a choice selection of this year’s Chicago Underground Film Festival, which we cover in this week’s issue) is less a documentary than a city symphony—though perhaps it’s closer to the mark to call it a city double concerto. The movie compares the recent development of Dubai with that of Detroit; and while Gruffat’s sensitive to issues like labor relations, crime, and sustainable design, she’s clearly more interested in creating images than social analysis....

Fanfic to the Rescue Re “Fishes and Loaves in a Barrel” by J.R. Jones, October 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » KDT: I love you right back for such kind words, but I must disagree with your characterization of the movie—Maher clearly expects it to be taken very seriously indeed. And he doesn’t present religion as something harmlessly silly; he presents it as something evil and dangerous, and as proof he hunts down and showcases a lot of fanatics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Critics are debating whether Double Down illuminates, or just dishes gossip, but I’m not addressing its substance today. I’m merely marveling at some of the damning evidence Kinsley presented that the writing is unintentionally hilarious, although Kinsley, editor at large of the New Republic, didn’t seem amused. (This isn’t a review of Double Down. I haven’t read the book, and in light of Kinsley’s review, probably will spare myself the pleasure....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first person I noticed as I entered the Albion, Nebraska, fairgrounds at dusk was a lean teenage girl in jeans riding hers with serious elan. She galloped past me on a quarter horse, and soon I became aware that dozens of horses and riders were about—some teenagers but most of them older men, raw-boned or heavyset, all sitting comfortably in their saddles....

Southern Comfort Is Chicago on the brink of a Walter Hill retrospective? A month ago Doc Films screened a new 35-millimeter print of Hill’s The Driver, and in a little over three weeks Chicago Cinema Society will present an archival print of The Warriors, probably his best-known directorial effort. Bullet to the Head, Hill’s first theatrical project in more than a decade, opened in general release earlier this month and left theaters shortly thereafter....

Depending on how cynical you are in re: Chicago politics and/or hip-hop, you’ll either find it surprising that rapper and aspiring politician Che “Rhymefest” Smith is having trouble with his past just two weeks into his campaign for 20th Ward alderman (which I wrote about last week) or you’ll be shocked that it took two whole weeks for someone to dig up some legitimate dirt on him. The dirt in question is his criminal record, consisting of a 2001 guilty plea to a misdemeanor domestic battery charge (which arose from a fight with his first wife) and a 2005 conviction for criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon (Smith fired a registered gun into the air during an altercation with a real estate agent at his home)....

DonkeyHotey Want to kill a bill in the Senate? Mum’s the word. The Senate’s first day of business will last for at least one more. Senate majority leader Harry Reid recessed proceedings this afternoon instead of adjourning them. That’s because the Senate can change its procedures only on the first legislative day of a session, and no agreement has yet been reached on changing the filibuster rules. Recessing instead of adjourning means that tomorrow will still be today....

I’ve always felt well suited for castle life—holed up in a regal, fortified residence of stone, one can get some real thinking done in between visits from neighboring feudal lords and having to devise the occasional military strategy. But since I live in Midwest, U.S.A., and nowhere near the grand Warwick Castle—my turreted birthright, located in Warwickshire, England—a bizarre, Middle Ages-style bed and breakfast 13 miles outside of Carbondale will have to do....

Stay Under the Stars, the second full-length by Faroe Islands singer-songwriter Teitur Lassen, has received plenty of acclaim in the five months since its worldwide release (including in these pages), but it deserves even more. It’s not the kind of record that strikes one over the head on first hearing: the songs are tuneful enough, but their elegant simplicity and naked passion, enriched by understatement, work best lived with over time, grown into, absorbed–and after all that they remain capable of startling....

USS Mauna Kea My college roommate came to town recently and handed me a letter I’d written him years ago as I sailed west across the Pacific Ocean. It was an unhappy, sardonic letter—which probably describes every word I wrote during my two years in the navy, aside from the notes telling my parents I was fine. My naval experience is something I rarely talk about, or much care to think about, although the places I saw, the cast of characters I met, and the quasi-captivity I thought I was enduring constitute a trove of seed corn I’ve drawn from ever since....

With all the tepid bands coming out of Scotland over the past few years (the cursed Franz Ferdinand, the totally whatever Snow Patrol), it’s nice to finally hear a Scottish outfit with some, uh, balls. Though their name and album artwork–mostly illustrations done in the style of an old elementary-school primer–suggest something terminally effete, the Twilight Sad are actually indie-rock classicists who lean a little to the vicious side: they love melody but pit it against a massive rig of distortion pedals....

If the American theater harbors a precedent for Mickle Maher‘s astonishing 2011 play There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, I’ve never found it—except, perhaps, in Maher’s other astonishing plays. For 90 intermissionless minutes, poetry professors Bernard and Ellen lecture on William Blake’s poetry. The previous evening, on the college quad, the pair got so carried away reading Blake that they stripped and made love in full view of their students and the school’s perverse, puritanical president....

With our gender roles up for grabs, we would-be moderns are naturally fascinated by historical figures who had to negotiate—and, often enough, trade away—their sexual identities. The female historical figures in particular. Cleopatra is one, as indicated by the fuss Stacy Schiff provoked last year with her biography of the legendary Egyptian. England’s Queen Elizabeth I is very definitely another. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Henry VIII’s youngest daughter has become a trope, ironically, for becoming a trope....

As the public face of the Animal Protection & Rescue League and a 12-year vegan, attorney Bryan Pease has campaigned in California in favor of nonlethal pest control, protection of seal habitat, a ban on veal, and a ban on foie gras. In January in Chicago he joined the anti-foie gras protests at Bin 36 and Cyrano’s Bistrot, trailed by a French TV crew doing a piece on Chicago’s duck-liver ordinance....

What really seems to irk most people is where the money’s going: straight into the coffers of the county government of president Todd Stroger, whose name, fairly or not, has come to mean something like “wasteful, bumbling, and incompetent.” For example: “the Stroger tax hikes,” “the Stroger administration,” “It’s really Stroger to keep the water running when you’re brushing your teeth.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Not everyone agrees with my decision, but the purpose of my vote was, number one, to help stabilize the government so it’s not some embarrassment like the state has become, and number two to change the course of the one-third of the government that the health bureau makes up,” he says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night I tagged along with Mike Nagrant to the Alinea cookbook release party at the Wired NextFest wigwam in Millennium Park. Unlike some other recent food-related (vaguely) shindigs thereabouts, this one was was pretty smashing. Things got off to a comical start when Grant Achatz took the stage for a cooking demo, and the AV techs in the “gallery of the future” couldn’t get his headset mike to work....