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I just found some good advice in the New York Times. It’s contained in a little essay by Joyce Wadler, who’s surprisingly droll considering that her literary output includes two memoirs of bouts with cancer. Wadler writes a column, addressed to boom generation readers, called I Was Misinformed, and her November 9 installment has to do with getting to a certain age and realizing you have things hidden in the back of your sock drawer that you don’t want your survivors finding after you’re gone....

The Whirlaway is a cold-weather bar. Devoid of a patio (and windows, for the most part), the dusky Logan Square hang is cozy and snug, attracting both bar fixtures that would burn to ash if they ever stepped into direct sunlight as well as a clientele of transplant youngsters who use barkeep and co-owner Maria Jaimes as a surrogate for their own mothers—only Jaimes will serve them copious amounts of alcohol and not force them to do something with their lives....

A self-destructive loner (Joaquin Phoenix), discharged from the navy after serving in the Pacific in World War II, flounders back in the States before coming under the wing of a charismatic religious leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) transparently based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. This challenging, psychologically fraught drama is Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature since the commanding There Will Be Blood (2007), and like that movie it chronicles a contest of wills between an older man and a younger one, as the troubled, sexually obsessed, and often violent young disciple tries to fit in with the flock that’s already gathered around the master....

In the evening, if you stand on certain corners in River North and take in the spectacle unfolding around you, you have to resign yourself to an inevitable, unhappy conclusion: “This is why the French hate us.” It’s our willingness to accept and support the nightlife equivalent of the zombie apocalypse. You want to flee the hordes of dead-eyed walkers who mob those yawning restaurants that possess little more focus and imagination than corporate cafeterias managed by circus clowns—and who dutifully shovel in whatever incompatible assortment of culinary gimmicks they’ve been told they must eat now: Croque monsieur fingers!...

Check it out. I put some scenery in the picture. Brooklyn Brewery goes all-in on a gimmick with their Black Ops barrel-aged stout. “Brooklyn Black Ops does not exist,” reads the label. “However, if it did exist, it would be a robust stout concocted by the Brooklyn brewing team under cover of secrecy and hidden from everyone else at the brewery. Supposedly ‘Black Ops’ was aged for four months in bourbon barrels, bottled flat, and re-fermented with Champagne yeast, creating big chocolate and coffee flavors with a rich underpinning of vanilla-like oak notes....

The 27th Chicago International Children’s Film Festival begins Friday, October 22, 6 PM, with an opening-night gala at Northwestern University’s Thorne Auditorium, 375 E. Chicago; tickets are $25 for adults, $10 for children. Included is a 60-minute screening of shorts that should appeal to all ages. The top live-action entry is Sandra Boynton’s One Shoe Blues (2009), with B.B. King playing straight man to some musical sock puppets. Two shorts combine hand-drawn animation and CGI: from Australia, Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann’s The Lost Thing, a surreal meditation on a mysterious beached creature, and from Germany, Johannes Weiland and Uwe Heidschoetter’s The Little Boy and the Beast (2009), in which a youngster is forced to take charge when his newly divorced mother becomes a morose, unrecognizable monster....

In my opinion, right now is the most exciting time in pop music since I was born, mostly because it’s just so intensely weird. Flirting with dubstep, a style that even just a couple of years ago was considered stylishly avant-garde, has become de rigueur for any pop artist who wants to seem up-to-date. Meanwhile rap music sounds more and more like Aphex Twin with every passing day. I sometimes imagine going back in time to play someone Beyonce’s “Bow Down/I Been On” so I can tell them that the pile of weird, warped noises that they’re hearing is in the future the latest single by one of the most popular musicians on earth....

Since 2003, defense attorneys in capital cases have been directed by the U.S. Supreme Court to conduct a careful search for the mitigating circumstances of each defendant’s life, and by the American Bar Association to retain a specialist who will compile “a comprehensive and well-documented psycho-social history of the client based on an exhaustive investigation.” The point of these directives was to make the death penalty less capricious and unjust. They certainly helped make it more expensive....

Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor Ricardo Villalobos on CD I was surprised to see a year-end post by critic Simon Reynolds ranking Villalobos’s latest, Dependent and Happy, as his third-favorite album of the year. On another blog of his, he explained that he rediscovered the Chilean-German minimal-techno producer and DJ in 2012; as a longtime fan, I was intrigued by Reynolds’s assertion that Villalobos’s albums sound way better on CD than as MP3s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was worried that the current weather, which is so discouraging of human contact, had started to cure me of the desire to ever have sex again, but then this New York Times piece about the Chicago singles scene came along and totally finished the job. It’s by Stephanie Rosenbloom, a “veteran solo traveler” who “arrived on a chilly spring evening” to find that, despite the fact that it was raining and windy, the porters at her hotel (the Wit) were still engaged in their paid employment....

Hater Fail Finally, someone exposes this phoney for what he is. Myles, get a clue and stop being such a jackass. —Arthur Layton, August 6, 2010, at 2:02 AM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why are all the comments coming up as “Arthur Layton”? I put in the screenname “Irish_Charmer” and it came out as “Arthur Layton.” What is up with that noise? —Arthur Layton, August 6, 2010, at 2:11 AM...

To Vote Your Gut or Hold Your Nose So for you to come out and announce that you’re going to cast votes based on fear—that’s a gray, blustery, sad day for the city of Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, you’re implicitly saying that the Democrats should feel free to run the most abominable candidate they can find, so long as the Republican is still worse....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today, not so much. New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan had this to say in August about the use of anonymous sources: “Readers deplore it, public editors shake a finger at it, Times editors and reporters say they try to minimize it.” The Times style book calls it a “last resort.” Sullivan was back on the same soap box in September, ripping the Times for the categorical headline “Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U....

Presented by the Society for Arts, the Polish Film Festival in America continues Friday, November 12, through Thursday, November 21, with screenings this week at Beverly Arts Center; Copernicus Center; Golf Glen 5, 9180 W. Golf Rd., Niles; Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 N. Saint Louis; and Society for Arts. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $13, $10 for documentaries, and a festival pass, good for seven screenings, is $70. This year’s festival includes a special series on composer Frederic Chopin, screening by DVD projection at Society for Arts; reviews of selected films follow....

A few years ago, when the backpacker scene was exploding and everyone was talking about the next great white MC, who would’ve thought that in 2007 Sage Francis would be the last one standing? Or anyway the only one who hadn’t plateaued. When it comes to skills, some of his peers outstrip him–his enunciation and flow are redolent of slam poetry–but his focus on the personal-political keeps his rhymes sounding fresh....

Check out our photos of the bands that played on Saturday. See our previews of acts playing on: Friday ·Sunday Riot Fest main » The Lillingtons adhered to the same Ramones-worshipping formula as their late-90s contemporaries: keep power-chord symphonies short and tight, keep beats simple and in pop-punk-appropriate time signatures, keep vocals in an upper-nasal register without sounding too much like a crazy person. But what made the Wyoming trio stand out, aside from being from Wyoming, was the lurking sinisterness found mostly in their artwork and the lyrics of Kody Templeman (now of Teenage Bottlerocket)....

Q My wife and I click on just about every level—parenting, money, religion, politics, etc—except for sex. After our last child was born, my advances were increasingly rejected. In an attempt to avoid pressuring her, I stopped initiating. One week passed, nothing. A month passed, nothing. A year passed, nothing. Depression and anger set in. But I was committed to being the “perfect husband,” so I still didn’t pressure her, hoping her libido would return....

GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON sss Written and directed by Alex Gibney Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alex Gibney’s last two feature documentaries, Taxi to the Dark Side (about the U.S. military’s torture of detainees) and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, are more important works of journalism than anything Thompson could bring himself to write in his later years....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanksgiving cooks are such insufferable didacts: prepare this turkey, they’ll tell you—heritage, brined—and these sides (brussels sprouts, creamed), cooked this way (deep-frying also permissible). Recently on Buzzfeed Sam Sifton, whose Thanksgiving cookbook somebody should surely be thinking about buying for me for Christmas, though at that point it will either come one month late or 11 months early, laid down six inviolable holiday rules—for instance, “The only trouble that should ever present itself when the subject comes to mashed potatoes and Thanksgiving is should someone demand that garlic or basil be added to the mix....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first is an essay by Tim Kreider entitled “The Busy Trap,” written for the New York Times‘s typically thoughtful Opinionator section (specifically, under the topic of “Anxiety”). Kreider, an essayist and cartoonist, criticizes the excuse “I’m so busy” or “I’ve been so busy” when used to explain why a person hasn’t seen you or can’t see you. Like a brilliant stand-up routine, I chuckled because it’s true and winced because there’s a bit of self-recognition in there—this is one of my reflexive responses and I am frequently called out for it (one of my friends asks me how I’m doing just so that he can make fun of me when I say that I’m “busy”)....