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I don’t know why people persist in believing that The Little Prince is a children’s book. To be fair, that is how it was intended by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote it in 1942. And it looks like a children’s book: large type, lots of pictures. The title character is a child. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s really a book for adults. The protagonist is not the young prince but rather the middle-aged Aviator who narrates the tale....

The 45th Chicago International Film Festival continues through Thursday, October 22, at River East 21, 322 E. Illinois. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $12 ($9 for students, seniors, or Cinema/Chicago members), and $5 for matinees Monday through Friday (before 5:05 PM). Passes are $110 (10 admissions) and $210 (20 admissions). Tickets can be purchased at Cinema/Chicago, 30 E. Adams, suite 800, Monday through Friday from 10 AM to 6 PM; at River East 21 from noon until the last screening has begun; or from Ticketmaster (312-902-1500 or ticketmaster....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the traffic hits sites located downtown (including a number of architects’ offices, not surprisingly), and there’s nothing wrong with that except the occasional long line. But for me the real fascination is getting out to far-flung neighborhoods and discovering the secrets hidden in plain sight, from industrial buildings to old theaters to art deco swimming pools in apartment buildings that look like they walked out of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical....

As penance for something bad I did years ago, I forced myself to watch the Republican convention. I can’t quite remember what I did, but it must have been bad, because that circus was dreadful. So many ironies. For one thing, who the hell is some guy from New Jersey to make fun of our legacy of corruption? I mean, that’s the state where just a few years ago authorities busted dozens of people for money laundering....

The device Lewis Larsen plans to build is about the size of a microwave oven. He figures it will sell for less than a conventional home furnace. The fuel—small amounts of lithium and hydrogen—will be cheaper too. Two of these devices, he says, could supply all the heat and electricity needs of a 2,500-3,000-square-foot single-family home without generating greenhouse gases, dangerous radiation, or nuclear waste, reducing gas heating costs by 90 percent and electric costs by 10 to 20 percent....

– Ted C. Fishman, 12/14/95 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I got back to the reptile house as the first strains of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” began to bounce brightly around the vaulted hall. My daughter, in a Santa-red vest and stocking cap, looked sternly at her music and struggled to sing over the brass in front of her and the yammering crowd beyond....

Julia Thiel From French farm country to downtown Chicago Expanding almost as rapidly as local craft-beer production is the selection of craft beers made elsewhere that are now available here. Among the latest entries to the market: Fireman’s Brew, an LA-based brewery founded by two firefighters, and Kona Brewing Company, from Hawaii’s Big Island. French breweries Pietra and Jenlain aren’t new to the market, but they’re both celebrating winning medals at the World Beer Championships, and their publicist sent a couple samples my way....

Best of Chicago 2009 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The traditional mission of a Best Of is—let’s be frank—largely to suggest places to spend your money. But if you’re among those of us who didn’t just get a million-dollar bonus from your government-bailed-out employer, you’ll find plenty of ways to spend less of it in our 2009 Best of Chicago. Sink your teeth into a real burger (with organic greens!...

FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Returning for a third year, the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival runs Thursday through Sunday, April 14 through 17, with music-related screenings, live performances, and panel discussions. Seventy films from over 20 countries will be screened at 13 different venues, including Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee; Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee; Hideout, 1354 W....

Within Our Gates, shot partly in Chicago in 1919, played at the Music Box on Saturday. Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961) is one of my favorite novels, even though its antihero, Binx Bolling, represents cinephilia at its worst. Cynical, socially detached, and incapable of experiencing deep emotion outside of the cinema, he ought to be studied by every self-proclaimed movie-lover as a model of what not to be. Every few years I reread the book in a sort-of aesthete’s Yom Kippur, to remind myself of the bad behavior that chronic moviegoing can ferment but cannot excuse....

Reasonable people can disagree . . . On the Bleader a few days ago, I posted my response to a John Kass column fretting that “the onslaught of a strident secularism” had “weakened Christianity.” I wasn’t so sure that strident secularism was the whole story. “It’s not consumerism that makes millions of people turn away from their churches,” I commented. “It’s not relativism. Or narcissism. Or secularism. It’s common sense....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mitt Romney’s three-ring faux pas might have gotten all the attention during last week’s presidential debate, but it was hardly the most insensitive of his statements regarding women. To me, the worst was the second part of his response to audience member Katherine Fenton’s question, “In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?...

Since Kanye West’s Yeezus leaked earlier today, it’s a little difficult to remember that other music-related things happened this week, but that’s hardly the case; after all, Riot Fest did announce that the Replacements are reuniting to play all three iterations of its punk blowout, including the mammoth one in Humboldt Park. Plenty of folks took to Twitter in response to the news, but the most interesting string of messages to the reunion and the festival in general has come from Riot Fest’s Twitter....

Over the past couple weeks news outlets across the country have run excerpts and mocking write-ups of Rod Blagojevich’s new book, The Governor, which explains how he played the game of politics. The donations enabled the committee to rack up about $42.3 million in expenses, including $10.6 million to employ a staff of 57—ten of whom make at least $135,000 a year—$1.7 million on hotel and housing bills, and $1,146,074 in airfare....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m skeptical, though for not entirely rational reasons. One of the pundits who kicked off the greening is Andrew Sullivan, who has an insufferable and rather self-indulgent tendency to run off half-cocked at romantic-seeming causes, and whom I don’t really trust on issues more complex than like being against torture. It’s worth recalling that he once and not so long ago condemned the anti-war left as akin to traitors, so his adoption as a voice of reason is perplexing....

Charles Mingus was a paradigm-shifting bassist, a volatile bandleader, and a quite readable author. But it’s his skill as a prolific and visionary composer, of everything from tough and tender ballads to rollicking jazz anthems, that has allowed the Mingus Big Band to remain fresh and viable for the past 15 years. Though Mingus did write large-ensemble material, the MBB works instead from new arrangements of small-group classics like “Boogie Stop Shuffle” and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as well as lesser-known masterworks such as “Free Cell Block F” and “Cumbia & Jazz Fusion....

The Inquirer was my first job out of college. I did political reporting, municipal stuff. I covered 9/11. The pilot of the second plane, Victor Saracini, lived in Lower Makefield, one of the communities I covered. Kayce Ataiyero, 35, is the original (and likely only) daily newspaper reporter turned minor-league basketball general manager. Prior to her tenure with the Chicago Steam, she spent time at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the News & Observer in Raleigh, and the Chicago Tribune, where she covered the infamous R....

I’ve been a longtime admirer of Juiceboxxx, a Milwaukee-bred rapper who specializes in uplifting party anthems, so when I heard the dude had a new mixtape in the works I made sure to keep an eye out for it. Juiceboxxx dropped Beyond Thunder Zone a couple weeks ago; it’s just taken me a little while to get used to it. The dude makes music that’s meant to be played at a high volume, but the mixtape is overpoweringly loud and raw....

Corbett vs. Dempsey, the record label, has just released one of the rarest and most historically murky recordings in the massive oeuvre of the great Sun Ra, issuing Continuation on CD for the first time. Last year I wrote about the formalization of the new imprint operated by the John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, the owners of their namesake art gallery, and even then, when I spoke with Corbett about this reissue, the actual date of the recording seemed in doubt....

“It’s an Irwin Allen movie,” director Steven Soderbergh recently told the New York Times in a story about his horrifying new thriller, Contagion. “We’re doing exactly what he did, using a lot of movie stars and trying to scare a lot of people.” Soderbergh was referring to the Hollywood producer who gave us the monster hits The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Allen didn’t really invent the disaster movie; that honor probably goes to Airport (1970), with Dean Martin trying to land a Boeing 707 that’s been crippled by a terrorist bombing....