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Imperial Silence: Una Ópera Muerta Who says death can’t be fun? Just look at Mexico’s most famous holiday—the Day of the Dead, which has been thriving for centuries among pagans and Christians alike. West coast multimedia artist John Jota Leaños capitalizes on the, um, vitality of that tradition in his 2008 political satire Imperial Silence: Una Ópera Muerta. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Everyone here is a skeleton—the ultimate leveling device for Leaños, who says he “identifies as part of the mainly hybrid tribe of Mexitaliano Xicangringo Güeros called ‘Los Mixtupos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the top of my wish list for next week is a one-off screening of Michael Almereyda‘s Paradise Thursday night at Nightingale. Described by its creator as a video “work in progress” despite having played at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles last month, the film comprises a diary of cities of Almereyda’s rapturous acquaintance—approximately two dozen in 33 shots, including New York, Los Angeles, and post-Katrina New Orleans as well as overseas unfamiliars like Seoul and Esfahan....

For the first 30 minutes of Welcome to Arroyo’s, it’s clear why playwright Kristoffer Diaz is a white-hot commodity. Not unlike his The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity—a Chicago hit and 2010 Pulitzer finalist—the play throws you into a whirling mix of hypercharged fable, metatheatrical commentary, and after-hours hip-hop party, all while exploring questions of ethnic and political identity. Especially as performed by the fiery cast of this American Theater Company production directed by Jaime Castañeda, Welcome to Arroyo’s initially feels vibrant, unpredictable, and bracingly contemporary....

Back Lot Bash This outdoor women’s festival kicks off indoors on Thursday at Mayne Stage (1328 W. Morse) with a night of comedy from Julie Goldman, Sandra Valls, and others. Friday features performances by Melissa Ferrick and Edie Carey, Dot Dot Dot headlines Saturday, and Uh Huh Her wraps up the weekend with a DJ set on Sunday. 6/28-6/30: Fri 5 PM, Sat-Sun 3 PM, 5238 N. Clark, $10-$20 per day, $30 weekend pass....

South-Side Scene BJ’s Market & Bakery8734 S. Stony Island | 773-374-4700 In a 1998 Reader story, Calumet Fisheries’ Hector Morales lamented the decline in business that came with the death of the steel industry on the southeast side. But the tiny shack at the foot of the 95th Street Bridge is still smoking its own chubs, trout, and salmon steaks, heads, and collars over oak logs. These creatures remain moist after smoking, having been brined overnight....

I’ve got a confusing issue with my girlfriend. Our relationship was going great until I caught her having an emotional affair via MySpace. She swore never to hurt me again. Well, I recently found out that she posted an ad looking for NSA sex. She responded to several people who contacted her. When confronted, she encouraged me to look through her e-mail to prove her innocence, but her e-mail proved her guilt....

QI’ve been mostly happily married for 15 years. I’m a straight man. I love my wife. We used to have a great sex life. But after many years, children, and just day-to-day reality, our sex life is now pretty unsatisfying. While my wife was barely GGG at the beginning, now she will not go down on me ever. We do have sex four to ten times a month, but it is always plain vanilla....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps you’ve read Pete Wells’s New York Times restaurant review of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, the gargantuan new Times Square food circus presented by noted celebrity chef Guy Fieri? Isn’t it neat how the entire review was written in a series of direct and rhetorical questions? Can you believe that those questions were all virulent takedowns of the restaurant?...

My recent perusal of Cecil Adams’s answer to the question, Is fluoride a good thing or a danger? [The Straight Dope, February 2], makes me think it’s time to rename his column “The Curved Dope,” or perhaps “The Lazily Researched Dope.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a freelance science writer and book reviewer, I’ve been puzzling over the thorny topic of water fluoridation almost as long as I’ve been reading and enjoying Cecil’s normally insightful reports....

If you’ve got meds, take ’em. As rendered by Jennifer Shin, the protagonist of Rolin Jones’s 2004 melo-comedy is a contagious mess of tics, outbursts, and generally freneticized anxiety. Shin plays Jennifer Marcus, a 22-year-old robotics whiz with OCD so severe she can’t step out the front door of her adoptive parents’ California home. Which naturally puts a crimp in her plan to find her birth mother in China. Her solution: build “Jenny Chow,” a lifelike android capable of making the trip....

On May 3 Ray Hanania got one of journalism’s high honors, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award. Hanania earned his for a series of sympathetic columns about a grocer in Oak Lawn who believed that the village had harassed him and eventually shut him down because he was an Arab. The judges commented, “He did some real reporting and brought to light a situation that otherwise would have been ignored in his community....

On a recent Monday evening, the otherwise underpopulated dining room in the Sofitel hotel was inhabited by French speakers at no fewer than five tables. Our extremely capable server, himself a native of Lille, said it was an anomaly—that week for mysterious reasons he’d attended to an unusual number of diners hailing from the Basque regions of France and Spain. Was there a separatist shepherds’ convention in town? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

University of Chicago Outside the Arts Incubator, at the corner of Garfield Boulevard and Prairie Avenue The corner of Garfield Boulevard and Prairie Avenue is a few blocks, a city park, and miles and miles of psychic space away from the libraries and quads of the University of Chicago. But 11 days ago, the university made its latest attempt to reach out to its Washington Park neighbors by opening the Arts Incubator, a new project developed by its Arts + Public Life Initiative, and already things are starting to happen....

The cover of the new seven-inch Code Orange Kids share with three other bands “Less is more” may be a tired-out adage, but there are times when it can be trusted. Code Orange Kids beat that maxim bloody with their fleeting but doomy hardcore cuts. This Pittsburgh four-piece can wring hefty doses of unhinged fury from its short songs. Hard-headed newcomers to the hardcore scene, last fall Code Orange Kids released their debut album, Love Is Love // Return to Dust, which runs less than 30 minutes....

After taking in some great Atlanta rap courtesy of Big Boi and Killer Mike last night at Park West, I returned home to find some sad news from the same city flooding my RSS feed: Kris Kross‘s Chris “Mac Daddy” Kelly died at the age of 34. Kris Kross accelerated to fame in the early 90s thanks to the duo’s hyperaccessible, kid-friendly approach to hip-hop, which also made the group an easy target for jokes about early-90s pop culture in later years....

Bloody Bess: A tale of Piracy and Revenge BackStage Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gordon’s shows often drew on literary sources, from Voltaire’s Candide to Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. But he was equally enthralled by classic genre films. His 1971 sci-fi trilogy Warp! (cowritten with former Reader critic Lenny Kleinfeld) paid tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So far, though, critics haven’t offered many concrete counterproposals—I’ve heard some talk about dipping into TIF funds, renegotiating some expensive contracts, reducing management-level staffing instead of front-line workers, and other “efficiencies” that arguably should have been considered to save taxpayers’ money well before the city’s deficit bulged to nearly $500 million. “We don’t know the scope,” says Anders Lindall, a spokesman for AFSCME Council 31, which represents about 5,000 city workers....

For years developers and dreamers battled for possession of Pilsen’s gorgeous Thalia Hall, built in 1892 by European expat John Dusek, a sort of Fitzcarraldo of Chicago’s new Bohemia who spent an exorbitant $145,000 to reproduce Prague’s Old Opera House at the corner of 18th and Allport. Dusek is long gone, but among his successors is Empty Bottle impresario Bruce Finkelman, who snatched the Romanesque revival building out of foreclosure last summer and has come close to restoring it to its former glory....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The visit to Prairie Fruits Farm, which took place the day after Petrini’s speech before more than 500 at Northwestern Law School, was arranged by Slow Food Chicago, and a set designer couldn’t have manufactured a more perfect pastorality for the Illinois stop of his book tour. Four baby goats frolicked on the lawn, while on the other side of the table a plump speckled Sussex hen clucked and pecked in grass....

Random House Curtis Sittenfeld is a relative newcomer to Saint Louis, so it took a native to teach her about some local lore, specifically the time back in 1990 when a climatologist named Iben Browning predicted a big shakeup along the New Madrid fault line sometime in early December. In 1812, New Madrid was the site of the most massive earthquake ever to hit North America. Entire towns disappeared. The shocks were felt in Saint Louis, 150 miles to the north....