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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think it touched a nerve here because of all the things it’s about–the Castro in the 70s, the politics of coming out, the gay-rights movement, Milk as a person–it’s first and foremost a movie about local politics. It is, to borrow an overused term, Capra-esque about democracy and America. It’s a really patriotic film, but it’s patriotic about small business and local government, which makes it something of an anomaly in the political-movie genre....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raucous two-piece 1994! came out of the same Pennsylvania scene that produced Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing, whose jittery take on second-wave emo have inspired plenty of kids to give the music a try; of those bands 1994! is the most caustic, and its music can get a little deranged. Algernon and Snowing have since broken up and 1994! has gone off in a fascinating new direction, producing the aggressively strange Fuck It; 1994!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are enough juvenile delinquents in this year’s European Union Film Festival that they could make up their own sidebar event. Wayward teens are the main characters of Belle Épine and Avé, playing next week, and they make appearances in Innocence, Cousinhood, and Blood of My Blood (they’re also the focus of Clip, a Serbian film that recently won an award at the Rotterdam Film Festival)....

Redmoon thinks small in Frank Maugeri’s toy-theater show: tiny cardboard cutouts “perform” on cunning cardboard sets. The videotaped and projected action has immense visual impact, but the look is familiar; Terry Gilliam was doing much the same decades ago. And Joe Meno’s story, about a little girl who rescues a city’s stolen birds, is simplistic and meandering, full of missed opportunities–especially when it comes to the girl’s mother, potentially the most interesting character....

The first time I saw Paul Mooney was on Chappelle’s Show‘s “Ask a Black Guy” segment. I was a freshman in college when the show premiered, and for the mostly white, mostly wealthy kids I lived with, it seemed like watching Chappelle’s Show was as edgy as it got. It was probably the first time a lot of us looked into the mirror at our privilege; now there was a mean old black guy looking back at us, telling us how shitty and unworthy of his time we were....

Speaking to an interviewer in 1993, Raul Ruiz explained, “My films are not fiction films but about fiction.” This statement comes as close as any to defining this prolific and playful Chilean-born filmmaker; still, it deals with only one aspect of his varied career. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t think of a better introduction to this major but underappreciated filmmaker than his Portuguese feature Mysteries of Lisbon, which opens this week at Music Box....

Argyle Street and BeyondTwenty Asian restaurants in Uptown Cafe Hoang1010 W. Argyle | 773-878-9943 Drab, utilitarian storefront brightened by the toasty golden glow of its bakery cases, lined with Asian buns, rolls, and flaky cakes filled with sweet bean pastes, vividly yellow egg custard, sugary ground peanuts, or even a mix of candied melon and onion. They’re not quite panaderia cheap, but they’re close: a sesame ball, filled with adzuki-bean paste and deep-fried, will set you back 70 cents, and a barbecue pork bun costs 90....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curator Kyle Westphal just completed a bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Media Studies at UC, and his thesis documents the history of America’s “longest continuously running student film society.” About half the items were culled from alumni association materials donated to the library’s special collections; Westphal, Doc’s current programming chair, dug the rest of the stuff out of the group’s archives....

Generally labels do reissues to make some easy money, either by pouncing on a buzz band’s little-heard back catalog or by whipping up a “special edition” of a beloved classic for fans who can be suckered into buying it again. But every so often somebody reissues a record that sank into obscurity when it first came out in hopes that a second go will help connect it with the audience it deserves....

Brecht’s 1943 play turns the dialectic of Major Barbara in on itself, fusing Machiavellian father and idealistic daughter in a single character. The upshot of the metaphor: market socialism (or any capitalism with a human face) is schizophrenic. This production deftly nails the geopolitical resonance of Brecht’s thesis today, from the literal hybrid of the Chinese economy to unaccountable, hypocritical American paternalism there and elsewhere: Iraq, the occupied territories, Haiti. Before a floor-to-ceiling bank of TVs slickly programmed with words and images by video designer Andrew Schneider, the Big Picture Group ensemble–under Roger Bechtel’s muscular direction–negotiates Brecht’s hairpin rhetorical curves in masterfully emblematic style....

To summarize: Sanger was born in 1879 into a large Irish-American family in upstate New York. Growing up, she saw how her mother’s health had been ruined by her 18 pregnancies (11 children, 7 miscarriages). In one of the more chilling incidents in Woman Rebel, young Maggie’s father, an artist and political radical, takes her along to a graveyard in the middle of the night to dig up the body of her dead baby brother so he can make a death mask to comfort her mother....

“And Avimelekh fought against the city, all that day, and he took the city, and slew the people that were in it, and pulled down the city, and sowed it with salt.” This Avimelekh was clearly not a bloke to be trifled with, but my question is about the sowing part. Did anyone really get bags of salt and plow it into the ground just to prove what total conquerors they were?...

DANCE: Cajmere and his Cajual label on a new British comp On October 30 British label Strut released the double CD Only 4U: The Sound of Cajmere & Cajual Records 1992-2012, which surveys the catalog of the label owned and operated by Chicago house and techno great Curtis A. Jones (aka Cajmere, aka Green Velvet). The span of years in the title is a bit misleading, since 17 of the 22 tracks date from the first five years of Cajual’s existence—its creative heyday—and the rest are scattered across the aughts....

Leor Galil Third Man’s Rolling Record Store I never thought I’d be as relieved to hear the words “Chief Keef will not be performing tonight” as I was Saturday around 8 PM. That’s when some SXSW authority figure armed with a megaphone tried to deliver the news to a massive throng of people waiting to get into a cavernous warehouse that served as a venue for SXSW; the infamous young rapper had been scheduled to perform alongside acts like Death Grips, Baauer with RL Grime, and Mount Kimbie....

This past Wednesday, the remake of John Milius’s classic kids-versus-commies action fest hit theaters just in time for Thanksgiving Black Friday, providing the perfect option for those thirsting for some Americanism during the holiday season—which, in case you weren’t aware, is the optimal time to be an American. I reviewed the film for the Reader, a task I happily volunteered for given my fascination with the 1984 original. Chuck Norris in Invasion USA Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Clybourne Park may have been the worst thing that could’ve happened to former Chicagoan Bruce Norris. The 51-year-old playwright and actor had spent years designing a life that left him free to be as sharp-tongued, difficult, misanthropic, and iconoclastically brilliant as he wanted—and he clearly wanted, quite a bit. Thanks to the occasional role in a movie (The Sixth Sense) or TV series (Law and Order), Norris was able to maintain the economic independence he needed to write scabrous satires like The Pain and the Itch, which revolves around a four-year-old girl’s genital rash....

DIY projects are popping out around Chicago thanks to the Harold Washington Library Center’s Maker Lab, which features 3-D printing technology. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lab opened to the public on July 8, aided by a nearly $250,000 grant issued by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Right now it’s slated to remain open through December 31, but plans could change depending on how it fares, according to Mark Andersen, chief of the Business, Science, and Technology Division at the Chicago Public Library....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Friday I was lucky enough to attend the first of Bruce Springsteen’s two sold-out shows at Wrigley Field. I knew I’d be going the second the shows were announced: my father is a huge Springsteen fan, and I don’t think he’s ever missed a Chicago tour stop. Because my dad was so obsessed, the Boss was my first concert, and the opening snare-drum hits and synth notes of Born in the U....

Honeys Even though the new Pissed Jeans record, Honeys, doesn’t come out until 2/12, it should go without saying that it’s been leaked. If you’ve been following the musical path of the Pennsylvania noise-rock four-piece, it should also go without saying that Honeys is an incredible album. Picking up where 2009’s King of Jeans left off, Honeys showcases the band running through gross-out noise rock, plodding postpunk, and wild ‘n’ grungy punk, all while covering some hilariously dark subject matter, like wishing your corporate project manager were dead (“Cafeteria Food”), staying healthy through extreme unhealthiness (“Health Plan”), and very public domestic disagreements (“Bathroom Laughter”)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It rained during the first two days of the Pitchfork Music Festival, and fortune frowned on the crowd again during the third and final day by blasting 95-degree weather and transforming Union Park into a giant outdoor sauna. Despite the ongoing risk of dehydration, exhaustion, and other forms of weather-related discomfort, it was the best overall day of the weekend, with many of the finest performances....