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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week Martha Bayne and I reprised an early 2006 visit to Schwa. Since its reopening the day before Valentine’s Day, we’d been trying to land a reservation for a mid-March, midweek seating, but had some difficulty. First she couldn’t get a call back, and then the answering machine was full. When I got through I didn’t have a dummy credit card handy to secure the date, and when I called back the machine said they were booked until early April....

Everyone’s a comedian on Twitter. There’s something about the format that just begs for drollery—or attempts at drollery, anyway. There are loads of exceptions, but actual comedians tend to be the most reliable source of yuks on Twitter. Facebook is for spying on people you went to high school with, not jokes. And Vine’s pretty equal opportunity. (As local improv actor Carisa Barreca explains it, “Seven seconds of anything on repeat is funny....

Chicago Restaurant Week, originally scheduled to end today, has been extended through Friday, March 6. That gives you one more week to get $22 three-course prix fixe lunches and $32 dinners (not including tax and tip) at participating local restaurants. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Publican continues its monthly Brew Masters series with a four-course prix fixe dinner featuring Three Floyds beer, including Gumballhead and Behemoth barley wine as well as Banana Split 7-Inch, a brew chef Paul Kahan created in collaboration with the brewery....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thursday at 7 PM, Mark Bires, chef and co-owner of Jerry’s Wicker Park (1938 W. Division), prepares a six-course meal with beer pairings from Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewing Co.; Patrick Conway, co-owner of Great Lakes, will be on hand to discuss the brews. The menu includes roasted tomato soup paired with Eliot Ness Vienna Lager, fried green tomatoes and shrimp remoulade over a buttermilk biscuit paired with Burning River American Pale Ale and Commodore Perry India Pale Ale, and collapsed chocolate souffle cake with creme anglaise paired with Edmund Fitzgerald Porter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The move sure feels intentional, as Håker Flaten sticks exclusively to electric bass (deploying a nasty distorted tone that frequently erupts in clouds of acidic feedback and fuzzed-out mayhem), and while the album is mostly original material (along with the take on “India” and one of Duke Ellington’s “Heaven”), the jackhammer beats of Nilssen-Love and the snarling bass grooves continue to sound a lot like rock music....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a culmination of the Hideout’s participation in the campaign, the club has organized the Big Shoulders Ball, a blowout concert on Monday, January 19–the night before the inauguration–at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. Tortoise, the Waco Brothers, Eleventh Dream Day, Jon Langford & Sally Timms, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Ken Vandermark, Freakwater, Icy Demons, and Judson Claiborne are confirmed and “special guests” are promised....

Last year Carole Travis-Henikoff invited about 60 of her pals to her University Village graystone for a smorgasbord representing disarticulated human body parts. At the top she laid a suckling pig head with angel-hair pasta tresses and a beef tongue. There were veal sweetbreads around where the thymus glands would go, and a braised beef heart was surrounded by barbecued pork ribs, a roasted veal breast, and an abdomen of liver paté....

AP Photo/Roberto Borea Sammy Sosa at the plate in 2003, four years after Bill Clinton paid him homage during a State of the Union address Every year at about this time, the president, his cabinet, Congress, and the Supreme Court gather in the House chamber to honor the nation’s Lenny Skutnik winner. The president also gives a speech. The Lenny Skutnik tribute began in 1982, during Ronald Reagan’s first State of the Union address....

Lauren Bacall, with curtain designs, in The Cobweb I’m convinced that a great movie can be made on any subject, no matter how arcane, provided that its makers find something of greater significance in the material or else employ cinematic form to transform that subject into something interesting. One of Vincente Minnelli’s best films, The Cobweb (1955), centers on a debate over who gets to design the curtains of a posh sanitarium’s common room....

“Who cares about our stupid family?” asks Joanna Polley at the outset of Stories We Tell, a documentary by her sister Sarah. “Every family has a story. But I do think it’s really interesting to look at this one thing that happened and how it’s refracted in so many different ways.” You don’t often get such a blunt set of instructions for how to watch a film, yet Joanna’s comment also poses a direct challenge to the filmmaker....

Tabadol is Arabic for “exchange.” That’s what bass clarinetist and former Chicagoan Gene Coleman had in mind last year when he arranged for members of Lebanon’s nascent free-improv scene to visit five U.S. cities and perform with local musicians and visiting Europeans in each. While the plan seemed potentially intriguing from a political and cultural angle, I was looking forward to hearing the music; bassist Raed Yassin, trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, and saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui are all strong players whose use of extended techniques and preference for harsh textures owe little to either jazz or traditional Middle Eastern music....

Opening night of “Sex. Money. Race. Gender.” will involve coloring, games, on-camera interviews, and revising historical documents. At least that’s what the audience will be doing. The artists, all members of the Ladydrawers Comics Collective, will be hula hooping, performing stand-up comedy, collaborating on a mural, and acting out a live-action comic. The work in “Sex. Money. Race. Gender.,” Moore says, ranges from “didactic to weird.” It includes Cash Kitty, a photography project by Melissa Gira Grant in which sex workers take pictures of the money they make alongside their pets; captions contain information on what the money was spent on....

Julia Thiel Lobby at the Peninsula chef Lee Wolen’s durian custard “I love the Reader. But that column where people cook with yak phlegm? That’s terrible. It’s gotta go.” So said a friendly bartender at the L&L Tavern late last year, unaware that he was talking to a group of Readerites including Julia Thiel, who writes our chef-to-chef challenge, Key Ingredient. We’ve been running the feature since December 2, 2010, when Grant Achatz kicked things off with kluwak kupas, the first and only ingredient to come from us (more specifically, from food writer Mike Sula—”damn Sula,” said Achatz, who’d never heard of the nuts)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Remember when the Coen brothers opened Fargo with the legend “This is a true story” and it turned out to be fiction? Roger Donaldson’s new heist thriller The Bank Job seems to operate on the reverse principle. A press release says it was “inspired by” the 1971 robbery of a London bank, suggesting a certain amount of fiction. But a full year ago the UK Observer reported that screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais drew on a “deep throat” informer familiar with the hushed-up case to “incriminate high-ranking police officers, the secret service, politicians, and a prominent member of the Royal Family....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Margasak’s rant about cell phone photos from concerts hit home with me, not because I particularly mind them but because I’m sore tired of multifunction cell phones that do many things badly. A couple years ago I plunked down on a Nokia 6800 with a flip-out keypad for e-mailing (used as a dork signifier in The Devil Wears Prada), and it hasn’t yet improved my quality of life, plus I’m out a couple hundred bucks over that period for the service....

Several months in, the financial crisis remains an immensely confusing phenomenon, linking everyday mortgage-paying Americans to boutique derivatives trading houses to Scandinavian pensions. While the particular cause of the crisis, its implications, and the best means of dealing with it remain a topic of vigorous debate, it has been unquestionably linked to the profligate tendency of Americans to live far beyond our means. I.O.U.S.A., which premiered at Sundance in January and saw theatrical release in late August as the full scale of the crisis began to dawn on Wall Street, looks at the problem of personal debt in the United States in much the same way Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth examines the climate crisis....

When I started rapping I wanted to bring people together; that was the mission of my music. I wanted to approach pizza the same way. So I say eat pizza at every pizza place in Chicago. Pay no mind to food critics and magazine reviews. Why not make a rad event every weekend where you and your friends venture to a new pizza place? If everyone got together and did this all the pizza places would prosper and everyone would be friends....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even if you have only a passing familiarity with Korean food, you’re likely to know pajeon, or haemul pajeon, the wheat flour, scallion, and sometimes seafood pancake that often precedes the main meal in Korean restaurants, either as an appetizer or along with the banchan. But it’s less likely you know its more scarfable cousin bindaetteok, a crispy, savory flapjack made from pulverized mung bean batter....

Durango Silk Road Theatre Project There are no whole families in the plays of Julia Cho. In fact, what binds their members to one another is a shared loss, a sudden amputation. A father takes off, a mother dies, a child vanishes. Missing persons haunt Cho’s families like phantom limbs, palpable in their absence. But they’re vulnerable to subtler forms of loss as well: sacrifice, attrition, diminishing returns. In her 2004 play The Architecture of Loss, a character grimly compares people to gloves that start to bag over time, as the wearer’s hands age and shrivel: “Little by little, life takes away the things inside you....

“It was a great time,” says filmmaker Jim Sikora, recalling the 90s punk scene he hopes to re-create in his new feature, I’ll Die Tomorrow. “Chicago was the cheapest date. There was such immediacy to the music. Everything on Touch and Go at that time was just brilliant. . . . I’ll Die Tomorrow is a distillation of all these things. It’s why I’ve wanted to do it for so long....