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“A feeble, secondhand Mr. Chips” is how one character describes Fred Miller, the embattled professor at the center of David Rush’s muddled new play. Unfortunately, the sobriquet fits. Despite a game lead performance from Don Bender (a relatively late replacement for another actor), the play veers from strained academic demi-satire to misty midlife-crisis melodrama to over-the-top surrealism, in dream sequences involving Lewis Carroll and the Jabberwock. Miller’s decision to twit an argumentative Jewish student by dressing like Hitler and passing out Nazi propaganda in class doesn’t make him a free-speech hero– just a jerk....

Q I’m a 25-year-old girl dating a 26-year-old guy. My boyfriend identifies as sexually submissive. He likes to be tied up, put in women’s underwear, and locked in a chastity device, and he has a strong urge to please. I hate the term, but I suppose you could call me a “feeder.” I am turned on by the idea of someone eating a lot of food, usually junk food, and putting on weight....

Seth Perlman/AP State rep La Shawn Ford: “I’m fighting to keep people out of jail, out of the system, and now I’m in the system. It’s just crazy.” State representative La Shawn Ford is trying to stay hopeful. “I love Austin,” he says on a recent drive through the west-side neighborhood at the heart of his district. “If only we could get it right and allow opportunities to be here....

This year has already seen a number of long-awaited releases by high-profile artists, including Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience and Daft Punk’s uncharacteristically human, warm Random Access Memories (which technically isn’t out yet but is streaming on iTunes, not to mention illegally downloadable, which is about the same thing). But certain hip-hop and R&B fans are keeping their focus locked on two records they’ve been waiting for seemingly forever, which are finally about to drop....

thursday25 Thursday25 Richie Hawtin Friday26 BloodymindedJohn MellencampTrap Them Saturday27 Syl JohnsonBruno MarsA Masked BallJohn MellencampSabertoothMavis Staples Monday29 Blind Guardian Tuesday30 A Masked Ball Wednesday1 Diamond RingsJenny Scheinman’s Mischief & Mayhem friday26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JOHN MELLENCAMP John Mellencamp‘s latest, No Better Than This (Rounder), was recorded by T-Bone Burnett with a single microphone and a 55-year-old Ampex tape machine in three iconic locations: Sun Studios in Memphis, the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, and Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where Robert Johnson cut his first sides....

Good news, Chicagoans! Our coffers are overflowing, as tens of millions of property tax dollars pour in to revitalize the schools, the parks, the city, and the county. There’s money for new books and new teachers, new police and fire equipment, expanded recreational services for poor kids who can’t pay rising Park District fees—maybe even a rebate for overtaxed property owners. And it’s all because around this time last year, the Central Loop tax increment financing district hit its 23-year anniversary....

In previous years this has been billed as the Chicago United Film Festival; the new, inverted title more accurately reflects the fact that, instead of a homegrown event, this is really the local installment of a nationwide series programmed by the Los Angeles distributor United Films. The 23 programs screening range from new indie dramas and documentaries to shorts programs to late shows of studio releases (The Terminator, The Craft). Following are reviews of three genuinely local productions; for a full schedule see musicboxtheatre....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not often that we think of commercials as they pertain to authorship. Certainly, the basic function of a commercial is to sell something, so the prospect of aesthetic intent resides outside of our general perception. (Of course, one could easily make the argument that the majority of movies are also out to “sell” something, but that’s a topic for another time....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been a fan of the Alot for a couple years now, ever since a friend who knows my grammar-freak tendencies (it’s not hard—some people who have never met me know about my slight obsession with grammar) sent me a link to Allie Brosh’s excellent The Alot Is Better Than You at Everything—one of her equally excellent Hyperbole and a Half comics....

Shawn and Suzanne Staples had a house-hunting goal: to find a permanent residence to raise a family. “We got really lucky,” Suzanne explains over the giggles of the couple’s boisterous two-year-old, Abby. “Every single place we looked at was exactly the same. As soon as we turned the corner [into the living room], I was like, ‘I really, really want it.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This past April, the Stapleses moved into their “forever home”—a Lakeview church designed by Swedish-born architect Lawrence Gustav Hallberg and built in 1898....

Most people who signed Joe Laiacona’s petition to run for state representative of the 40th District probably had no idea they were supporting a historic campaign. That’s because Laiacona didn’t tell them. One evening in August I followed the 62-year-old as he hoofed it down Sacramento between Irving Park and Addison. Wearing a short-sleeve plaid shirt tucked into jeans, he said almost exactly the same thing to anyone who’d open the door: “Hi, I’m Joe Laiacona....

Asperger’s syndrome—a mild form of autism that leaves linguistic functions unimpaired—didn’t make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1994, 50 years after it was first described. (Perhaps the most important secular document in American life after the Constitution, the DSM monetizes and thus legitimizes our ever-shifting categories of mental illness: if your problem isn’t in the big book, it doesn’t exist and your insurance company won’t pay for treatment....

The Easy Virtue at The Drawing Room 937 N. Rush 312-266-2694 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mixologist Charles Joly created this phlegm cutter for the Drawing Room’s spring menu after watching the Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby vehicle High Society, where “they’re pretty much sauced for half of the movie.” After she’s spent the night before her wedding cavorting with Sinatra in a swimming pool, Crosby serves Kelly an eye-opener—a classic Stinger....

Mon 11/25: Hunters at Empty Bottle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brooklyn duo Hunters will be at the Empty Bottle tonight. Before their last stop in town over the summer, Kevin Warwick said, “The 2011 debut EP by Brooklyn band Hunters, Hands on Fire, was a mini hype magnet on account of its rough-and-tumble, scuffed-and-bruised sound—it’s raw, sludgy, and kinda evil, and on its cover, founding members Isabel Almeida and Derek Watson writhe on the ground during a set at some no-stage space that probably no longer exists....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville moved big, 6-foot-10, but generally little-used defenseman John Scott up front to play left wing on the fourth line—the so-called “energy line”—Friday night, and Scott responded right away on the first shift by digging a puck out of the corner that led to a goal by Jamal Mayers. Scott, a fearsome fighter, later pummeled the Anaheim Ducks’ Sheldon Brookbank (in the way a Sheldon should be pummeled) and headed to the penalty box to the strains of Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad john....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s really nothing of any consequence to expect from a given January, but here: that’s when the Reader prints its annual Pure Fiction issue, written by you. This year will be number 14—check out the most recent issue here, and our Fiction archives here—and the time to submit your short stories is now. In the past we’ve been lucky to have published such illustrious authors as Gina Frangello, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Bayo Ojikutu, Stephen Markley, Adam Langer, and Rennie Sparks, who also wrote one of my favorite songs....

“I could have killed him,” said Patrick Henaghan after Carnivale bartender Luis Rodriguez challenged him with chicken bouillon. Instead Henaghan, a barkeep at Michael Jordan’s Steak House, conducted a tasting of “fake chicken flavor” in six different forms. He wound up using a triple-clarified solution made from combining a no-sodium powder with a full-sodium version, using a third kind in powderized form to rim the glass. “I went a little crazy,” Heneghan admitted—hence the cocktail’s name....

Bob San Proper raw-fish minimalists typically have nothing but scorn for the dark sound-tracked nightclubs that chum fashionable neighborhoods for suckers eager to accessorize their nights out with gaudy fish candy. With a dining area and lounge, Bob San has the latter market locked up—it’s the place to be seen washing down your crabby dragon roll with a saketini. So hats off to Bob Bee. He’s a hell of a businessman, but no bottom feeder: the sushi bar at Bob San is also a haven for people who take their sashimi and sushi seriously....

For the first in our series of artists interviewing artists, Chicago Afrobeat Project keyboardist Kevin Ford spoke with Femi Kuti, eldest son of legendary Afrobeat pioneer and Nigerian human-rights activist Fela Kuti, about his new album, his doubts about democracy, and his efforts to protect his father’s legacy while carrying it forward. Femi Kuti plays with his band the Positive Force on April 30 at Metro. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In a recent New Yorker profile of actress Anna Faris, writer Tad Friend reflects at length on the dearth of farcical comedies for women and dissects the mentality that discourages studios from making them. According to the conventional wisdom in Hollywood, when a couple goes on a date the man picks the movie, and though women will go along with seeing a rowdy, male-oriented comedy, men avoid “chick flicks” like the plague....