Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » George Bernard Shaw famously was quoted as saying that “If we had to kill our own food, we’d all be vegetarians,” but after watching Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s pristinely chilly (and chilling) documentary Our Daily Bread last week at Facets, I almost have to wonder if even ordinary fruits, legumes, etc, are feasible culinary options these days. Take olives: the way they’re harvested, apparently routinely, by huge clawed machines that shake the trees to within an inch of their uprooting (i....

When drying my hands in a public bathroom, I frequently have the choice of an electric hot-air dryer or paper towels. Since the label on the hot-air dryer proclaims it is environmentally friendly and reduces paper towel waste, I generally use it. But the dryer requires no little electricity, the production of which is often detrimental to the environment. So which is less damaging for the planet? —Marcus Evans, Nottingham, UK...

Beginner’s luck may account for the ups and downs of this effort from seasoned performer and first-time playwright Paul Oakley Stovall. His family drama dives headlong into identity politics–a young man brings home his boyfriend of another race–and somehow lands gracefully on the other side. Nonchalantly, with unforced humor and organic ease, Stovall sketches out complex characters and simmering conflicts. But having done the hard part, he doesn’t know where to go next and proceeds to undo some of his own fine work....

Dance by the disabled isn’t as uncommon now as it was in 1987, when this company of the able-bodied and disabled was formed in the Bay Area. The troupe is more relevant than ever given recent controversies over what constitutes disability and what its consequences should be, if any–consider Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin (stripped of her title when she was photographed standing), Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, and the Terri Schiavo case....

A mild-mannered Arab-American man enters a waking nightmare in Yussef El Guindi’s disturbing political drama about the U.S. government’s push to curtail the civil rights of terrorism suspects. El Guindi’s sympathies clearly lie with the guiltless who’ve suffered interrogation in the name of a war on terror; admirably, he also tries to show the causes of the government’s xenophobia. But his central point–that pretty much anyone can be made to appear guilty if statements are taken out of context–might have been more dramatically compelling if we weren’t so thoroughly assured from the start that the hero’s innocent....

A weird article in the September issue of Conscious Choice raises questions about the direction being taken by one of Mayor Daley’s favorite magazines. “The 9/11 Credibility Gap” was a friendly interview by national editor Abigail Lewis with David Ray Griffin, professor of theology at the Claremont Colleges and author of The New Pearl Harbor, which suggests the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives planted in the towers rather than by the planes alone and that behind the catastrophe were neoconservatives seeking a pretext for war....

I dislike few buzzwords more than mockumentary, which even academics now use casually and uncritically. People often assume it’s a neutral descriptive term, but unlike pseudodocumentary—an honest and serviceable label—mockumentary leads many to conclude that the documentary form that’s being imitated is also being made fun of. Most of the works that get labeled mockumentaries are actually honoring the form, by using its techniques to make them seem more real....

Cillian Murphy gives a tour de force performance as Patrick “Kitten” Braden, a cross-dressing Irish teenager in early-70s London who’s less concerned with the IRA activity going on all around him than with finding his long-lost mother, who abandoned him on a priest’s doorstep. This is adapted from a 1998 novel by Pat McCabe, but its tale of a beautiful dreamer traipsing through a junkyard of ugly realities is a natural for Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), who sets it to a killer vintage-pop sound track....

Lee Hall’s black comedy features a paraplegic Elvis impersonator, his alcoholic wife, their food-obsessed teenage daughter, and the hapless baker who moves into their home in northern England. Dale Goulding’s staging for Sang Froid Theatre Company last year in a studio at the Athenaeum captured beautifully the play’s atmosphere of dank claustrophobia, some of which is sacrificed in the current restaging in the broad main-stage space. But once the four actors–all vets of the original production–pick up steam, this sad, nihilistic fable-cum-farce is often mesmerizing and hilarious....

The outrages of pedophile priests have generated screaming headlines but relatively little understanding of the Catholic culture that permitted and concealed such crimes, which makes this informed documentary by Amy Berg all the more valuable. She focuses on Father Oliver O’Grady, a monstrous little leprechaun who raped dozens of children in the 70s and 80s while the diocese of Stockton, California, shuttled him from one parish to another. Living unsupervised in Dublin following a prison term, he speaks openly about his sins, cheerily at peace with himself and his God even as, back in America, his grown victims tear themselves to pieces....

Big Picture Group’s multimedia performance piece aims to explore the obsessions and communication breakdowns inherent in contemporary romantic relationships–relationships also tainted by consumerism and Photoshopped media imagery. But writer-director Andrew Schneider’s aphoristic dialogue and cliched stage pictures seldom rise above the level of a perfume ad. Schneider seems to feel disdain for the desire to be entertained, but honestly, who wants to stay in a relationship with someone who’s boring? Plucky performers Allan Aquino and Sally Bell fully commit to their roles, but their delivery often slides into the static drone parodied as a staple of performance poetry....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “…unless religious leaders take younger adults more seriously, the future of American religion is in doubt…. Younger adults are already less actively involved in their congregations than older adults are. Not only this, younger adults are currently less involved than younger adults were a generation ago. The demographics behind this declining involvement also do not bode well for the future....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The program began with something obnoxiously called a “sizzle reel,” ten minutes of clips so short I couldn’t begin to take notes on them. But for the most part they consisted of Maher touring various holy sites and interviewing diehard followers of the “Big Three”–Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. After a short onstage interview the filmmakers showed a series of longer clips that gave a better idea of their scorched-earth policy....

Normally, Navy Pier is one of the last places I’d visit voluntarily, but during the zombie days of summer I’ll do anything for free air-conditioning. Tickets for Wired magazine’s annual high-tech extravaganza, NextFest, were $15, but I kept my eyes locked on my cell phone like an oblivious asshole while pretending to text-message someone and kept walking until I blended in with the crowd. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

With his tattoos, cornrows, and thug entourage, Jaheim looks tough, but musically he’s all about vulnerability, conjuring the spirit of Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Vandross without shying away from his abiding love of hip-hop. On the hit “Put That Woman First,” an adaptation of the classic William Bell slow jam “I Forgot to Be Your Lover,” he uses the same kind of absurdly prosaic style R. Kelly has turned into an art form to lament all the distractions that have kept him from showing his lover the proper respect....

It took 34 years for Michael Yonkers’s Microminiature Love to make it into record stores, but I’ll leave it to the theologians to debate whether this demonstrates that the world is fallen, that God is benevolent, or both. I’ll just say that the album–recorded in 1968 but shelved after the guitarist’s relationship with Sire Records went sour–is one of my favorite rock releases of the 21st century. First pressed in 2002 by vinyl hounds Destijl and reissued a year later on CD by Sub Pop, the record sounds startlingly up-to-date....

Architecture’s a hot topic in Chicago right now–and vice versa. The current issue of the trade journal Architectural Record is dedicated to the city’s revival, with nods to Soldier Field, Millennium Park, Koolhaas and Jahn’s new buildings at IIT, and Ralph Johnson’s Skybridge development just north of Greektown, plus an overview of hot younger architects, including Jeanne Gang, Doug Garofalo, Darryl Crosby, and Melinda Palmore. This weekend the sixth annual Great Chicago Places and Spaces offers more than 130 free architectural tours of the city (see schedule in Section Two)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s the nub of “The New Funding Heresies,” a lengthy and sure-footed account of the difficulties of financing progressive causes, published in In These Times and written by Christopher Hayes (a sometime Reader contributor). “This isn’t the case for progressives, who will have to rely upon a kind of What’s the Matter With Kansas? effect in which ideological principles trump personal class interests....

There is nothing like the sound of a slam dunk–not the dunk itself, even though a number of arenas are now miking the hoops and broadcasting the sound over the PA, but the roar of the crowd in response. There is something both joyful and violent in that roar, an appreciation for the beauty of the feat but also for the humiliation it wreaks upon an opponent. A dunk triggers the same sort of unbridled in-your-face ecstasy as a smartly landed punch in boxing, with all of the sadism but none of the guilt....

This muddled kids’ show directed by Michael Brooks has a cute premise and some fun ideas but collapses too easily into cliche: at the end we’re told there’s no place like home, individualism is OK, and you can’t judge a book by its cover. The story revolves around a young aardvark (Ginny Moore) who feels restricted by her community’s emphasis on routine and work, so she declares, “I don’t wanna!” Her Grambo (Jenni Cline), a similarly antsy aardvark, tells her that she needs to figure out what she does want....