Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So off we went last Friday, a party of far-flung family 13 strong, to Incanto, Mark Pastore’s rustic Italian restaurant and wine bar in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. The occasion, the synchronous birthdays of both my aunt Jacqueline and cousin Peter. Executive chef Chris Cosentino, as the name of his personal Web site attests, is one of the most visible and articulate stateside champions of nose-to-tail eating–and this fall he may have lapped Fergus Henderson in popular recognition thanks to his almost-ran appearance on The Next Iron Chef....

By anyone’s standards Chester Arthur Burnett–the man better known as Howlin’ Wolf–led a colorful life. But for first-time authors James Segrest and Mark Hoffman, who’ve just published a biography of the legendary singer and harpist, the most remarkable aspect of his story was that no one had put it to paper before. Segrest went to the library to read up on Wolf, but all he could find were threadbare anecdotes and bits of boilerplate in blues survey books....

Late Chrysanthemums With Haruko Sugimura, Sadako Sawamura, Chikako Hosokawa, Yuko Mochizuki, Ken Uehara, Hiroshi Koizumi, and Ineko Arima Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Having seen 10 of the 19 films by Mikio Naruse (out of a career total of 89) screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center’s retrospective that started in January, most of them post-World War II features, I can think of only one–Travelling Actors (1940), an uncharacteristic comedy about two Kabuki actors who play a horse–that might cheer someone up....

Molly Shanahan’s Eye Cycle: Arithmetic of Shadows–part of a project that began in 2003 with Eye Cycle–is gentle, honorable, and brainy. Josh Weckesser’s fluid lighting, Shanahan’s video projections, Kevin O’Donnell’s music, and soft, repetitive dancing by Shanahan and Kristina Fluty all contribute to a dreamy sense of meditation. Missing, however, are development and communication–I could have stayed home and thought about Shanahan’s subject, “the ephemerality of movement in regards to light, shadow, framing, reflection, and perspective....

Dear Justin, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One evening about two years ago my husband and I took Libby and Buster for our evening jog on a route that took us by the corner of Diversey and Halsted. On this particular evening it was raining. When we approached the northwest corner of Diversey and Halsted our dogs started yelping like I’ve never heard before....

Lead Story In a June ruling, federal judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. ordered Missouri to stop executing condemned prisoners until it develops a standard lethal-injection protocol to reduce the current risk of unnecessary pain and suffering–one that specifies, for instance, which lethal drugs are to be used and in what quantities. Gaitan also noted with concern that, according to deposition testimony, the one doctor responsible for mixing the drugs used in Missouri executions suffers from dyslexia, which “causes him confusion with regard to numbers....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barnard Lorence filed a $2 million lawsuit against the First National Bank and Trust in Stuart, Florida, in November, accusing it of falsely advertising that it cares about its customers. He alleged that he was treated rudely by a manager when he asked that the bank waive a $32 overdraft fee and that stress from the incident had aggravated brain damage he suffered in a 2001 accident....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Houston Chronicle reported in May that while school districts around Texas are hard-pressed to find money to pay teachers and buy books, they’re having little trouble raising bond money for lavish high school football stadiums: communities surrounding the state’s major cities have recently built or are now planning 23 new stadiums at a total cost of $305....

Even as commercial moviemaking becomes more geared to teens and preteens, this crackerjack survey, the opening-night program of the 18th Onion City festival, shows how some contemporary experimental work approaches and interacts with the mainstream. Among the shorts screening are Soul Dancing (2004), a weird video by Japanese cult horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), a 35-millimeter ‘Scope reworking of a Sergio Leone western by Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky; Here (2005), in which Fred Worden shuffles images from Georges Melies and the Laurence Olivier Henry V; and Andy Warhol’s 1966 screen tests featuring Bob Dylan....

Last fall, at the age of 87, Chicago artist Tristan Meinecke was the subject of his first retrospective. While the exhibit of his paintings, drawings, constructions, and recorded music was being mounted at 1926 Exhibition Space, Meinecke said to one of its curators, John Corbett, “I just hope I make it until the show.” But when I interviewed him in September he seemed vigorous to the point of pugnacity: when I took offense at his use of the term “little faggot” to describe a former Art Institute official he disliked, he responded by asking whether the Reader wasn’t a “hippie newspaper....

This touring festival of digital videos celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, with programs screening Thursday through Sunday, October 19 through 22, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Music videos continue to provide an inviting market for adventurous video artists, which Resfest has recognized through its long-running emphasis on music clips. Videos That Rock (Fri 10/20, 9 PM) includes clips for John Cale, Sufjan Stevens, Nada Surf, OK Go, and Death Cab for Cutie, while Cinema Electronica (Sat 10/21, 7 PM) highlights dance music acts like Basement Jaxx, Massive Attack, and Gnarls Barkley....

“Science, mutation, magic, and gadgets” make up the working arsenal of the superhero pantheon, according to Dan Telfer’s toothsomely goofy new late-night show, and variants of all of those are on display in the octet of unlikely crime fighters that make up the Rogue 8. The audience gets to vote (via handheld keypads) at crucial intervals on who will save the day. Like the legendary Organic sci-fi opus Warp!, Rogue 8 is designed as a serial, with new episodes unfolding every month....

We tend to make trade-offs between reality and fantasy when we watch movies, buying into some questionable premises because we want to honor others. Despite shared assumptions and conventions, we have different thresholds for what we find believable—or an acceptable version of what’s real. We’ll settle for a certain amount of contrivance, but our tolerance has limits, determined in part by age, taste, and experience and in part by whether we like the rest of the movie enough to stretch our standards....

After the Quake Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For this Steppenwolf Theatre Company world premiere, adapter-director Frank Galati combines two of the stories in Murakami’s 2002 book. In “Honey Pie” a lonely writer, Junpei, still loves a woman he met in college, Sayoko, who married his best friend instead. When her daughter, Sala, suffers nightmares after the quake, Sayoko asks Junpei for help, and he makes up stories about a clever bear to calm the little girl....

On February 20 the Web site Baseball Prospectus scooped the dailies by reporting that Cubs starting pitcher Mark Prior was having shoulder trouble. Cubs GM Jim Hendry and manager Dusty Baker initially denied the report. “You can’t believe a report unless it comes from us,” Baker told the media the day after the story appeared. “If it doesn’t come from us, it doesn’t count.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Despite the name, this game is all hits, no errors. A young, athletic cast hits the zenith of zany in this family-oriented 75-minute superpowered condensation of Shakespeare’s early comedy of mistaken identities and the resulting “infidelities.” Director David H. Bell puts a rubber-faced ensemble, here playing eager actors of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, through a thousand paces: pratfalls, sight gags, puns, comic anachronisms, and industrial-strength mugging. Reduced to its farcical essence, The Comedy of Errors is a Saturday-morning cartoon anyway, thus the perfect way for a kid to meet the Bard....

Since Godspeed You! Black Emperor dissolved a few years back, the band’s loyal legions have embraced the Godspeed side project SILVER MT. ZION, which has gone from being practically off the radar to launching its first U.S. tour, including three shows on this Chicago stop. The two groups are different animals, though. Godspeed was a mostly instrumental anarchist collective prone to album-side-long epics; Silver Mt. Zion is helmed by guitarist Efrim Menuck (joined by Godspeed cohorts Thierry Amar, also of openers Black Ox Orkestar, and Sophie Trudeau), who sings in a craggy voice over minimal, church-solemn tracks....

There’s something startling, all right, about local artist Josh Garber’s planned sculpture for the revamped Kimball station on the Brown Line, but it’s not the phallus some people claim to see. Anyone who finds this loopy pair of columns pornographic better avert their eyes from the entire Chicago skyline. Garber says his inspiration was the lotus, which a Cambodian immigrant told him represents “hope and renewal,” the piece’s title. In his proposal for the work, Garber notes that it’ll be made of thousands of welded aluminum bars, “meant to represent each of the individuals living in the area,” while the petals, which double as benches, point to the four corners of the earth....

EMBER SWIFT 5/7, SCHUBAS This Toronto-based singer-songwriter follows the Ani DiFranco model, with her own label (Few’ll Ignite Sound) and networking Web site. On her eighth album, Disarming, Swift (on acoustic guitar) and longtime collaborator Lyndell Montgomery (electric bass, violin) effectively contain the music’s fierce politics in an easy-to-swallow capsule of deft, frisky, superwhite jazz pop. There’s not a single eruption of doubt or uncontrolled energy–it’d be nice to get some sense that Swift’s journey to her feminist outlook was more than a casual stroll....

Last month the John Jay College of Criminal Justice released its study on the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, uncovering 10,667 allegations of molestation between 1950 and 2002. Eighty-one percent of the victims were male. Two percent of accused priests received jail time. Of course, allegations aren’t necessarily based in fact. But when you consider that any claim of inappropriate behavior can get a mom-and-pop day care center shut down, it becomes clear how effective the Catholic bureaucracy has been at shielding its suspect clergy from examination....