Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Feeling flush? Friday at 7, Eno is opening its three bottles of 1945 Chateau Latour, one of the rarest and most expensive wines in the world. They’re offering 2-ounce and 6-ounce tastings, which will cost $250 and $750, respectively. Reservations are recommended. Even if a taste of some of the world’s most expensive wine is out of your price range, tasting the most expensive coffee in the world might be feasible....

To get to Washington Island by car, take I-94 north to Milwaukee, then I-43 to Green Bay. At Green Bay take Route 57 north to Sturgeon Bay, which straddles the ship canal that separates northern and southern Door County and is the last major town on the peninsula. From April through June there’s construction on the main bridge; motorists are advised to take Business 42/57 into the city. Depending on the ferry schedule, it may be convenient to spend the night here (in winter, it’s basically a given if you’re shooting for the morning boat)....

Writer-director Roger Bectel, who adapted Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for the new Big Picture Group, allows the actors to be overwhelmed by Andrew Schneider’s intriguing layered video projections. That’s too bad, because Big Picture has an interesting vision. Ibsen’s play is about the tension between the truthfulness necessary in a genuine relationship and the illusions we need to stay alive, and the videos–images of the actors as well as flickering collages of calming and disturbing subjects related to the play’s themes–illustrate that nicely....

Earth Empty Bottle, 9/24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sylvia Plath was right: very often the pleasure of solitude is cold and planetary. And Earth–the Seattle-based band that basically consists of guitarist Dylan Carlson and whoever he’s working with now–offers some of that same sort of pleasure. Ordinary lusty rock ‘n’ roll usually revs people up with speed–it takes the rhythms of pulse and breath and throttles them up just the right amount....

It’s not quite “My Big Fat Persian Wedding,” but Iranian-American Negin Farsad’s autobiographical comic monologue about a trip back to Tehran in 1999 for a female cousin’s nuptials does tread some familiar ground as this all-American party girl confronts old-world traditions. A hit at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival, Bootleg Islam has a few bits that don’t quite pay off, but Farsad does create poignant snapshots of postrevolutionary Iran as “a country obsessed with waiting”–whether for personal or political change....

Bruce Sterling is an idea-and-gadget man; fiction is just his wobbly forum. In The Zenith Angle (Ballantine), his latest high-tech novel, a sentence like “As a telecom expert, Van knew definitely that his son’s vocalizations had contained the phonemes ‘dada’” is what passes for character development. But his rendering of the world and human activity as basically mechanical, and therefore understandable, can make the wade through shallow characterization and murky plot interesting, however wrong his basic notion....

When I was in theater classes at Columbia College Chicago back in the Pleistocene era (i.e., the late 1980s), certain reverse-snob assumptions came out from time to time about the Theatre School at DePaul (which had changed its moniker a few years earlier from the Goodman School of Drama). DePaul was, to us, the high-toned […] The last time the Sklar Brothers performed stand-up on New Year’s Eve was more than a decade ago in Sacramento, according to Randy Sklar....

On a cold morning a few weeks ago I looked out the window of my Humboldt Park apartment and saw the aftermath of a violent attack. The perpetrator was still tearing apart the victim right out in the open. I went outside, stealthily made my way to a nearby porch, and trained my binoculars on a branch above me, where a young Cooper’s hawk was eviscerating a bird that was too far gone to identify, its down and feathers sinking on a light breeze to the snow below....

Logan Square politics used to be a lot more entertaining, back in the days of alderman Richard Mell. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Mell ran the show. He did things his way, and only his way. If you didn’t like his way, well, tough. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He built up his organization, using clout and connections to get his workers hired by the city, county, and state....

Eyewitness accounts often differ because observers reconstruct their fragmented memories of an event into a coherent but not necessarily accurate whole. So it’s plausible that the teenage characters in this MadJoy Theatrics production should all have different recollections of the day when a runaway car crashed into a front stoop crowded with girls, killing one and injuring another. Even the “objective” reports–from the girl who meticulously records everything in her journal, the girl watching from across the street–are nebulous and often contradictory....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tour the Nielsen-Massey Vanilla factory in Waukegan with the Culinary Historians of Chicago, Saturday at 10 AM. $2, reservations required; call 847-432-8255. To kick off its weeklong Pumpkin Festival, featuring specials like pumpkin risotto and arctic char with a pumpkin seed crust, Mon Ami Gabi is sponsoring a tour of the Great Pumpkin Patch Saturday at noon. After lunch at local Amish restaurant Vera’s Family Meals (included in the price), attendees can pick cucurbits (i....

Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, the core of the Melvins for more than 20 years now, run their band like a Mongol horde–sweep down on your enemies from both flanks at once, change tactics constantly, and know when to kill everything in your path and when to settle down and impregnate a few locals. (It’s amazing how many bands have a little Melvins DNA in them somewhere–figuratively speaking, of course.) In the past couple years they’ve collaborated with Jello Biafra and dark-industrial pioneer Lustmord, and last spring they released A Live History of Gluttony and Lust (Ipecac), a blistering revision of their 1993 Atlantic album Houdini with Trevor Dunn on bass....

When you’re one of the world’s leading authorities on religious magic and mysticism, you get some odd requests. After the release of The Exorcist in 1973, reporters looking for a local expert deluged Rabbi Byron Sherwin with calls for interviews. Being a teacher as well as a scholar, he granted them. Soon after his name began appearing in the papers, Sherwin got a phone call from a distraught man who was convinced his ex-girlfriend had put a curse on him....

According to a recent biography, Mildred Walker hated being called a “regional novelist.” It’s easy to see why. For any American writer, “regional” is a kiss of death. You’d have an easier time earning the respect of the literary establishment writing Star Trek novels. But there’s really no other word that will do. Walker published 13 novels between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, and though her locales changed, they’re all in the America that’s off the mainstream map....

It seems almost like conventional wisdom these days to suggest that, with Americans slacking or underperforming or just plain fucking things up in so many different ways, Canadians should really come down and take over. But if they wind up controlling our indie rock, I worry they’ll set an impossibly high standard, establishing a Canadian Quality Control Board only a band like They Shoot Horses Don’t They could win approval from....

This is a release party for the long-anticipated Samsara, the first release from this local experimental metal band since 2002’s well-received Way of the Dead. The guys aren’t especially slow workers, and they weren’t trying to be coy–by the time they finished touring behind Way of the Dead and started writing new material, it was already early 2004. Plus they financed the album themselves and then shopped it around, finally signing to LA’s Prosthetic Records in August....

In the 80s America awoke to the menace of sexual abuse of children, and the watchword was “Believe the children.” One of the first journalists to question that watchword, freelance reporter Debbie Nathan, studied notorious prosecutions such as the McMartin case in Manhattan Beach, California, and concluded that America hadn’t just opened its eyes but lost its bearings. Some 25 years earlier, when he was four years old, he’d been one of the children allegedly abused at the McMartin preschool....

Cindy Brandle says she often sits up at night holding her two-year-old child and thinking. Or, more accurately, worrying–about the state of the world and her daughter’s future in it. Brandle’s hour-long In the Eye of Stillness presents an abstracted view of what she sees as the chaos of contemporary existence. Divided into eight sections, it isn’t nearly as chaotic as you might expect, often coming across as a sort of ritual: candles are lit and extinguished, and the seven dancers are dressed in flowing black like priestesses....

Deception in the Name of Truth “Though it wasn’t true, Woodward told Deep Throat that he and Bernstein had a story for the following week saying that Haldeman was the fifth person in control of disbursements from the secret fund. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bok conceded that “the situation was one of mounting crisis for the nation and of potential danger for investigating journalists who came too close to revealing the facts about Watergate....

On Thursday evenings commuters bustling to their trains in downtown Chicago are hailed by two sets of hawkers handing out free weekly newspapers. One paper’s the Reader; the other is the mysterious Epoch Times. Few of the Chinese-American vendors who cry “Free, free” speak any more English than that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s a quote from “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” a series of reports the Epoch Times published last fall that won it a national award from the Asian American Journalists Association....