Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One way in which I feel estranged from portions of the mainstream movie audience is my total aversion to scenes involving torture, which makes me avoid films involving them as much as possible. (I wound up seeing Pan’s Labyrinth, currently picking up lots of deserved annual awards, which opens shortly before the end of the year, anyway, but this is one of the rare cases where I consider the depiction of torture artistically defensible on some level....

The four earnest one-acts in this heavy-handed Stockyards Theatre Project production all deal with women’s body images. Two zaftig friends in Katie Carey Govier’s The Real Life Adventures of Lizzy and Rilla, directed by Sara Keely McGuire, try to make each other feel better while eating fast food and shopping for clothes. Marki Shalloe’s Barbie’s Dream House, directed by Jocelyn Fultz, trots out well-worn arguments about how Barbie looks nothing like actual women....

The name of Owen Ashworth’s one-man band, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, lets you know you’re in for some melancholy bedroom pop played on bargain synths. But what it doesn’t convey is just how well Ashworth’s songs succeed at making depression sound alluring. His lyrics owe a huge debt to the Smiths, and he knows it–on his most recent album, Twinkle Echo, he turned their kicky “Sheila Take a Bow” into the despondent (if still satirical) “Toby Take a Bow....

Tapped by the New Yorker a few years ago as one of the 20 best American writers under 40, Korean-born Chang-rae Lee has made his name with novels about cultural identity: both Native Speaker, his 1995 debut, and A Gesture Life, his 1999 follow-up, dealt with themes of assimilation and alienation. But in his most recent novel, last year’s Aloft (Riverhead Books), he proves he’s not bound by these themes, venturing into the realm of family drama....

It’s not hard to find a horn man or percussionist who plays piano passably: many learned it first, and many more use it as an aid when writing music (a degree of expertise known as “composer’s piano”). But rarely do you encounter one with such command of the instrument that he could make it his primary focus and still achieve success. Charles Gayle, the avant-garde tenor saxist known for his guttural shrieks and jagged rhythms (as well as for making his living, and often his home, on the streets of New York for nearly 20 years), began learning piano at age seven but didn’t release his first album of solo piano music till more than 50 years later, in 2001....

WHEN I CAME TO to Chicago 11 years ago, a vegetarian from Pittsburgh, I was pale, underweight, and awestruck by how much there was to eat here. I’d had a few revelatory eating experiences back home—Thai, Indian—but I had no idea how poorly those meals would compare to so many in my future. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between giant metal Puerto Rican flag arches in Humboldt Park, Division Street becomes the Paseo Boricua, the epicenter of the venerable Puerto Rican community....

The 16th annual Chicago Humanities Festival, this year themed “Home and Away,” continues through 11/13, offering dozens of lectures, readings, and discussions by an international coterie of writers, artists, and scholars as well as theatrical and musical performances. All programs are $5 in advance, $6 (cash only) at the door, unless otherwise noted. (Tickets for some sold-out programs may become available; check at the venue no later than 30 minutes before the program....

I’m awfully cynical about shaggy indie rockers these days, but Dr. Dog’s new album, Easy Beat (National Parking), is one of the best records I’ve heard this year. What the M’s are to the Kinks, this Philadelphia quintet is to the Beatles: they create immaculate pop packed tight with pretty vocal harmonies, subtly shifting arrangements, and loads of catchy melodies. They could be a long-lost Elephant 6 act, except they never sound smitten with their own cleverness; recorded in their home studio, the album has a nicely ragged feel, but the songs lack the lazy, tossed-off quality that makes so much indie pop sound ho-hum....

At 66, trumpeter Enrico Rava now stands with the likes of pianist Giorgio Gaslini and reedist Gianluigi Trovesi as a grand old man of Italian jazz. He’s had an affinity for musical alchemy since the early 60s, when he began his career recording with Gato Barbieri and Steve Lacy; later he performed on Carla Bley’s monumental avant-garde composition Escalator Over the Hill and recorded a series of ECM albums on which his pianoless quartet geed against the label’s famously well-mannered musical direction....

Just in time, the Bears rediscovered the draw play. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bears used to run it exquisitely with Walter Payton. A ferocious blocker, Payton could stay put without automatically signaling a ruse. And when he took off with the ball, the pass rush pushed aside and the defensive secondary dropping deep against the pass, he usually had ample room to maneuver....

As a full-time CD and DVD pirate for the last five years I read your article with deep interest [“The Bootleggers” by Tasneem Paghdiwala, August 17]. I have found that my experience differs greatly from the unorganized and uneducated bootleggers you featured. I started pirating music in college and became addicted to the fast money and control it gave me over my work hours each semester. While my friends lost sleep working at Starbucks and retailers part-time and full-time, I was earning a full-time income working a few hours a day for myself pirating goods....

Ticksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap Cohn, the author of 1968’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (often cited as the first book of rock criticism), has been obsessed with New Orleans since childhood: he writes vividly and enchantingly about the city and its music, from his early fascination with Jelly Roll Morton to his first visit there in 1972, while on the road with the Who. Though he later moved to New York, he continued to rent a house in New Orleans for several months each year, describing the city as “the lover I could never be free of....

Lookingglass Alice Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Looking back to look forward is a common impulse. Lookingglass Theatre’s first show, produced in 1988, was Through the Looking Glass–and now it’s performing David Catlin’s acrobatic new adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, written by Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, for his young friend Alice Liddell. Catlin’s version is as chaotic as its sources–or perhaps the logic of his piece is hidden, a sort of deep structure....

Rogelio Tijerina lives half the year in Chicago and the other half with his wife and five children on a 180-acre cattle ranch in Bayview, Texas, about ten miles west of South Padre Island. He raises Simbrahs, a cross between docile, easy-calving Simmentals and sturdy, heat-resistant Brahmans, and at any given time he has a herd of around 40 freely roaming about. The livestock is sold for meat, but that’s not what keeps the operation going....

Friday 1/9 – Thursday 1/15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 10 SATURDAY The Field Museum’s ongoing Year of Biodiversity and Conservation program is currently featuring exhibits on the New World tropics, which run from Mexico down to the southern tip of Argentina and are home to nearly a quarter of all the plant and animal species on earth–with dozens of new ones being discovered every year....

Most writers cite other authors when they talk about their influences. Bayo Ojikutu cites directors. “When I was younger it was mainstream stuff–Spielberg and George Lucas, John Hughes even,” he says. “Scorsese was huge for me as I embraced writing with some seriousness. Mean Streets and After Hours–there is this visual poetry at work in that film, its rhyming images, its jarring exposition.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This month Three Rivers Press published Ojikutu’s second novel, Free Burning, which has the kind of rich, cinematic realism you’d expect from somebody whose imagination was sparked by movies....

Built in 1887 on the near south side in what was then Chicago’s most desirable neighborhood, the forbidding Glessner residence was by all accounts a happy home. Mr. and Mrs. Glessner were devoted to each other, according to the docent who led a recent tour of the house, now a museum. Though wealthy, Mr. Glessner went to the office every day, and despite her role as a society wife, Mrs. Glessner was an industrious woman who busied herself with beekeeping, embroidery, and silversmithing....

On a rare day when the Bears, Cubs, and White Sox all played at home, the best team of the bunch drew the smallest crowd. The Bears are, well, the Bears, and the Cubs are never so lovable as when they’re losing. But to commit oneself to the Sox and their home finale last Sunday was to defiantly believe in them–in spite of what sense and both ancient and recent history suggested....

A suburban grandmother of five, Elyse Roberts is into the arts, horses, and the family she’s created with Ray Roberts, former CFO of an electronics manufacturer. She helps operate the Roberts Family Foundation, which supports organizations like the Lyric Opera, the Barrington Area Arts Council, and the Pioneer Center, which provides developmentally disabled people with housing, jobs, and life skills. “I spent my whole life as the wife of a manufacturer, working in social charities, entertaining, and riding horses,” says Roberts, who’s 64....

Tim Clue and Spike Manton’s bittersweet comedy follows a man traveling country highways looking for a meaningful place to scatter his father’s ashes. Naturally the road is littered with mea culpas and memories: agonizing family trips to places of dubious historical import provide fuel for the extended, well-worn road-trip jokes (“Don’t make me pull over!”). Multilayered performances just barely keep the gags from feeling tired. And beyond the somewhat cliched premise is the son’s genuine sense of mourning, for his father, for his childhood, and for our nation’s loss of its heartland to chain stores and parking lots....