Shallots Keeps It Kosher in Skokie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Shallots’ five-year lease expired in January, the rent on its Clark Street space in Lincoln Park doubled. So owners and chefs Laura Frankel and Dennis Wasko packed up their kosher kitchen and moved it to Skokie, where the new SHALLOTS BISTRO opened in June. Skokie seems a natural home for the restaurant, which is usually filled with Hasidim....

Paul Lurie Though Paul Lurie has been visiting Door County since the 70s and has always found the countryside beautiful, it was only when he started photographing it that he began to understand the reason. “It has a lot to do with the perspectives the old buildings, pieces of sculpture really, lent to the landscape,” he says. Several images of silos in Lurie’s show at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology pay homage to Richard Serra’s huge spiral sculptures, which Serra designed for viewers to walk through....

Drink Me, or the Strange Case of Alice Times Three The problem is that Gail’s comedy, now receiving its local premiere from Seanachai Theatre Company under Kevin Theis’s direction, wavers between loving satirical homage to the various genres it apes, genuine murder mystery with sci-fi underpinnings, and quasi-feminist social commentary. That Drink Me works as well as it does is more a testament to Theis and his cunning cast than to Gail’s script....

An art project begun in outrage in 1972 led Buzz Spector to discover what he really wanted to do. In his last undergraduate semester at Southern Illinois University, he came across an Artforum article on Robert Ryman’s all-white paintings. “The claim was being made that these white paintings were art,” Spector says. “I remember thinking, This is a joke. The article was accompanied by hilarious reproductions in black-and-white half tones, in which you can’t even get white....

Every January since 2002, local and out-of-town comedy groups have gathered in Chicago–birthplace of the pioneering Compass and Second City companies, and mecca to the world of sketch and improv–to showcase their work at the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival. The first year’s confab featured some 30 ensembles; this year SketchFest, presented by Lukaba Productions, presents almost 100 groups from Toronto, New York, LA, Seattle, Cleveland, Portland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Des Moines, and elsewhere....

In my mind two things stand out about the first Country Teasers show I saw: the band doing poppers onstage, cackling wildly and in clear sight of the crowd, and guitarist Alastair Mackinven obliging a drunk young woman who bitched that the set hadn’t offended her enough by calling her a dirty cunt. That was in 1999, shortly after the release of the Teasers’ third full-length, Destroy All Human Life. Front man Ben Wallers has home-recorded enough new material for ten albums since then, releasing it on 90-minute cassettes under the name the Rebel, but until this year the Country Teasers proper had managed only a live album, two odds-and-sods collections, and a record that consisted largely of songs from the Rebel tapes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the early meetings of the Dill Pickle Food Co-op were anything like the meetings I endured as a bright-eyed co-op enthusiast in college, I’m not surprised it’s taken a while for this ambitious project to get off the ground. (I think I’m still scarred from one particularly heated bacon v. soysage debate.) The co-op, intended to provide the northwest side with a reliable year-round supply of green groceries, has been in the works for about two years now, since Kathleen Duffy first started talking the idea up with some of her friends....

If you told me back in 1998 that the Handsome Family was going to put out a record twice as good as In the Trees, I would’ve thought you were a bigger hyperbolist than me. But their new album, Last Days of Wonder (Carrot Top), really is that great: they’ve shrugged off the clunkiness and accidental camp that once made them an acquired taste, honing their sparse and polished orchestration into a precise delivery system for Rennie Sparks’s devastatingly beautiful lyrics....

These Australian legends took their spot in the Great Brief Spurt hall of fame when early-80s underground-rock geeks pronounced their 1978 debut LP, Radios Appear, a lost punk classic. (Sire dropped the band just months after the release, and they promptly broke up.) The geeks were right: even among the other great cuts on the 2001 Sub Pop collection The Essential Radio Birdman (1974-1978), the Radios Appear tracks jump out. (A posthumous follow-up, Living Eyes, is clearly a lesser album but still sorely underrated....

KEITH ROWE THE ROOM (ERSTWHILE RECORDS) Rowe and Connors operate in different spheres and have never collaborated–the American-born Connors is basically a blues guitarist playing to an indie-rock underground whose interest in him has waxed and waned, and Rowe, as a founding member of AMM, is a key progenitor of English free improvisation. But their paths have crossed occasionally, most recently when they shared a bill at the Rothko Chapel on June 1....

It’s spring, and birds, birders, and naked men are once again appearing amid the shrubbery at Montrose Point. The Magic Hedge sanctuary at the east end, a 15-acre expanse of fields, hedgerows, scattered trees, and thickets that was once home to a U.S. military installation, provides a haven for migrating birds–and for men looking to hook up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saturday morning, March 19....

By Jeffrey Felshman On the morning of his trial McDowell showed up bruised and battered, saying he’d been beaten by five guards at Cook County Jail. McDowell’s court-appointed lawyer, Thomas O’Hara, says his client assured him that his physical condition in no way influenced his decision to plead guilty. But the following day McDowell wrote a petition to withdraw his plea that hinged on the beating. He then filed a complaint with the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC), which stated that O’Hara had only met with him a few times, done little to investigate the case, and convinced him that the evidence was overwhelming when it wasn’t....

“I thought it was a below-mediocre performance,” snarled Bulls coach Scott Skiles, “and frankly I’m embarrassed by it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the UC, the Bulls came from nine points down in the fourth quarter to nip the Knicks. Ballyhooed rookie Ben Gordon was key, as he had been throughout the Bulls’ resurgence. Though he’d initially seemed tentative, literally out of his league, he was soon pouring in points with his erect, proud, stiff-necked style of play....

The World The title of Jia Zhang-ke’s 2004 masterpiece, The World–a film that’s hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian–is an ironic pun and a metaphor. It’s also the name of the real theme park outside Beijing where most of the action is set and practically all its characters work. “See the world without ever leaving Beijing” is one slogan for the 115-acre park, where a monorail circles scaled-down replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, London Bridge, Saint Mark’s Square, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Pyramids, and even a Lower Manhattan complete with the Twin Towers....

Moliare ss Where Landmark’s Century Centre, Century 12 and CineArts 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film opens in 1658, when Moli�re (Romain Duris) returns to Paris from the provinces. When the king’s brother requests a performance, he immediately plans to impress his noble audience with an epic tragedy. “They deserve more than vulgar farces,” he tells his fellow actors. “Our company deserves more than vulgar farces....

Lucky is a small, brown brindled pit bull who’s spent the last two years at Orphans of the Storm, an animal shelter in Deerfield. Depending who’s peering into his cage, either he’s got the makings of a steadfast companion who wants to cover someone’s face with kisses or he’s a vicious liability, hardwired to “snap” at some future moment and maul whoever’s around when he does. Goodman says he’s just scared....

Kaveri Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a high-end boutique only to be disappointed by the meager offerings–as if the owners forgot that shoppers’ primary purpose is to find something to wear, not to attend a gallery opening. Kaveri Satpathy knows that women like to browse, so she’s filled her spacious Lincoln Park shop with enough clothing to keep you busy for more than five minutes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hilly Kristal, the longtime owner of New York’s CBGB’s, died yesterday at the age of 75, following a battle with lung cancer. Although he planned to book bluegrass music when he opened the place in 1973, rock soon took over; few clubs have ever achieved a reputation comparable to the ramshackle Bowery dive, which closed after a long landlord dispute last year....

For four decades Gunvor Nelson, a Swede who lived in the U.S. until 1993, has made work that explores both personal and larger issues. One major theme is the way our consciousness connects time and space, and in the affecting 1987 Light Years (one of three works screening at Chicago Filmmakers) landscapes seen from a moving vehicle evoke the artist’s separation from her native land. In the 1984 Red Shift (Film Studies Center) fragments of Calamity Jane’s letters combine with fragmentary figures to suggest the unknowability of others’ lives....

At a Chicago concert a few years back, Spanish sound artist FRANCISCO LOPEZ hung black curtains around his gear, turned off all the room lights, and distributed blindfolds to the audience–he treats visual stimulation of any kind as a distraction from the immersive experience of sound. His recordings, which are rarely named and usually minimally packaged–often without titles, credits, or album art of any kind–leap unpredictably from near silence to tympanum-scouring static....