XSport Fitness Health Club Runner-Up: FFC

The Chicago Latino Film Festival is one of the best festivals around, not just for its impressively extensive programming, but for the sense of discovery it affords. Each year I come away treasuring new films and new directors that I hadn’t previously known. This can happen at most festivals, but CLFF is one that consistently expands my horizons with movies that, were it not for the organization’s mission, I might not otherwise hear about....

When COVID-19 suspended the concert industry, it didn’t just mean we’d miss out on the bands we were already looking forward to seeing—we’d also miss out on the bands we didn’t yet know we wanted to see. As ubiquitous as streaming and social media are, they can’t beat live shows as paths to music discovery. My musical taste would map as a scatter plot, not a straight line, and I enjoy the diversity of sounds—the scathing “Minotaur” by Nequient sits next to the cloudlike, ambient “Tempest” by Our Earth Is a Tomb....

Center on Halsted Runner-Up: Howard Brown Health Center

THEATER PICKS (KERRY REID) Czech writer Karel Čapek is probably best known for his dystopian drama about robots taking over the world, 1920’s R.U.R. Trap Door Theatre mounts a rare production of this 1937 play, which was written as Germany’s threats against Čapek’s homeland were increasing. As a nation faces looming warfare, a strange disease begins killing people over the age of 45. Nicole Wiesner directs. Trap Door Theatre, 12/5-1/11, trapdoortheatre....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. For at least three decades, our national government has primarily served the interests of the one percent—the major donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. To carry on in such an undemocratic fashion in a country that still requires leaders to stand for election, our leaders need to lie with impunity, especially about matters of war....

Nasee Yehuda is the proprietor of Madison Street Barbers (2429 W. Madison) on the near west side. During last month’s Major League Barber Original Midwest SuperBarber & Stylist Tradeshow at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, the 39-year-old took first place in the Fastest and Cleanest Fade event. He spoke about how he got immersed in the world of competitive barbering. So I went to college, and I flunked out, because I barely went to class, because I was cutting hair....

MICHELLE KLOSINSKI; COURTESY GROUPON Cyclist Bobby Cann was killed on May 29, 2013. Two years ago last Friday, cyclist Bobby Cann was killed in a crash at the intersection of Clybourn and Larabee. On the other hand, with a lengthy pretrial comes the chance of witnesses backing out or disappearing, legal experts note. In the meantime, Cann’s family, all of whom live out of state, continue to make the trek to pretrial hearings at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California....

Contrary to popular belief—at least insofar as the populace has any beliefs at all on the subject—the word “fringe” doesn’t necessarily mean “experimental” when applied to the performing arts. The usage was coined in 1947 to refer to eight productions that sprang up unbidden at the fringes of Scotland’s highbrow, highly selective Edinburgh International Festival. A better synonym might be “uninvited.” Cole’s To Relax and Laugh at least has a heartbeat—and an amusing situation too, centered on an uptight woman named Sloan who seeks help from a therapist lacking not only credentials but sanity....

Superdawg 6363 N. Milwaukee 773-763-0660 superdawg.com Runner-Up: Fatso’s Last Stand

Black Dog Chicago various locationsblackdogchicago.com Runner-Up: Lickety Split

For years Canadian composer Sarah Davachi has created stunning works of meditative sound art that deal with psychoacoustics, drone, and site-specific acoustic properties, often through hypnotic long-form pieces. She developed much of this material alone, using either strictly synthetic sources or subtle manipulations of long tones played on various keyboard instruments. In recent years, though, Davachi—who’s currently a doctoral student in musicology at UCLA—has increasingly collaborated with other instrumentalists. On last year’s stunning All My Circles Run (Students of Decay) she bathed live sounds produced on strings, piano, or voice in immersive, transformative electronics, but her new album, Let Night Come on Bells End the Day (Recital), suggests she hasn’t left her older methodologies in the past....

To appreciate the significance of Mayor Rahm’s retreat on Lincoln Yards and the 78 projects, let me take you back in time to a previous TIF debate. When Hugh Devlin, a Rogers Park activist, testified against the TIF, former alderman Burt Natarus cut him off, bellowing—oh, what does it matter? Back then Burt was always bellowing about something. Bowing to Lightfoot’s wishes, Mayor Rahm asked the council to postpone the vote on the $2....

Like doesn’t necessarily breed like—just ask all the friends for whom I’ve tried (and failed) to play cupid. But similarity is bliss for underground labels Deathbomb Arc and Hausu Mountain, which collaborated to release the compilation Arc Mountain on May 7. Based respectively in Los Angeles and Chicago, these eclectic, irreverent labels might be separated by geography, but they’re soul mates aesthetically. Arc Mountain only proves it: three years in the making, it pairs an artist from the DBA roster with another from HausMo on each track, and in doing so manages to sound fizzily spontaneous....

Sure, Valentine’s Day often means drowning in candy hearts and teddy bears, but not all celebrations of love need to be so saccharine. This year the city has some more savory romantic offerings like a boozy brunch, lady arm wrestlers, and embarrassing entries from teenage diaries. Heart and Soul Valentine’s Day Brunch Kick off Valentine’s Day with a boozy brunch date at Logan Square’s Parts and Labor. The bar will be offering a full brunch menu and $5 “bleeding heart” pom-mosas, and there’s a live DJ set from the Windy City Soul Club....

Julia Momose (Kumiko) Javier Rios (Funkenhausen) Finalist: Slava Borisov (The Langham)

Trophies You Deserve from I Am Home iamhome.us Though I feel I’ve accomplished a lot in my life, when I gaze upon my shelves I realize I don’t have much to show for it—though, yes, there’s my college diploma and that photograph of me with 1998 Olympic Gold medalist Tara Lipinski. Look, not everyone can be a “champion athlete” or an “award-winning filmmaker” or a “participant” amassing trophies and medals and other acknowledgments of success....

As the wind chill dipped below zero and the snow piled on last week, small teams of youth hit the streets of the 37th Ward. They fanned out across unplowed residential blocks of Austin, West Garfield Park, and West Humboldt Park to tell locals not to reelect incumbent alderman Emma Mitts. The teens, some of whom have been involved with the #NoCopAcademy campaign to prevent a $95 million police and fire training facility from being built in the ward, have organized under the hashtag #AnybodyButMitts....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, November 22, 2016. Newly ordained Catholic cardinal Blase Cupich tackles gun violence, brings Pope Francis’s vision to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Governor Bruce Rauner, Senator Dick Durbin and Illinois supreme court justice Anne Burke were all at the Vatican in Rome over the weekend to watch Pope Francis officially make Blase Cupich a cardinal of the Catholic Church. The Atlantic published an interesting feature on Cupich’s important role in Chicago and his efforts to curb gun violence....