Chicago Diner Handlebar Finalist: Original Soul Vegetarian

A stranger walks up to you. They know your name, where you’ve been, where you’re headed, what you’ll do there, and how your life will turn out decades in the future. If you’re human, you back away slowly and get the bejesus out of there. If you’re a character in an inadequately vetted play by habitually credulity-challenged Steven Dietz, you ask the stranger for directions, or advice, or sympathy. You even reveal intimate details about your deepest insecurities within a few minutes of meeting....

Boots Riley had been waiting nearly three decades to make a movie. The Chicago-native turned Bay Area resident studied film as an undergrad at San Francisco State but didn’t immediately become the next Spike Lee. He earned a record deal in the early 90s and focused instead on spreading his leftist messages through the medium of hip-hop. Riley released half a dozen raucous party rap/funk-rock albums with the group the Coup starting with 1993’s Kill My Landlord while managing to balance his art with political activism and community organizing—most famously as the public face of the Occupy movement in Oakland....

I’ve liked rapper Aesop Rock, aka Ian Bavitz, for a long time, but for the most part I got lost in the sound and feeling of his performances and didn’t pay a ton of attention to what he was talking about. He helped create the acrid flavor of early-2000s underground hip-hop, seemingly searching for the darkest, most claustrophobic corners he could find. But his distinctive flow also has a playful energy that can make unwieldy words pliable and infuse intimidating blocks of text with a lively, almost bouncy momentum....

I ‘d been hearing about the Third Coast International Audio Festival for as long as I’d been a journalist in Chicago. Reporters’ circles in this city have been shrinking, so if you’re from the newspaper world you’re bound to cross paths with radio people. They rhapsodize about Third Coast as a magical place for audio producers, or as a kind of forum for inspiration and networking, one that transcends your average professional conference....

Anything and Always . . . To say that Nic Wehrwein’s Anything and Always is a trite sob story fit for the slush pile at Lifetime would be to pile on one more cliche to an interminable 140 minutes full of them. A young victim of breast cancer, Courtney (Michelle Alejandra Limon) frolics in the afterlife as she did in life, crashing onto the stage with such vigor that the vibrations can be felt in the last rows....

On Sunday, millions of Bulls fans across the world gathered around their TVs to watch the first installment of The Last Dance—Jason Hehir’s much-heralded ten-part documentary miniseries about Michael Jordan and my beloved Bulls. I don’t have cable. I’ve never had cable—even in the glory years. I was a broke-ass Reader writer—who could afford it? Hey, Hehir—make sure you mention Norm Van Lier! You cannot produce a documentary about the Bulls without mentioning my all-time favorite Bull!...

Music Box Theatre Logan Theatre Finalists: Davis Theater, New 400 Theater, Gene Siskel Film Center

Wolfbait & B-girls 3131 W. Logan 312-698-8685 wolfbaitchicago.com Runners-Up (tie): Humboldt House Neighborly

Evanston Oak Park Finalist: Berwyn

Perman Wine Selections 802 W. Washington 312-666-4417 permanwine.com Runner-Up: Red and White Wines

Editor’s note: The Reader is teaming up with Blvck Vrchives founder Renata Cherlise to create multimedia narratives of black life in Chicago. Cherlise’s site offers “a curated visual journey through history.” As this year marks the 50th anniversary of Gautreaux vs. Chicago Housing Authority, we take a look back at Chicago’s public housing and the living conditions within a segregated city.

Alex Wroblewski Acme Refining’s Bridgeport headquarters A Pilsen community group has filed a lawsuit alleging that a company looking to build a $30 million metal shredder across from a Pilsen high school improperly obtained its city permit. Swedlow has long denied a connection between the two companies. However Brett Baron, a former principal in Acme and son of its president, is now the president of Pure Metal Recycling. A spokesman for Pure Metal Recycling pointed out that Pilsen Alliance’s lawsuit was jointly filed by the community organization and SIMS Metal Management, a company that operates an existing metal shredder in Pilsen....

Neo-Futurists founder Greg Allen made the surprising announcement today that he’s ending the 28-year Chicago run of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind on December 31. He’s doing so in order to create a new, diverse Chicago theater company that will be entirely dedicated to social activism. Too Much Light continues to be produced by Neo-Futurist ensembles in New York and San Francisco and by other companies around the world....

As sacrifices go, staying home when possible and wearing masks in public seem like fairly small requests. But as we’ve seen, when hyperindividualism trumps community, the results can be deadly. ALAS is a fragment of a larger Vişniec piece, Cabaret of Words, translated by Daniela Șilindean and directed by Michael Mejia, featuring a cast of 16, from Trap Door local regulars to artists from their sister company, Trap Door International in Barcelona....

V ery few people these days set out to be milliners, and, although she owns a store where she makes and sells hats, Susan Abelson is no exception. As a young woman in the 1970s, she was a merely a connoisseur and collector. She preferred 1940s styles, with veils. “I was young,” she says. “I could pull it off.” But then her entire collection was stolen from the storage space of the Minneapolis loft where she was living at the time....

Trailblazing avant-garde musician, sound artist, and composer Pamela Z, who gives a rare Chicago performance at Constellation on Saturday, began experimenting with vocal processing in the early 80s, but the first album devoted entirely to her work didn’t arrive till 2004. On “Bone Music,” the opening track of A Delay Is Better (Starkland), her voice rises in swells over thudding percussion, then plummets into speech—only it’s not quite speech. Her words, if they’re words at all, are impossible to make out....

Longman & Eagle The Publishing House Bed and Breakfast Finalists: Ray’s Bucktown Bed and Breakfast, House 5863, The Polo Inn

PAWS pawschicago.org Runner-Up: Greater Chicago Food Depository