Charles Rex Arbogast / AP Photos Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis—shown here in 2012—has suspended her mayoral campaign to address health problems. A certain political columnist is hoping she can still give Mayor Emanuel fits. A few days back, I had a conversation with a woman named Pat who was walking her north-side neighborhood, collecting signatures for Karen Lewis’s mayoral campaign. Well, let me play devil’s advocate with you, Chicago—I think Karen Lewis should keep that enthusiasm alive by filing her petitions and getting her name on the ballot for the February 24 mayoral election!...

Last month, Block Club Chicago broke the news that Texas cooler company Yeti would open its second brick-and-mortar store in the 4,796-square-foot Wicker Park space occupied till February 2017 by long-running music venue the Double Door. Earlier this month, the odds of the venue reopening in the neighborhood apparently declined to zero when a sign reading “Future home of the brand new Double Door” appeared at a Smashing Pumpkins pop-up at the Wilson Avenue Theater in Uptown....

If you haven’t yet seen Crimson Peak, I strongly recommend checking it out in IMAX while it’s still playing in that format. Guillermo del Toro’s gothic horror film makes inspired use of the large screen, employing it to enhance the towering mise-en-scene and chilling atmosphere. Whereas many other films presented in IMAX use the format to present things like mountains and skyscrapers—which would appear gigantic regardless—the spectacle of Crimson Peak lies in the transformation of gothic architecture into something more imposing and spectacular....

Julia Thiel Chocolate-stout macaroons I first tried Danny Macaroons in 2011 at Chicago’s second annual Food Film Festival. The idea behind the festival, for those who aren’t familiar, is that the audience members get to taste what they’re seeing on the screen (offerings at this year’s opening-night event included oysters, ramen burgers, and compost cookies). During a screening of the brief film Danny Macaroons: There’s No Such Thing as Boring Coconut Macaroons Anymore, plates of caramel-drizzled macaroons—flown in from New York City by Danny Macaroons himself (aka Dan Cohen)—were passed down the aisles....

Sun-Times Media Roy Ayers, 2004 There are a ton of great shows this week—at least a dozen could have made it onto our Soundboard calendar if we had the space. One that didn’t, but is worth checking out, is Roy Ayers, the great jazz composer and vibraphonist. Ayers has produced a number of solid albums, including his work on the Coffy soundtrack; Music of Many Colors, his 1980 collaboration with Fela Kuti; the 1973 album Red, Black, and Green; and Everybody Loves the Sunshine, his 1976 album released under the Roy Ayers Ubiquity moniker....

For much of his time in Chicago, guitarist Nathaniel Braddock immersed himself so thoroughly in African music—leading the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International and Trio Mokili as well as teaching various African guitar styles at the Old Town School—that it was easy to forget that he’d also led the indie-rock band Ancient Greeks, played in the experimental guitar combo Butchershop Quartet, and curated an exhibition devoted to the graphic scores that John Cage collected in the book Notations....

Greenstar’s first two beers, an India pale ale and an American pale ale. I’m 80 percent sure that’s the IPA on the left. In 2011 the Green Restaurant Association named Uncommon Ground’s two locations the first and second greenest restaurants in the country—and in this case “green” means solar panels and wind power, not homemade composting toilets and fruit flies everywhere. Last month Uncommon Ground raised the bar by launching Greenstar Brewing, certified by Wisconsin-based nonprofit MOSA (the Midwest Organic Services Association) as the first organic brewery in Illinois....

The main flaw in Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists is not that it’s yet one more play about a playwright agonizing over her unwritten play but that its running gag is about how surely no one would ever want to watch a musical about the French Revolution. (Les Misérables was about the Paris Uprising of 1832.) But of course history does not really matter in a play that brings together four women—playwright Olympe de Gouge (Kat McDonnell), Caribbean antislavery revolutionary Marianne Angelle (Kamille Dawkins), assassin Charlotte Corday (Izis Mollinedo), and (who else?...

This month, the Silent Film Society of Chicago (SFSC) is collaborating with three Chicago-area venues to screen the silent films The Kid (1921), The Artist (2011), and 7th Heaven (1927) with live musical accompaniment. Since its inception in 1998, SFSC has been preserving and presenting silent films across the Chicago area. “Our mission was to bring silent films to the forefront, because they’d gotten a bit musty,” Wolkowicz notes. “But we got started by doing most of our screenings at the old Gateway Theatre on Lawrence Avenue—that’s a 2,000-seat theater—and we would do it with all the bravado of going to a silent film in the 1920s, with the grand pipe organ and opening the curtain....

McCartney II As at least one Reader writer insinuated recently, J.R. Nelson‘s Soundboard capsule for Paul McCartney’s appearance tomorrow night at the United Center is a welcome and amusing slam of the former Beatle and longtime salamander. While I agree with some of J.R.’s assessment of McCartney’s more, er, remunerative practices, I cannot agree with his take on Macca’s music. In particular, I will vigorously defend 1980’s McCartney II, a quirky and unexpected patchwork of bedroom-pop experiments, muppet disco, and proto-synth-pop....

Kaplan (right) at the Large Hadron Collider The new documentary Particle Fever, which opens today at the Music Box, recounts the opening of the Large Hadron Collider in 2008 and the events leading up to the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson (a subatomic particle first theorized in the mid-60s). For a movie so concerned with the scientific process, it’s surprisingly lively and good-humored—as I note in my capsule review, it often feels like a sports movie, steadily building excitement as the physicists come closer to realizing their goal....

Nico Soto/Guazu Media Speranza (center) on the set of Rambleras As I wrote last Thursday, I’m an admirer of recent Uruguayan cinema in general and Daniela Speranza’s Rambleras in particular. A wise, generous, and visually stunning comedy about overcoming life’s disappointments, Rambleras strikes me, after three viewings, as a nearly perfect film. Every detail of characterization or decor reflects careful consideration, and the graceful storytelling allows one to savor each one....

Around 11 PM on Wednesday, January 18, Abigail Kruger was sitting on her couch in her Lakeview duplex, just south of Wellington and Racine, when the evening’s quiet was shattered by a loud bang. Kruger says she then assumed Zidek had been the victim of a hit-and-run. But the motorist who injured the cyclist was actually an as yet unnamed police officer who sped through the intersection at Wellington and Racine—which has four-way stop signs—en route to a burglary call....

Gay camp and heartwarming sincerity typically go together like oil and water, so I was delightfully surprised and touched by this fun little one-act holiday emulsion by Bryan Renaud and Emily Schmidt. In a queer twist on the 2003 Christmas family comedy Elf, Barney (Roy Samra), a lipstick-wearing, golden-voiced bundle of unconditional love, is exiled from the North Pole workshop to the streets of Chicago by Santa Jr. (Jaron Bellar), a tyrannical, Trump-like autocrat....

It’s no secret that, like countless other Chicagoans, I’ve been miffed with Mayor Rahm for quite some time now. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was somewhat compelled by his prepared remarks at the Department of Justice press conference. On January 13, he stood alongside outgoing U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch as she unearthed her bureau’s findings, and the “agreement in principle” to enter into a consent decree that would address the Chicago Police Department’s deficiencies and misdeeds....

Candide Leonard Bernstein’s operetta—premiered in 1956 and much revised over the decades—uses a buoyant, quasi-classical score to illustrate Voltaire’s 1759 philosophical satire, about a naive young man whose optimistic ideals are shattered by the harsh realities of war, religious persecution, and the infidelity of his lover, Cunegonde. Bernstein’s score—featuring lyrics by Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Bernstein himself—is a dazzling pastiche that evokes the work of Mozart, Offenbach, Strauss (Johann and Richard), and Mahler....

Mike Sula Tonkotsu ramen, Strings Ramen Shop I can’t help but beat my head against the truth that the current wave of ramen slingers who do a million other things besides ramen will never make a bowl as good as the ones I slurped at Ramen Misoya, the Japanese chain that opened last summer in Mount Prospect. It’s a belief I have to smother in the service of objectivity every time I try a new bowl at a place that also happens to make sushi, or whatever filler they use to pad the menu for people who can’t deal with a restaurant that doesn’t have 180 options....

This murky, heavy, hairy Finnish trio are a known quantity on every outing, and on their fourth full-length, Deranged Pagan Sons (released last year on Nine), they continue with their reliable formula of weaving the heavy, groovy riffage of a Sabbath and Pentagram pedigree through a distinct homeland sensibility pioneered by their forebears, Reverend Bizarre. Cardinals Folly builds steady and reliable structures from a familiar toolbox: clean vocals (with growl eruptions), tempo shifts, and an aesthetic rooted in sword-and-sorcery and pulp-fiction paganism....

Even as Unfriended and other computer-screen-focused films continue to reflect our new media-consumption reality, the Film Center‘s upcoming shows of the satirical 1994 Czech sci-fi movie Accumulator 1 remind us that big-screen filmmakers have long been interested in the small screen. Here are five prime examples. SpinIn 1992, Brian Springer used his satellite dish in Buffalo to scavenge 500 hours of television feeds from America’s media power brokers, capturing moments that are normally deleted by local television stations....

We don’t refer to beloved local musicians as poseurs very often, but for Andre Foisy of Locrian we’re willing to stretch the term! Foisy, who contributes guitar and vocals to the group’s delightfully unsettling drone metal, teaches several classes a week at West Town yoga studio Turbodog. He tells Gossip Wolf that he’s leading a candlelight session on Fri 3/7 that includes a dark ambient soundtrack by several of Locrian’s mates on Milwaukee experimental label Utech, among them James Plotkin, Nadja, and Horseback....