Michael Gebert Rhine Hall Distillery As a category of drink, schnapps has an old-fashioned, slightly cheesy image tied up with winter sports. Peppermint schnapps is the kind of candy-flavored drink that someone young and unsophisticated would drink in the belief that more sophisticated people drink it apres-ski. Dean Martin would pour two of them in hopes of seducing Elke Sommer in a Matt Helm movie or something. The proof of that is a device that’s proudly displayed but no longer in use in the distillery: a contraption in which bicycle power is used to crush apples and extract the juice....

Fuck, yeah!” It’s a Zen trick, that ability to balance fun and business, looseness and precision, spontaneity and discipline. And the person charged with maintaining that equilibrium on the resurgent Cubs is first-year manager Joe Maddon, who has won over the city and its sportswriters with his old-school baseball intuition, offbeat intellect, and New Agey managerial style almost as well as he’s charmed the players. Meanwhile the Cubs have risen to a winning record and now challenge for a playoff spot for the first time since president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer took control of the team at the end of 2011, deliberately crashed the franchise, and rebuilt from the ashes, drafting prime young talent with the top picks allotted to losers, then waiting for those players to develop and arrive at the big leagues....

One quiet evening in Yum Cha not long ago two Asian women—veritable little old ladies—sat for hours in a dim alcove daintily chopsticking rice from bowls held up to their chins. That’s the kind of eater you look for when you walk into a restaurant: one who looks like she knows what she’s doing There’s nothing that troubling on the menu at Yum Cha—perhaps due to the sobering influence of Eddy “Chi Ping” Cheung of Chinatown’s venerable Phoenix restaurant, who consults on staff training....

A tricked-out Fiat is suspended from a wall in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s atrium. “It’s kind of a gravitational mindfuck,” senior curator Dieter Roelstraete says of the piece, the entry point into “Metamorphology,” the first major museum survey in the U.S. of the British conceptual artist Simon Starling, opening June 7. A stone’s throw away at the Arts Club of Chicago, an associated Starling show, “Pictures for an Exhibition,” debuts June 6....

With the Great Chicago Fire Festival of the last couple years, the city made a peculiar spectacle of the anniversary of one of our worst disasters. City Hall poured cold water on the fest earlier this month by cutting off funding after this year, but perhaps the money would be better spent on an effort to commemorate a more recent catastrophe: the 1995 heat wave. Not to celebrate the five July days that left 739 people dead—but to prevent anything like it from happening again....

I’ve had the pleasure of being friends with writer, curator, and producer John Corbett for more than three and a half decades now. There are lots of things that I love about John—his generosity, his smarts, his humor—but his unflagging enthusiasm for the things he’s passionate about has always been a huge inspiration. He’s gotten me excited about and turned me on to countless things during our friendship; in fact, early on his enthusiasm for my perverse late-80s fanzine Butt Rag was crucial, giving me a huge boost and a major shot of confidence....

Random House Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time when she was 17 while she was studying for her Oxford entrance exams. From the first sentence—”Miss Brooke had the kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress”—it was true love. George Eliot Mary Ann Evans was considered one of the cleverest women of her time, and also one of the ugliest. Romance eluded her until her late 30s when, in a tiny London bookshop, she met George Lewes, another writer....

Tribune Publishing told its employees a month ago that business was bad and it needed to cut costs so it was offering hundreds of buyouts. On Thursday it announced that it had approved buyouts for about 7 percent of its roughly 7,000 eligible employees. The journalists who will soon exit the Chicago Tribune include a number of distinguished veterans. The loss will be brutal. When the Tribune laid off photographer Chuck Berman in June, he was OK with it and so was his wife, columnist Barbara Brotman....

Godot13/Wikimedia Commons The entrance to the Theresienstadt concentration camp In addition to Stranger by the Lake, the Music Box will present the first Chicago run of Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust starting this Friday. The fourth stand-alone documentary assembled from unused footage Lanzmann shot for Shoah, Unjust centers on Benjamin Murmelstein, the Vienna rabbi who worked with Adolf Eichmann in facilitating the deportation of Austria’s Jews and served as the last administrator of the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia....

I’ve been around Chicago long enough to realize that if you want an accurate account of how our government works, you shouldn’t pick up any campaign literature during election season. In the flyer, Mitchell uses a Q&A format to claim to be a leader in the movement for an elected school board: “Question: Who represents us on our school board? Not surprisingly, the current board ends up acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of Mayor Rahm Emanuel....

In a city that prides itself on its inclusive and varied performing-arts scene, Steppenwolf’s eclectic LookOut series, which debuted this past summer at the 1700 Theatre, stands out. The last half of the winter leg, taking place from now until the beginning of April, boasts a diverse sequence of shows ranging from comedy to spoken word to music. This Sunday, Fifth House Ensemble and the Chicago-based bluegrass band Henhouse Prowlers come together to perform “Voices From the Dust Bowl....

It’s all about time,” reads the moody grayscale poster for David Lowery’s supernatural drama A Ghost Story. Nothing on the poster seems entirely black or white, except for the abyssal eyeholes in the bedsheet that represents the ghost. The film follows two young lovers, C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara), just long enough for us to care about them before C dies in a car wreck. Suddenly draped under a white sheet, its eyeholes empty and brooding, C walks away from whatever ethereal realm awaits him and, unable to let go of his previous existence, wanders back to the house that now holds his grieving partner....

Gossip Wolf is a longtime fan of Andy Slater, leader of funky rock outfit the Velcro Lewis Group. Not only is he one of the city’s most entertaining front men, he’s also just written his first comic! Slater is legally blind, and his Jack Chick-style tract How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up? (illustrated by Secret History of Chicago Music creator Steve Krakow) doubles as a guide for dealing respectfully with the disabled....

Michael Gebert Paul Fehribach Southern-style comfort food is a fairly easy sell, especially after a few drinks. When Big Jones opened in Andersonville in 2008, it could have gotten along just fine doing a restaurant version of feel-good food, calories be damned. But chef Paul Fehribach, who opened it with co-owner Mark Armantrout, was determined from the start to do farm-to-table, whole-animal cooking, like people in the south always did....

There’s a “Chicago Pastrami Dog” on the menu at 3 Squares Diner that sounds tempting. Just imagine: an encased farce of brined and smoked brisket dragged through the garden of the orthodox Chicago condiments. Sounds simultaneously delicious and dangerously provocative. I was so unnerved by the Chicago Pastrami Dog I was prepared to ask for ketchup, but then I noticed the small tub of it—a molasses-colored version with a deep sweetness that seemed to terrify the thick and nicely crisped fries....

When Martha Lavey became Steppenwolf Theatre’s artistic director almost two decades ago, she invited me to lunch to pick my brains about the fringe theater scene. With so many resources at her disposal, she explained, she felt a duty to share the wealth with the smaller itinerant companies in town. I knew her good intentions were genuine (we spent time together in graduate school, and I’d seen firsthand her commitment to experimental work), but I doubted the demands of an oversize, heavily mortgaged, subscriber-dependent institution would leave her much room for noblesse oblige....

Noname’s fans consider her this generation’s “woke” female rapper, but it’s a notion that Noname herself rejects. In a recent interview with The Fader, the Chicago rapper otherwise known as Fatimah Warner insists that her music shouldn’t be pigeonholed as “real hip-hop” (shorthand for old-school rap, usually invoked by the same people who think the four elements represent the only true hip-hop culture). “A lot of my fans . . ....

In the weeks and now days leading up to the inauguration, it seems like the jokes about Trump and the current state of our political climate are basically writing themselves. Between rumors of golden showers and the president-elect’s meeting with Steve Harvey, it sometimes feels as if we’re all living in one long political sketch. So where are comedians supposed to go from here? Fantastic Super Great Nation Numero Uno is by no means Second City’s most inspired or politically hard-hitting revue....

When Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller first saw the shoebox half-hidden beneath a couch, they had no idea that it would, 25 years later, develop into an obsession that would take over not only their lives, but the lives of dozens of artists, scholars, students, and soldiers, and send them on an epic quest halfway around the world. At the time, it looked like just another estate-sale curiosity: an ordinary shoebox filled with 130 brown envelopes, each containing a four-by-five-inch negative, with a black-and-white print stapled to the front....

Yes, Donald Trump’s in the driver’s seat, and the world’s careening like a bumper car from one potential disaster to another, but it’s summer, glorious summer-time to turn our attention to something equally global in scope but more immediate and personal; something that is, in fact, at this exact moment, affecting you in a very intimate way. Sew Your Own Underwear 7/27-8/24: Fri 6:30-9:30 PM, Lillstreet Art Center, 4401 N. Ravenswood, 773-769-4226, lillstreet....