*** THE REF In any comedy the funniest moment for us, the audience, is the most miserable for the characters. And so it is in Ted Demme’s brilliantly breezy The Ref, about an akward, pathetic, tragic, overwrought, embarrassing, potentially violent, and ultimately hilarious Christmas Eve dinner at the home of Caroline and Lloyd Chasseur, a genuinely wretched married couple. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No wonder everybody in the family, from the troubled son Jesse to Lloyd’s suffocating mother Rose to Lloyd’s brother’s brood, dreads coming to another Christmas Eve dinner at the Chasseurs’ (mispronounced “Chaser” or “Chasser” and swiftly corrected by Lloyd: “Sha-soor!...

High Culture in the Dumps Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The performing arts, such as theater, classical music, and opera, have been especially hard hit by a decline in interest among young people. The federal reports cite the ineffectiveness of arts education programs, which foundations have thrown millions of dollars at in recent years in the hopes of creating a future audience for the arts....

When Peter Strazzabosco moved to Chicago from Milwaukee in 1989 he did what any avid mountain-bike rider would do: set out to find the most tantalizing local off-road trails. He couldn’t get much information. Most of the mountain-bike owners he met seemed content to roll their knobby tires over asphalt. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So Strazzabosco–a Lerner reporter who also writes biking columns for Windy City Sports–wrote, designed, and in August published the Chicago Mountain Bike Trails Guide, an 85-page book that details 31 riding areas in northeastern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, northern Indiana, and southwestern Michigan, and offers capsule reviews of 25 others....

It’s Magic: Prices Rise at Steppenwolf Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steppenwolf artistic director Randall Arney anticipates that studio prices will go back down to their previous level for future productions. Last season, the first for Steppenwolf’s studio, the highest priced tickets for Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Slavs! were $19.50, while Lookingglass’s The Master and Margarita, presented in association with Steppenwolf, topped out at a mere $14....

Metallica Metallica has always been something of a problem. They’re loud, ugly, and probably armed. Their lyrics, the ones you can decipher, stink. They’re filthy rich and ludicrously popular, worshiped by hordes of white punks on dope. On the other hand, they’ve been responsible for some of the most soul-stirring rock and roll ever made. Though they toiled in relative obscurity for years, their new album, Load, is being trumpeted by Rolling Stone as the biggest release of the summer, and recently a new twist has been added to the simple Metallica-equals-heavy-metal equation....

By Scott Barancik No one doubts Klaas’s sincerity about child safety (although Polly Klaas’s killer didn’t use a mail list to find her). But Klaas and KOL’s other members, including Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Evan Hendricks of Privacy Times newsletter, seem to be in denial about one thing: their role in Phillips’s relentless war on Donnelley. Over the past five years, Phillips, cofounder and president of a 40-employee, $5 million firm, Aristotle Publishing, has battled Donnelley–a $6....

Old Town School at a Crossroads The 38-year-old Old Town School of Folk Music, housed for the past 26 years at 909 W. Armitage, will decide within the next five months whether or not to move further north, to the former Hild Library at 4544 N. Lincoln. Notes Fred Lieber, president of the school’s board of directors: “This is a very significant move for the Old Town School of Folk Music, and it will be a very considered decision....

Party Boys Hit NYC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Soloway, the production was a sellout almost from the first preview, but as a hedge against possible negative notices he and his co-producers held off inviting critics for three weeks, hoping word of mouth would build. “The crossover audience happened almost instantly in New York,” says Dillon, noting that it took a few months for mainstream audiences to find the play in Chicago....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, FU: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have this sneaking feeling that it’s not other guys checking out your boyfriend that bothers you, but your boyfriend’s habit of checkin’ back. Your boyfriend cruising other guys when he’s with you, as opposed to “having a look,” is a very bad sign. But you, since this relationship is new and you want it to work out, blame every gay man in the city for your boyfriend’s wandering eye, which is dumb, dumb, stupid, dumb....

Plate By Carol Burbank Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But these personal holocausts, unlike the mass murders of World War II, grow from an internalized enemy. To isolate and exorcise that inner, culturally created mirror of self-hatred, women with eating disorders must embrace the very wilderness of rage and disorder they rejected with their bodies, a dynamic that makes the performance of an anorexic’s narrative very tricky....

Earth Day Event for Federal Plaza Wilson relies on fate the way a painter relies on pigment: to add color to an outline. His intrusions into public spaces, both as a solo artist and as half of the duo Men of the World, are typically governed by a set of simple written instructions that leave plenty of room for fate’s intervening hand. In Hour of the 100 Flowers, for example, Wilson and fellow Man of the World Mark Alice Durant told themselves to “arrive at Daley Plaza…and place 100 flowers (red carnations) on one per 3×3 square foot of granite tile....

The brainchild of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone Rock & Roll Bowl kicked off its inaugural run last fall with challenge exams at 30 colleges and universities nationwide. That’s where I came in. Six months later, after increasingly competitive regional and semifinal rounds, my Northwestern University team (myself, Will Getter, and Steve Weinstein) duked it out with San Jose State (Dawn Reichelderfer, Walter Ryce, and Thomas Lawler) amid the glamour and clamor of Spring Break Daytona Beach....

THE WAILING WOMAN/LA LLORONA, Whole Art Theater Company, at the Blue Rider Theatre. Dear Whole Art Theater cast and crew: Just a few words from your director on opening night. Let me first highlight the 500-year-old Mexican myth we’ll be performing. La Llorona falls in love with a conquistador and bears his children. He plans to abandon her and take their children back to Spain. Rather than lose the children she murders them....

Carrie Mae Weems: From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried Another good thing about Weems’s rolling pin is that it doesn’t hit you over the head. In her work she orchestrates clashes between picture and text that point to racial imbalances in America without ever spelling out exactly what she has to say. Over the years her photographs of black people have served as guilt-magnifying backgrounds to racist jokes and riddles and as half-ironic illustrations of narratives about herself and her family....

It’s no fun outdoors. The wind cuts deep. Even the sun seems cold. The driveway of the farm two hours northwest of the Loop is half mud and half ice. Buying a portion of a particular farm’s harvest in advance is the essence of community-supported agriculture (CSA), also known as subscription farming. This year Chicago households can buy a “share” in a farm for $350 to $390. (Installment plans, subsidies, and half shares may be available....

“It’s usually disgusting when your pubic hair gets stuck to the soap,” says artist Tom Friedman, but once after bathing he “found it beautiful–the curves on the white background of the soap.” This experience led to an artwork, soon to be exhibited at the Art Institute, in which the artist’s pubic hair is arranged in a spiral on a bar of soap. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friedman, who’s 30, says critics have focused mainly on the repetitive and obsessive nature of his art....

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at the Theatre Building Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Boasting good notices from sources as diverse as the scholarly Shakespeare Quarterly and the Washington Post (whose reviewer compared Othello to O.J. Simpson!), as well as an advisory board that includes the British star Dame Judi Dench and Broadway director Jerry Zaks, Shenandoah Shakespeare Express travels year-round, bringing Shakespeare to high school and college audiences as well as community and professional venues....

Limon Dance Company Sometimes a dance seems blurred, as if someone had rubbed Vaseline on a glass wall built into the proscenium arch. The movement is missing something. In two of the pieces on the Limon Dance Company program, what was missing was the specific technique for the dance showcased. The dancers went through their assigned motions; but without the special quality that training instills, the works just seemed fuzzy....

In the brilliant, sardonic, and deeply political Dark Brothers movie New Wave Hookers 2, the theme of the original New Wave Hookers is made topical with a cleverness that is not, alas, typical of the genre. Whereas the first movie takes as its premise the idea that new-wave music can transform the girl next door into a raging slut (which is hilarious enough), the sequel delves into the contemporary archaeology of cults: the American obsession with white-bread normalcy subverted....

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This eccentric and soulful anarcho-leftist utopian fantasy is probably the most underrated of all Depression musicals. Directed by Lewis Milestone in 1933 from a script by Ben Hecht and S.N. Behrman and with a score by Rodgers and Hart that features rhyming couplets, the film stars Al Jolson as a Central Park hobo who actually likes being homeless–until he falls in love with an amnesia victim (Madge Evans) who’s a former mistress of the mayor (Frank Morgan) and has to get a job to support her....