Logan Javage Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Lisa Portes, theater director. “I liken being a director to being the captain of a ship. You choose a play and you set the course for that play. Say you’re doing Hamlet. You may decide you’re gonna do a straight-ahead, Shakespearean-period Hamlet, or you may decide to do a Hamlet that focuses on the generational battle between Hamlet and his stepfather, or you may decide it’s about political corruption....

The first time Big Star bartender Maria Carlin tasted makgeolli­—an alcoholic Korean beverage made from fermented rice—she was about eight. Her grandmother, Ok Sun, used to make it. “She would invite church ladies over and they’d come and pray and sing and drink makgeolli.” Carlin says that she also thought about what flavors go well with Korean cuisine, which led her to add ginger syrup to the drink. When you taste it, she says, “you get that yeasty, yogurty flavor from the makgeolli, then you get a little bit of ginger in the middle, and on the back end you get the smoke from the mezcal....

The Space video crew and I trampled into the Oak Park home of artist Laurie Freivogel on a slushy afternoon, and, being the polite and refined humans that we are, asked if we should take off our shoes. Freivogel warned us not to, though—there might be shards of glass everywhere. Moments later, a member of the team accidentally broke one of her bowls, blowing the whole polite-and-refined act. Still, I swear there were shards of glass scattered around before that happened....

Thanks to set designer Nick Schwartz, a good portion of the audience has to watch the Trap Door Theatre revival of Luigi Pirandello’s Naked unfold through casement windows placed right in their line of sight, over the downstage lip of the performing area. Since each window is composed of eight small panes, any given moment of the play may be broken up into 16 separate squares. When we first meet Ersilia, she’s just arrived at Nota’s apartment, delighted to the point of shame at her sudden turn of fortune....

“I ask, ‘What’s going on in Chicago, right? What is going on?’ There’s no excuse for it. There’s no excuse for it. I’m sure you’re asking the same question, ‘What’s going on in Chicago?’” —President Donald J. Trump “Before I bought the site, the Sun-Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular.” So the president tweeted in response to the suggestion that Chicagoans might not want to be jolted by his tender ego every time they gaze upon the city’s skyline, one of the great architectural spaces of the world....

Scott Stewart/Sun-Times A photo of 1230 N. Larabee Street taken in 2010, near the proposed site of Barack Obama College Prep When the City Council gets around to holding hearings on the controversial topic of race and selective enrollment high schools, aldermen might want to hear from Rob Paral, aka Chicago Data Guy. The mayor’s proposal has managed to upset people all over the city for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that it makes no sense to build new schools when you don’t have enough operational dollars to adequately fund the existing ones....

Anthony Rizzo Chicago Cubs rizzo44.com @ARizzo44 Runner-Up Jonathan Toews

Chance the Rapper chanceraps.com @chancetherapper Runner-Up Barack Obama

The Professionals Moving Specialists 3918 N. Western Runner-Up Rogers Moving Services

King: A Filmed Record. . . Montgomery to Memphis On the week of Martin Luther King Day, both Black Cinema House (on Sunday at 4 PM) and Block Cinema at Northwestern University (on Thursday, January 23, at 5 PM) will host free screenings of King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis, a long-unavailable 1970 documentary about the great civil rights leader. Comprised mainly of newsreel footage and devoid of offscreen narration, the film traces King’s career as a public figure, beginning with his involvement with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and ending with his assassination in 1968....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Greg Skidmore Tell us more, Rick • That the Democratic presidential contenders are having trouble responding to Black Lives Matter? —Mick Dumke

Fresh from its debut at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia earlier this year, “Barbara Kasten: Stages” opened Thursday night at the Graham Foundation with an introductory talk by the artist herself, part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s opening weekend events. A favorite feature of the exhibition was a set of three diazotype prints of nude bodies sitting in chairs with the camera angled up, situated next to woven figures affixed to actual chairs in the second-floor gallery space....

Leaving Chicago convinced German choreographer Nejla Yatkin that she needed to be making art for Chicago. While traveling the globe for a year-long project, Yatkin got a taste of how the rest of the world perceives her hometown—negatively—and returned on a mission to showcase the city’s beauty. Dancing With the Garden of the Phoenix takes viewers all over the grounds, and this participatory, immersive element is an essential aspect of Yatkin’s work, which seeks to change the viewer’s relationship with his or her environment:

In 2004 2000 Ravenswood’s invaluable Experimental Sound Studio launched the Outer Ear Festival of Sound, a multivenue celebration of unconventional music and sound art that brought in important international performers, among them Peter Brötzmann, Jaap Blonk, Phill Niblock, the Sons of God, Laetitia Sonami, and Stuart Dempster. In 2010 economic shifts forced the organizers to reinvent the festival as the relatively modest year-round series Outer Ear, with most of its events in ESS’s main studio....

Half Acre Beer Company 4257 N. Lincoln Runner-Up Revolution Brewing

Independent Spirits, Inc. 5947 N. Broadway Runner-Up Lush Wine & Spirits

Q I’m a 21-year-old straight male, and I’m mildly autistic. This means that I have difficulty picking up on social cues. I’ve learned to manage my disability in most areas of my life, but I’ve recently become concerned about how it pertains to hooking up. My approach to hooking up is how I imagine most other people’s must be: find someone who I can have a flowing conversation with, attempt to flirt with them, and then awkwardly make a move....

Anyone who’s been paying attention to film writing over the last few weeks is likely aware of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. In the past month there have been Internet think pieces, behind-the-scenes reports, a New Yorker profile of the director, and online detritus with such embarrassing headlines as “The Real Reason ‘Dazed & Confused’ Isn’t Mentioned in ‘Boyhood’” (I won’t link to it). Mainly this has to do with the movie’s unusual production: Over a period of 11 years, for about two weeks each year, Linklater filmed portions of Boyhood using the same principal actors, then edited the footage together to create a continuous story that follows its protagonist from first grade to freshman year of college....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, August 10, 2017. Park District demands answers from security firm after stabbings at Northerly Island concert The Chicago Park District is asking for answers from Monterrey Security after two people were stabbed at a concert featuring Dropkick Murphys and Rancid at Northerly Island Tuesday. The district wants to know how a concertgoer got a knife past guards from the “clout-heavy” firm subcontracted by Live Nation, according to the Sun-Times....

SHNS file photo The times they have a-changed. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • Wired on “How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet“? —John Dunlevy • About irascible film critic Armond White’s latest plea for attention? —Drew Hunt