For all y’all who have stopped working and are just killing time on the internet before heading to West Lakeview Liquors, here’s something to occupy your weekend-focused mind: It’s just been announced that Mayor Daley will be throwing "Chicago Gourmet: A Celebration of Food & Wine" in Millennium Park on September 26th, 27th and 28th. Details are being kept secret for now (they’ll be released at a press conference on May 20), but we know that the festival will be open to the public, will require paid admission and will feature tastings, demonstrations and presentations. Sounds to me like the anti-Taste of Chicago, more of an Aspenish event focusing on upscale food and our most prestigious chefs.
Anybody want to guess who’ll be making an appearance here? (Your first three guesses—Achatz, Trotter and Bayless—don’t count.)

Since completing the fantastic Hapland series of games (except for Hapland 3, which is iiiimpossible), I’ve been scouring the Internet for something similar—a click-based puzzle that deals with sequencing, timing and cool graphics. I found what I was looking for thanks, once again, to Bored at Work senior correspondent Steve Jacobs.

Enter The Life Ark. You play God to a primitive, plateau-based civilization. Create life out of nothing by filling clouds with rain water and sending aliens back to their home planet so humans can populate. Unlike Hapland, where much of what you’re supposed to do is at least visible from the get-go, the number of clickable items in a Life Ark level is actually quite small. Hence, you have to use certain items multiple times in different ways, which can get confusing. Particularly, it’s not always clear what you’ve already done, which can make for some annoyances if, like me, you’re constantly hiding your gaming window from your bosses. Try to remember where you’re at—there’s nothing more annoying than starting over and running a sequence you’ve already done a hundred times. Good for a head-scratcher as you prepare your mind for drinking-related weekend math. (How many drinks left before my unmade soggy aeromattress is actually comfortable?)

…never fear, you’ve still got some very fine options tonight.

Number one on the list of "Shows you’ll be glad you went in a few months when this band is huge" is the Heavy - check their lead vocalist Swaby at left - at darkroom—a Playboy Rock the Rabbit show featuring the Life During Wartime DJs. The U.K. retro soul-rock act has a slightly overly stylized debut album, Great Vengeance & Furious Fire, but its live show looks pretty damn convincing from everything I’ve screened online. Seriously, they will never play a venue the size of darkroom again. Get there.

On the dark, nasty, with just a hint of melody techno-electro tip lies the Jackson: Nation label showcase at Lava tonight. One of my favorite local madmen Traxx heads things up with his pal James T. Cotton spinning and Beau Wanzer in a live PA. Cotton’s new double LP, Like No One, has been burning up the iTunes around here. It sounds like some ’80s drum machines ganging up and going totally Videodrome on you.

Photo: Clay Gardner

By their very nature, film critics tend to be casual dressers. (If I may presume to speak for the profession, journalism in general breeds a certain degree of sartorial laziness, and this is especially so of a kind of journalism that frequently involves sitting in the dark, and refusing to socialize with one’s colleagues.) At the opening of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival, I wore a tie and jacket and felt damn classy. Parties at Toronto generally call for only standard film festival garb—i.e., whatever’s at the top of one’s suitcase. The New York Film Festival’s opening-night party is at least nominally black tie, but the times I’ve gone, even the hosts ignored that rule, and the half-dozen attendees who wore tuxes looked like assholes.

All of this is a long way of explaining why I’m less than super-prepared for the dress code police at Cannes, where the evening premiere screenings require black tie. This rule is strictly observed, sort of, and I’ve gotten wildly divergent advice on how to handle it, from "Don’t worry, critics mostly stick to press screenings because tickets for official premieres are hard to come by" to "No one brings a tux and you’re nuts for even asking" to "A tux is well worth bringing and a good investment besides" and, of course, the immortal "Bring a dark suit, tie a scarf around your stomach and pretend it’s a cummerbund." I’m kind of partial to the last one.

For more on my adventures in Cannes fashion—and more to the point, in Cannes movies—be sure to check back next week for my daily updates from the festival, which opens May 14.

Looks like Patty Burger is getting some competition. Local entrepreneur David Friedman is set to open Epic Burger in the South Loop on May 19, introducing what he calls "a more mindful burger" to Chicagoans. Cue the ‘Who the hell is David Friedman’ questions.

Well, we learned he’s a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who went on to open Elbo Room (which he sold long ago), work in product development for Boston Market and serve as a culinary consultant for a few food service chains. And he’s pretty set on offering a fast-food burger produced with Slow Food tenets. Friedman asserts that Epic burgers will be hand-packed and made from beef that’s 100% natural and fresh, not frozen. "I’ve done a lot of consulting to food manufacturers that sell to all of the major chains," Friedman told us. "I really understood at that point why, when there’s a meat recall these days, it’s not just a few thousand pounds, it’s millions of pounds. It’s coming from thousands of different carcuses. I started understanding food manufacturing and processing, and the more I understood, the more I wanted to get back to real food."

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This week’s featured shot from the TOC Flickr photo group comes to us from Timothy Gray Photography. I think it’s appropriate since the CTA has so much rerouting planned for the Red Line and the Loop this weekend that we’ll all need to pack extra reading material.

Here are some things to do this weekend:

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What are you doing after work? If you’re thinking about grabbing a beer, how about making it a good beer and making it free? West Lakeview Liquors, one of our go-to spots for craft beers, is holding a New Belgium Brewery tasting tonight from 6–9pm. Beers being poured include the new release of Skinny Dip (the brewery’s crisp take on light beer), 1554 (a black ale), Mothership Wit (a coriander-spiced, orangey wheat) and Sunshine Wheat (a straightforward filtered wheat). And yes, for all you Fat Tire guzzlers, some of the amber ale will be around too, but c’mon, think outside the box a little.

West Lakeview Liquors; 2156 W Addison St, 773-525-1916.

When Lost ended its third season with a flash-forward, fans were buzzing with excitement. Would every flashback now be replaced by a flash-forward? How else can Lost tell its characters’ stories?

As we’ve seen so far this season, flash-forwards seem to hit for characters we already know and flashbacks are implemented for the ones we don’t (Juliet, Faraday, Charlotte, etc.) But last night’s Locke-centric time-jump flashback worked pretty well—it revealed sides to Locke that we didn’t know, and inserted new questions into the mix. It felt a lot like the old Lost from seasons one and two, before complicated story lines started to make things murky.

Lots of spoilery stuff in the episode, so no more here. Make the jump for some thoughts.

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Two of the city’s distinctive dance troupes are having big parties with silent art auctions next weekend to benefit their ongoing activities. At 19 years old, River North Dance Chicago is the baby to Mordine & Co. Dance Theater, celebrating a remarkable 40 years in operation. The two troupes represent different facets of the scene, with RivNo holding the torch for Chicago-style suave, jazzy repertory and Mo & Co setting a standard for choreographer-driven modern dance exploration and development.

RivNo’s event, titled Dancers in the White City Part Deux, takes place May 17 from 5–8pm at the glamorous William H. Reid House on Prairie Avenue and includes fancy cocktails. Mo & Co raise (and offer) spirits at Cafe Selmarie in Lincoln Square on Saturday 18 at 5pm, and the event features a photographic retrospective of Mordine’s ouvre.

Swedish dance-popster Robyn’s guileless performance during her show at Park West often seemed as if one was being afforded a peek inside the bedroom of a teenage girl, performing only for herself and an audience of her adoring stuffed animals (no offense intended to those who braved the rain last night).

Perhaps it’s because Robyn finally seems to have found a persona that suits her. After spending her teenage years cranking out dewy-eyed requests for love, the songs on her self-titled album—available overseas since 2005 but released here just this year—alternate between B-girl boasting (“You wanna rumble in my jungle/I’ll take you on”) and slambook insults (“Tell me why your name is in the dictionary when I look up idiot”). In delivering her digs, she preened and strutted in a black, flowing getup over leather pants that resembled something out of Prince’s “Batdance” video, even stopping to flex her bicep muscles and lovingly kiss her “guns.” If more young girls adopted her giddy, take-no-shit sass, maybe we’d have fewer Miley Cyruses who crack under the strain of being Hannah Montanas.

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