Michael Gebert Pour slowly, says Greg Seider. Put me in a home kitchen and I could kludge almost anything to at least edibility with some wine, garlic, and rosemary. But having grown up in the era of the Pina Colada song, the low point for mixology in America, I’ve never felt like I had a comparable intuitive sense of the principles of cocktails. So when I saw that New York-based mixologist Greg Seider (the Summit Bar, the cocktail program at Le Bernardin) had written a book called Alchemy in a Glass: The Essential Guide to Handcrafted Cocktails, and was coming to Chicago, I cadged myself an hour of his time to have him run me, and you, through the basics of making drinks that don’t suck....

You’re at Art Basel. You’re a megamillionaire rap mogul. Your manager spots a glorious painting that he’s sure will appeal to your refined yet edgy taste. It’s certainly no stretch that Jay-Z forked over $20,000 for a Hebru Brantley—though it’s a nice touch that Hova asked the Chicago-south-side-born artist, whose aesthetic is part Wildstyle, part Japanimation, to deliver the painting to his hotel room. If you find the price a little steep, keep in mind that Rick Ross dropped a reported $20,000 at Art Basel on a mere photograph....

The Chicago Country Music Festival continues its journey north: in 2008 it was held on parkland at Soldier Field, last year it was at Grant Park, and Fri 10/8 and Sat 10/9 it’s in Millennium Park from noon till 9 PM. The final major outdoor festival of the year presented by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, it features three stages of country, honky-tonk, and roots rock, a Kids’ Corral, and more....

Paradise: Love Though I’ve seen you three times in the last nine months, I think I’m just starting to understand what you’re all about. I’ve tried to articulate it on the few occasions when you came to Chicago, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results. That’s one of the snags of being a movie critic: you often have to write about movies you’ve recently discovered rather than the movies you’ve decided to carry with you, which are the ones you’re far more capable of writing about....

These medium-length films constitute the first two parts of director Bill Douglas’s autobiographical trilogy about growing up in a Scottish mining town. They represent the most valuable kind of personal filmmaking, with singular ideas about composition, editing, and even sound design appearing to have grown organically from the artist’s own memories (in fact, Douglas shot the films in the very places where he was raised). Set in 1945, My Childhood (1972, 44 min....

Two years ago the New York Times decided to demarcate its contents typographically. “Straightforward news,” it explained, would be published in justified columns; opinion—be it a “memo,” an “appraisal,” a “journal,” or some other subjective form—would get ragged-right treatment. Guess how they appeared. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Being at heart a reporter rather than a pundit, I won’t presume to say why. I simply wish to observe, without suggesting a correlation, that Internet values are seeping into print journalism, and Internet values reward instant punditry, the more flamboyant the better....

Julie Koca doesn’t traffic in cliches of the “throbbing manhood” sort. Her first book, a contemporary romance called Just the Sexiest Man Alive—published this month by Berkley Books under her nom de plume “Julie James”—features no brooding Fabios, no heaving bosoms, no goofy anatomic euphemisms. (In fact the pedestrian penis shows up on the second page.) Still, as she’s learned in her transition from attorney to screenwriter to novelist, there’s no escaping stereotypes entirely....

A couple weeks ago I reported on a chat I’d had with a savvy observer of the Sun-Times Media Group who wanted to remain nameless. His advice to the Sun-Times included this: “Go the way of becoming almost like an urban daily magazine on newsprint and de-emphasize the personalities. . . . Give them the opportunity to become writers without their mugs in the paper, and if it doesn’t work sweep them out....

It’s been five years since Horizontal Action magazine threw the last Blackout, a festival that over its six-year run became one of America’s most spectacular showcases of garage rock and binge drinking. But on May 27 and 28, HoZac Records is bringing the party back, and Gossip Wolf has the scoop on the lineup! A source in HoZac’s upper-level management confirms that out-of-towners Nobunny, the Spits, Idle Times, K-Holes, and Reading Rainbow will play, as will locals the Brides, Mickey, Heavy Times, Outer Minds, and Radar Eyes....

Rap dad Jay-Z and rap-dad-to-be Kanye in the video for “Otis” On Sunday night Kanye West announced that his uber-celeb beau, Kim Kardashian, is pregnant. The tide of responses made it feel as if no one before Kanye and Kim had ever conceived a human child, which mirrors some reactions people have about anything West does these days. The headline to Alexandra Petri’s Washington Post blog post sums everything up: “Kanye West and Kim Kardashian having a baby, so the ‘fiscal cliff’ can wait....

Mike Sula Bo ssam, Hal Mae Bo Ssam For anyone who’s ever eaten Korean barbecue bo ssam is not an unfamiliar delivery system. Literally meaning “wrapped,” it also refers to a particular dish—a feast, actually—particularly if soju is involved. Typically, bo ssam is sliced and boiled pork belly served with raw oysters, kimchi, and raw cabbage or lettuce. You pick up a piece of greenery, tuck in some pork, an oyster, a scrap of kimchi, and perhaps add a smear of doenjang, or bean base—or a dab of fermented shrimp sauce—before bundling it up and shoveling it in your pie hole....

This is a terrible time to open a barbecue restaurant. Making consistently good commercial barbecue and making money at it is a notoriously difficult endeavor in the first place. But whether by coincidence or kismet, some half-dozen smoke joints have opened up this summer, making the odds of any individual one’s success all that much worse. I’ll be surprised if more than half are still open by this time next year....

It’s the rare theater company that doesn’t have a mission statement. But how many theater artists have one? Director Eric Hoff does. He’s committed, he says, to exploring “works that are at the intersection of social justice and beautiful art.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Eric Hoff, who guides the show with a strong hand, insures that the actors are supported by [Holter’s] language, rather than overwhelmed by it,” wrote the New Yorker‘s Hilton Als of the production, presented by the Inconvenience as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s annual Garage Rep....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what happened at the meeting–for some reason, the Times doesn’t appear to have covered it–but based on a sampling included as part of Cohen’s story, the women have a point. Of 141 plays produced by five important off-Broadway theaters over the last five seasons, only 36 were written by living women. Theater by theater, the percentage of plays by living women over that period ran from a low of 18 percent (interestingly enough, for Manhattan Theater Club, which is run by a woman) to a high of 32 percent....

I’m an early-20s gay guy turned on by hypnosis. During my adolescent explorations of the Internet, I found a site with stories about “mind control,” usually involving the seduction of straight men. I was hooked. I’m not beating myself up for being a “bad person,” because my desire to try this in real life is nil for reasons of its impossibility (true hypnosis is something different, and I am effectively fantasizing about magic) and immorality (sex without consent is rape)....

QMy name is Nancy, and I’m 19. My boyfriend’s name is Carl, we have been together for almost a year—our anniversary is actually February 14!—and we have great sex frequently! I want to do something sexy for us on our anniversary. I plan on being with Carl for years to come, and I don’t want the sex to become monotonous. For a while, I’ve wanted to go to a sex store to purchase a few things to spice things up....

Don CherryOrganic Music Society (Caprice) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cherry moved to Sweden in 1964 (he’d later marry Swedish-born painter Monika “Moki” Karlsson), and after living there for a few years he all but vanished from the jazz scene. Organic Music Society captures some of what he was up to. Of the album’s 13 tracks, cut in 1971 and ’72, only two were recorded in a studio, and Cherry plays trumpet sparingly....

While the state supreme court was at work restoring Rahm Emanuel’s name to the mayoral ballot, election-law attorney Adolfo Mondragon sat at the back of a nearly empty courtroom in the Daley Center, trying to keep his client’s fledgling aldermanic campaign alive. In 2007 a man named John Cinkus decided he wanted to run for trustee in Stickney, a southwest suburb. Stickney’s electoral board bounced him from the ballot on the grounds that he owed the town $100 in an unspecified fee or fine....

Elizabeth Madden regularly puts students from the French Pastry School to work in the Oak Park commercial kitchen where she makes her Rare Bird Preserves. But of course one day of instruction isn’t enough to launch a career in jam making. “The French Pastry School is amazing, but they kind of just give you the hint,” Madden says. So she began her own independent research, first diving into the books of Alsatian pastry chef Christine Ferber, internationally known as the “queen of confitures....

Lloyd DeGrane On the Cubano, proportion is everything. When Mike Sula profiled Philip Ghantous back in 2008, his South Loop Cuban cafe, Cafecito, had made the Reader‘s list of the year’s most notable restaurants, and Sula was still marveling at the first-time owner’s achievement. A Lebanese-American actor from Peoria, Ghantous wasn’t the likeliest proprietor of a place that nails the correct proportion of mustard, pickle, and Swiss to ham and mojo-marinated pork for a top-flight Cuban sandwich....