An essay in last Sunday’s New York Times marveled at the spate of new Holocaust movies arriving for the Christmas season. Movies fulfilling the pledge to “never forget” have become a genre, wrote film critic A.O. Scott—a feel-good genre emphasizing “hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Besides reading the files, Nelson and military historian Nicholas Turse tracked down veterans associated with them—perpetrators, enabling commanders, whistle-blowers, and investigators and custodians....

The Critics will be screened Friday and Saturday, February 18 and 19, at the Gene Siskel Film Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seeing so many plays and writing so much about them had distorted my sense of perception; my world had narrowed and become increasingly self-referential. My standards had become less and less related to the so-called real world and more and more related to other shows I had seen....

Not to be confused with American Craft Beer Week—which starts May 13 and is actually confined to a single week—Chicago Craft Beer Week begins Thursday and continues for a week and a half. There are just too many events to cram into seven days, it seems. Really, there are enough events to fill a month or two. Just take a look at the schedule—it’s completely overwhelming. Each day features dozens of events, ranging from discounts to special tappings to all-out festivals....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently the confusingly prolific James Jackson Toth, also known as Wooden Wand (but not for much longer), is a little tired of sloppy journalists getting their facts wrong when covering him and Vanishing Voice, the band he sometimes (but not always) performs with. Fair enough—I have no doubt that theoretical physicists and Hermetic magicians also get fed up with people who don’t realize just how crucial the difference between, say, string theory and string cheese, or the pronunciation versus mispronunciation of a particular angelic name, can be....

In Jennifer’s Body, stuck-up high school hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox) is brutalized and wreaks hideous vengeance on men in general and the perpetrators in particular. This is a familiar arc, used in such rape-revenge films as Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981). Action, reaction, gallons of blood. It’s not clever, but it has a crude inevitability. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Cathedral of the Black Goat took over Cafe Lura (3184 N. Milwaukee) one night in March with an eight-band underground extreme-metal bill featuring Black Witchery, Nyogthaeblisz, Loss, and Ritual Combat and headlined by Filipino bestial black-metal crew Deiphago in their first North American show. Organized by a fellow calling himself Myrmydon Antichristus, who plays bass for local group Black Devotion, it was definitely an event for connoisseurs—you have to be pretty into metal to know who most of these bands are, or to appreciate how rare it is for many of them to play live at all, never mind together....

Challenged with sriracha by his Barrelhouse Flat comrade Jess Keene, bartender Mark Brinker started “playing around with a bunch of different stuff”—he notes that the rooster sauce works especially well in beer cocktails. But for his final concoction he ended up using “a bunch of fat” to neutralize some of the sriracha’s spiciness while preserving its flavor. The result, a rum-based drink made with whole egg and coconut cream, is “almost like a spicy milk shake,” he says....

Sean Moeller’s parents have a summer house on West Okoboji Lake, near the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Music Association Museum. When he visited in 2008, what struck him most about the museum’s collection were the 1960s concert posters—it amazed him to learn that bands like the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five had toured his home state. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In early 2006 Moeller cofounded the Web site Daytrotter, which brings bands to the relatively small town of Rock Island, Illinois....

Two Wheels vs. Four Wheels It gets better. While riding on the lakefront trail—a bike path, not even a road that I’m obligated to share with motor vehicles—I was shot at roughly a dozen times by the passenger in a car coming down the Lake Shore Drive exit lane near Montrose. Fortunately he missed every time—moving platform, moving target—and only knocked some twigs out of the trees around me, so I didn’t get to find out the hard way whether the rifle he was using was a pellet gun or a paintball gun....

A Playboy Woman I think it’s pretty clear here—and even more obvious in the print version with the use of fonts—that it’s a stylistic homage to Playboy‘s classic covers. So it’s thematically spot-on. (Disclosure: I’m the editor and director of content for Playboy.com.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, it’s an homage to Playboy self-advertising. But it’s also misleading. Shame on the Chicago Reader....

Saturday Night Live alum Julia Sweeney combines a stand-up’s shrewd timing with a monologuist’s attention to detail in this autobiographical solo show about her “knowledge pilgrimage” from Catholicism to atheism. Sweeney starts with her seventh birthday–when her dad told her, “You’ve reached the age of reason … now God will start keeping notes on you”–and chronicles a lifetime of moral questing and questioning. Some of the story is lightweight: recollections of her childhood identification with Hollywood-nun role models and her adolescent attraction to the picture she kept in her bedroom of a sexy, shaggy-haired Jesus....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Friday, during day one of the proceedings, it was revealed that no one had even acquired a building permit for the project. A lawyer for the city claimed that the Park District and Latin didn’t need one to build a large Astroturf field with bleachers, a scoreboard, and drainage pipes. Of course, a back porch would be another matter....

More of our our fall arts preview Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival there were a few precious moments that helped restore my faith in rock ‘n’ roll, and some of the best happened because an inexplicable scheduling decision had resulted in overlapping Sunday sets by Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall—two like-minded acts with like-minded audiences. Thee Oh Sees started first, and their bizarre but magnetic front man, John Dwyer, hollered on mike at Segall, who was setting up across the park; once Segall started playing, the garage wunderkind commanded his crowd to yell “DWYER!...

“It was a miracle of rare device: / A sunny Pleasure-Dome with caves of ice!” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But last month at a luncheon at the Arts Club Barr unveiled plans for a $21.5 million facility, already under construction at the southwest corner of Dearborn and Superior, introducing it as the “end of an odyssey” and as a metaphor for poetry itself, revealing itself “line by line....

About 20 minutes into Putin’s Kiss, a Danish documentary screening Saturday and next Thursday at the European Union Film Festival, filmmaker Lise Birk Pedersen drops in on a restaurant gathering of young Putin supporters that suddenly erupts in a beer-hall chant. “Ne-ver! Lie or betray! And don’t be a swine!” shouts one dude in horn-rimmed glasses and a knit hat, pounding on a table and leaping to his feet to face the camera....

Despite its disco-esque backdrop of fluttering silver curtains, Reggie Wilson’s The Tale: Npinpee Nckutchie and the Tail of the Golden Dek has a homely quality. Performed by four dancers and four singers, it features a range of music, from recordings by Grace Jones, R. Kelly, and others to live a cappella renderings of traditional songs–old blues, spirituals, hymns. The choreography is pointedly not fancy, often spare and in unison, and reflects popular forms like the Charleston, the cha-cha, and the electric slide....

Few musicians can match Robbie Fulks’s command of pop and country idioms, and practically none works so hard to subvert their conventions. On his new double live CD, Revenge! (Yep Roc)–one disc is with his electric band, the other is mostly stripped-down acoustic stuff–his often inscrutable blend of sincerity and mockery feels like a coping strategy: Fulks clearly loves the enduring tropes of classic songcraft, but the repetition and sentimentality that typically accompany them seem to drive him nuts....

Hey, everybody: by now you’ve no doubt heard the news that America’s favorite crystal-meth-snorting, male-escort-blowing evangelical Christian pastor is cured! While 99.9 percent of wannabe ex-gays struggle to overcome their homosexuality for decades, Ted Haggard was pronounced “completely heterosexual” after just 21 days of counseling! Don’t you just love a happy ending? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yippee! I’m completely heterosexual, too! And as everyone knows, once you’re completely heterosexual all your troubles are over....

I have a laptop at home. On occasion my best friend/roommate uses it to check her e-mail. On rare occasions her boyfriend uses it to check his e-mail–or so I thought. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s already seen your ass, SOPT, so why not write “Fuck you, [his name here]!” on your ass with a black Sharpie, take some pics, and leave them on your laptop for your best friend/roommate’s boyfriend to find?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before landing here in Chicago in 1982 Nasir Raufi and his wife fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for Iran, and then Germany. He owned a furniture store for a long time, then he opened Afghan Kabob almost three years ago at the intersection of Elston and Montrose. As far as I know it’s the only Afghan restaurant in the region, ever since the demise of Devon Avenue’s Afghan Restaurant, and the (supposedly) in-the-process relocation of Skokie’s Kabul House....