Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Spanish label Disconforme has recently launched an excellent reissue program of music recorded for Egrem, the Cuban state label. Thus far the titles have focused on the 60s, a time period sadly underrepresented in the U.S., as much for political reasons as anything else. There are a few CDs featuring the great pianist Chucho Valdes, including some music that predates his pioneering Latin jazz juggernaut Irakere, but the album I’m most taken with collects two killer albums by the trombonist Generoso “Tojo” Jimenez....

QI’m gay and a junior in high school, and I’ve had a boyfriend for a year. (He’s one year older than me, Dan, so relax!) We are out to our parents and everyone is supportive. We are not bullied or suicidal or using drugs. But we are frustrated! We had sex education in our schools, but they didn’t cover gay sex. (Big surprise!) I tried to talk to my mom about gay sex, and all she said was “please use condoms....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aside from squabbles over specific picks, it’s good that Obama is moving quickly with the econ section of his cabinet; the market is something that can be tweaked by news of something that will happen in the future, so it’s one step the president-elect can make to actually improve the economy without having any actual powers as of yet....

The 15th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 16, through Thursday, March 29, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 22; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Christening The hood trying to go straight has been a staple of the gangster movie almost since its inception, but the premise still resonates in this first-rate crime thriller from Poland (2010)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years ago, during a strategic planning session, the board decided that TBC had strayed from its mission, he says. It was supposed to be creating new work, but was mostly just functioning as a landlord, renting its three stages out to other companies. Determined to “right the course,” the board hired Cercone last January because of his “passion for new musical development....

The ongoing renaissance in South Korean cinema is too stylistically diverse to constitute a movement, but its major filmmakers—Park Chanwook (Oldboy), Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine), Kim Ki-duk (3-Iron), Hong Sang-soo (Woman Is the Future of Man)—share a taste for complex narratives that challenge social taboos. The most brazen of the bunch may be Im Sang-soo, whose work is founded on his irreverence toward national sacred cows. With The President’s Last Bang (2005) he created a slick black comedy around the 1979 assassination of President Park Chung-hee; the president’s son, Park Ji-man, was so offended by the film that he sued for defamation, hoping to block its release....

Q I’m a straight 24-year-old female who has known my fiance since freshman year of college. He has a fetish where he likes to watch women use the bathroom. I knew this, having seen some of his porn early on, and I accepted it. We all have kinks. But while peeing in front of someone isn’t that big of a deal, shitting in front of someone is hard. (2) Yes. However excited your fiance was about finally realizing his watch-my-girl-take-a-shit fantasy, he shouldn’t have pressured you to perform once it became clear that it wasn’t gonna happen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seasons executive chef Kevin Hickey, a White Sox fan, and Naha’s Beard-award-winning Carrie Nahabedian, a Cubs fan, go head-to-head Iron Chef-style in the Crosstown Culinary Classic Friday at 6 PM at the Four Seasons. They’ll prepare four courses of jazzed-up ballpark fare; there are also live and silent auctions. Proceeds benefit Common Threads, a nonprofit that educates children on the importance of nutrition and physical well-being....

The Museum of Contemporary Art hasn’t dispensed with the dick jokes. In fact, a whole room of “Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity” is devoted to artists’ anthropomorphic glosses on the modern tower, which tends to look like a penis even when it’s not trying. The centerpiece of the so-called “personification” section of the exhibit is Vito Acconci’s hilarious High Rise, a structure that visitors can hand-crank to the point of full erection....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone–a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. … Eating on the street–even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat–displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly....

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2008-09 season boasts a galaxy of international opera stars including Nicole Cabell, Lisa Daltirus, Mark Delavan, Natalie Dessay, Morenike Fadayomi, Vladimir Galouzine, Nathan Gunn, Gordon Hawkins, Jonas Kaufmann, Frank Lopardo, Lester Lynch, Matthew Polenzani, Patricia Racette, Deborah Voigt, Erin Wall, Guang Yang, and Dolora Zajick. Actors and supernumeraries will work with these stars and with renowned stage directors José María Condemi, Paul Curran, Herbert Kellner, Vincent Liotta, David McVicar, Elijah Moshinsky, Chas Rader-Shieber, Francesca Zambello....

Earlier this year Porchlight Music Theatre set the Harding administration to music in The Teapot Scandals. This new comedy for the Neo-Futurists, written by Sean Benjamin and directed by Sean Daniels, also looks at corruption in the Harding cabinet but focuses more on the 29th president’s fleshly sins and linguistic shortcomings. The result is an uneven but funny portrait of a man who, unlike W, is keenly aware of his own limitations....

When the world ends someone better tell the computers or they’ll go on talking to each other forever. Ask Kylie Loynd at the Polishing Stone, a tiny quarterly in Snohomish, Washington, who received an e-mail in mid-January that began, “Dear Kylie, Did you know that your membership with the Independent Press Association will expire 02/14/2007? Here’s a reminder of the benefits of membership.” National distribution had been every indie publisher’s nightmare, with newsstand revenues dribbling rather than gushing in....

Q My life isn’t horrible. I’m an American college student. Compared to most people in the world, I’m pretty well-off. I go to school in Bellingham, Washington—the weed is awesome, the weather is great, and there are lots of hot guys. Score! But! I’m a homo. And I didn’t know how horrible my life was until I got here . . .It seems like every gay/queer person who is involved in anything gay/queer on campus has this idea that gay people are so oppressed that we need to constantly discuss it and feel like victims....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1983, Steinski was a 32-year-old ad man–significantly–and hip-hop nerd who, along with his friend Doug DiFranco, won a Tommy Boy promotional contest judged by Afrika Bambaataa and other notables. Their winning entry, “Lesson One – The Payoff Mix,” a remix of “Play That Beat, Mr. D.J.” by G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid, was too weird to be much for dancing but found an audience on dance radio, and subsequently became a hugely important underground hit....

Miles Raymer Talk Normal Thanks to a delayed flight I ended up in Austin too late on Tuesday night to actually go out and do anything, so I began the second day of SXSW well rested and not at all hungover, which gave me something of an edge over probably the majority of attendees. Aside from the fact that I missed a Rob Zombie-hosted cocktail party that I’d managed to swing an invite to, the only major downside to the situation was that I had to spend the first part of Wednesday running around picking up credentials and wristbands for various unofficial and semiautonomous venues such as the Fader Fort....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Hideout‘s already pretty famous for treating their bands really well, but they’re stepping things up a little further for some Chicago acts heading down to South by Southwest. On Saturday, March 10, they’ll be hosting an all-day showcase of Austin-bound locals, and by “all day” they mean seriously the whole damn day. If you want, you could start off seeing Catfish Haven at noon and stick around all the way through to the 1900s’ midnight set and the Life During Wartime dance party afterwards....

Logan Square native Bill “Brenmar” Salas dropped his latest dance mix, 24k, this week, just before his Brooklyn-based band, These Are Powers, headed out on a European tour. The 20-track continuous mix features three Brenmar remixes/edits and two original tracks, including a collaboration with Nguzunguzu. It can be streamed or downloaded at soundcloud.com/brenmar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gossip Wolf exclusive! Mary Ralph, guitarist for Scotland Yard Gospel Choir—which recently returned to playing as a full band after a serious van accident last year—reports that her tortoise, Justin Townes Turtle, has “started renovating his aquarium home during the night....

What’s remarkable about Chicago’s schools is not only how deeply segregated they are, but how long that’s been true—and how blase everyone is about it. Except for a handful of selective-enrollment and magnet schools, the schools have been nearly all black, brown, and low-income for more than 25 years now. The schools were also segregated in the 1960s and 70s, but in a different way: the enrollment was about half white and half black, but the two halves went to different sets of schools, with conspicuously different conditions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the school year, 826CHI offers students writing education and one-on-one tutoring. The nonprofit, founded by McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers and profiled in the Reader‘s fall 2005 books issue, aims to replace the writing instruction increasingly wrung out of public school lesson plans. This summer, the Wicker Park center will host free writing workshops for students 6-18 in its storefront office at 1331 N....