French writer Benoit Duteurtre’s satiric novel The Little Girl and the Cigarette (Melville House) opens with a conundrum: condemned man Desire Johnson’s last request is to smoke a cigarette, yet the prison is smoke free. The resulting legal quandary and Johnson’s serene, adamant stance create a media frenzy; the execution is postponed until the Supreme Court can rule. Seeing an opportunity for a public relations coup, the General Tobacco Company (located on President Bush Avenue) takes up Johnson’s cause....

Sometimes we don’t value a skyline until it’s ruined. Ugly and completely out of scale, the Conservatory is as crass a building as was ever put up in Chicago. Thirty years after it opened, I drive by on Lake Shore Drive still astonished that the gentry of Lincoln Park would inflict such a—well, to borrow from Prince Charles, carbuncle on themselves. Construction of the 29-story Conservatory was cursed: It began in 1973 but the original owners went bankrupt in 1975, and the unfinished shell sat there for five years while neighbors complained about breeding rats....

I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE ss Directed by Chris Rock | Written by Rock and Louis C.K.| With Rock, Kerry Washington, Gina Torres, Steve Buscemi, and Edward Herrmann Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With I Think I Love My Wife, Rock puts his color-blind ethic to the test, remaking a movie that’s not just white but white, bourgeois, and French: Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), the last of Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scully made its first appearance at the Great Taste of the Midwest in 2009. By the time I first tried it, at the Night of the Living Ales in 2010 (its fourth showing), it was already being barrel aged. “Goose Island took the gold with an oak-aged version of their painfully scarce and truly wonderful Scully,” I wrote at the time....

Cap’n Jazz drummer Mike Kinsella, speaking exclusively to Gossip Wolf, reported that guitarist Victor Villareal purchased a watermelon for $4 and brought it to the band’s practice this past Saturday. No one ate any of it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Girls Rock! Chicago rock camp completed its first session of the summer with a showcase of 17 kiddo bands at the Metro this past weekend....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steckles’s career began in England in 1960 on the sports desk of the South Shield Gazette in County Durham, wended its way to Manchester, crossed the pond to major Canadian papers in Toronto, Montreal, and other cities, and later led him to create a new tabloid, Caribbean Week, in Barbados and to somehow function simultaneously as a news editor of a paper in Vancouver and as the proprietor of a restaurant on Saint Kitts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s becoming apparent that the major labels are no better at making money through lawsuits than they are at making it through actual record sales. Recently the University of Michigan took the ballsy step of just saying no to RIAA demands that they snitch on their students, while the recipient of an RIAA “invitation” to settle out of court has not only declined, but has actually gotten Sony to back down, thanks to a well-written letter from his lawyer....

Barry Bonds came through town this week, in hot pursuit of Hank Aaron’s record 755 lifetime homers. The San Francisco Giants’ visit drew more than 160,000 fans, but with Bonds playing only one of the four games it seems clear most fans were there to celebrate the Cubs rather than boo or cheer Bonds. The media reaction was curiously waffling as well. After Bonds missed the first game, televised nationally on ESPN, Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus did a neat piece suggesting Bonds was purposely dodging ESPN games, perhaps in revenge for his reality series being canceled on the network last year....

Over the last couple weeks, while the eyes of the nation have been on the workers’ rights standoff in Madison, Wisconsin, two normally quiet Chicago colleges have seen their own labor uprisings. At Columbia College and Northeastern Illinois University, faculty and students are protesting what they call dictatorial governance and exploitation. In both cases, the plight of adjunct teachers—the dirt-cheap, dispensable day laborers of academe—is at issue. It’s a situation ripe for the push-back a union can supply—and here again Columbia has been ahead of the curve....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s only when I stopped to count that I realized that this is my seventh trip to Argentina in eight years, something that started when the Buenos Aires branch of FIPRESCI, the international film critics organization, brought me there to give three lectures in the fall of 2000. The couple who became my host and hostess–critics Quintin and Flavia de la Fuentes, both of whom wrote for the monthly film magazine El Amante and would later review some films at the Chicago International Film Festival for the Reader–invited me back after Quintin became director of BAFICI, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film, a remarkable event sponsored by the city every April....

Comics have a fraught relationship with the gallery. High artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons have mined comic books for imagery and energy, demonstrating the genius (and bankability) of the genre by finding worthy subjects in even the lowliest pop detritus. Comics artists have reacted to this elevation with a mixture of resentment and self-loathing; creators like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes first reject their own pulp roots in superheroes, then reject the high-art snobs condescending to them....

Chemically Imbalanced Comedy Dinner buffet and drinks, followed by an improv show at 9 PM, followed by more drinks and food, and then short improv games at 11 PM. Champagne toast; music and dancing until 2 AM. Advance purchase required. 8 PM, Chemically Imbalanced Theater, 1420 W. Irving Park, 773-865-7731, cicomedy.com, $50, $95 per couple. 2nd Story New Year’s Eve NYE party edition of the storytelling series, with four stories, live music, and a DJ after midnight....

Lead Story Compelling Explanations Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sticking with the classics: Accused of numerous violent crimes (including bank robberies, carjacking, shooting at a police officer, and soliciting the murder of witnesses), Andre Henry was confronted by prosecutors at his February trial in Philadelphia with a recording of what seemed to be his confession to a cellmate who’d been wearing a wire. Unfazed, he testified that the speaker was actually his twin brother, with whom he’d earlier switched cells....

Q I’m a straight male college student in a relationship, which had been going great. The only incongruity was that, for a religious reason, I don’t want to have penetrative vaginal sex before marriage. I’m up for anything else—I would eat her out, piss on her, whatever else—but not vaginal sex. I made this clear at the beginning. My girlfriend started bringing up how she wanted to have “actual” sex. I told her, “I love you, and if you need to fuck other guys, go for it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So sweet, in fact, that board president Todd Stroger, a south-sider, introduced a resolution honoring the Cubs pitcher that included some of the most eloquent language to flow from the halls of local government since Bill Beavers compared himself to a well-endowed farm animal: “Whereas Chicago Cubs pitcher and Cook County resident Carlos Zambrano is the staff ace for the first place Chicago Cubs....

JAZZ | Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How much time have you spent playing in Europe in the last year or two? I haven’t really added it up, but I’ve been going several times a year for the last decade. I think last year I was there about three or four months. A number of the projects that make the trips possible are with U....

Does a restaurant exist if Google can’t find it? Go ahead and type the words “Two restaurant Chicago” into a browser. Bubkes, right? As of this writing the only immediate pertinent result I can come up with is a not terribly helpful Everyblock post on the second page. To get anything relevant out of a search engine you would have to know Two—the second restaurant from Yamandu Perez, chef/owner of Hinsdale’s Zak’s Place—is located at 1132 W....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this year Films We Like released a two-disc set on the idiosyncratic New York indie Sara Driver, a filmmaking contemporary (and a longtime partner) of Jim Jarmusch who handled production on his early features Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver made her own directing debut with the striking mood piece You Are Not I (1981) and followed it with two surehanded exercises in low-key surrealism, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993)....

Valentino Rarities is a videotape collection of the silent film star’s early shorts. The Sulzer Regional Library is Chicago’s only public library that carries it. After days spent trying to find out from the library’s top brass what’s going on, late last week we finally received a response. Chicago Public Library spokesperson Ruth Lednicer said via e-mail, “The staff at Sulzer is in the process of consolidating the movies in preparation to move them to the second floor....

One look at the nightly specials menu at West Town’s Arami should jar anyone out of his sushi-ordering routine. Sushi chef B.K. Park, a veteran of Mirai, Meiji, and Aria, leaves the spicy-mayo-tempura-crunch frippery to everyone else, instead focusing on the fundamentals of traditional Japanese cooking: rice, fish, soy, seaweed. Arami’s BYO days are numbered, but I’d expect an interesting beverage program from owners Troy and Ty Fujimora, who also own Small Bar and the Exchange....