On Tap The Bristol2152 N. Damen | 773-862-5555 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If we truly lived in a town that cared to eat well, restaurants like chef Chris Pandel’s beercentric the Bristol would be distributed evenly instead of concentrating in overcrowded, gentrified ghettos like Bucktown or Lincoln Square. The seasonal menu at this new arrival promises interesting variety at accessible prices, including on one visit a broiled eel sandwich, a perfect pairing of grilled mackerel and romaine in the Caesar, and “Scotch olives,” a mutation of a Scotch egg (a boiled egg encased in sausage and deep-fried) and Italian olives all’Ascolana (fat green olives stuffed with pork and veal and deep-fried)....

Serious question: I have always had a thing for Anna Nicole Smith and frequently masturbated to her Playboy photos. I’ve always felt some guilt about masturbation to begin with, but since her death I now feel a little creepy doing it. Do you think it’s OK to continue now that she has passed away? –Missing Anna Nicole Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But masturbating to pictures of the dead inspires only feelings of hopelessness and despair....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A little while back I did a column on webcasting and the egregious royalty rate the RIAA’s shill-men, SoundExchange, pushed through the Copyright Royalty Board. In it, I quoted a few theories from the webcasters at AccuRadio about how the rate hike might affect the industry, if it didn’t demolish it outright. Daniel McSwain floated a theory that labels—specifically major labels, due to administrative complications that could effectively lock indies out of the process—might use a legal loophole to offer lower royalty rates to webcasters who agreed to play certain artists the labels were pushing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In short: I don’t know. But compared to Gary Rivlin‘s account of the Tribune newsroom after Harold Washington defeated Jane Byrne and Richard M. Daley in the 1983 Democratic mayoral primary, I might prefer Kool-Aid: “For weeks no one could talk about anything else. The cliché about Chicago was true: its citizens follow local politics with the same fervor they do the Cubs and Bears....

The third Architecture & Design Film Festival runs Thursday through Monday, April 12 through 16, at Music Box, with 31 films screening in 15 different programs. Tickets are $11, with packages available for $45 (five tickets) and $90 (13 tickets). Following are selected films screening; for a full schedule see adfilmfest.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Detroit Wild City French filmmaker Florent Tillon calls RoboCop one of his favorite movies, but his 2010 documentary owes little to Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 Motor City dystopia....

Over the past decade or so, while the butter-slicked perniciousness of Paula Deen was undermining mainstream perceptions of southern food, there was a quieter, nonparodic revolution ramping up to take it back to its preindustrial agrarian past. That was when the sheer variety of local crops allowed a diverse family of differing regional cuisines to develop—as opposed to the monocultural set of foods the rest of the country has long held the south to possess....

Joan Mazzonelli and Theatre Building Chicago have been synonymous for nearly a quarter century. She went to work as manager of the theater complex at 1225 W. Belmont in 1985 and was promoted to executive director 11 years ago. During that time TBC’s distinctive missions—to provide venues and support for emerging artists and small theater companies and to develop new musicals—have taken shape and flourished. (The organization’s roots go back to a theater company called the Luther Burbank Dingleberry Festival, founded in 1969; Byron Schaffer Jr....

The Rathbones, the 18th-century whaling family at the center of Janice Clark’s debut novel, have a mystical connection to the ocean. Moses Rathbone, the family patriarch, could feel the water’s current when he was on land, predict the weather, see miles out to sea, and swim underwater for ten minutes. Most providentially, he could sense whales. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moses built a dynasty on the shore of Connecticut, sending out whaling ships every year, manned by Rathbone sons and grandsons who’d inherited the family gift, and bringing in whale oil and gold by the barrel....

In the racket over Rahm Emanuel’s residency, a key issue has been ignored. Emanuel claims he’s been a Chicago resident for the last year, as required of mayoral candidates, because he owns a house on the north side, in Lakeview. Some of his opponents say he shouldn’t be allowed to run because he rented out the house while he lived in Washington, where he was serving as President Obama’s chief of staff....

Michael Tanimura’s parents—both nisei, or American-born children of Japanese immigrants—were in their early 20s in 1942, and living in Gardena, California, when they were forcibly evacuated to an internment camp on Arizona’s Gila River Indian reservation. They were among more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans removed from their homes during World War II, allowed to bring only what they could carry. In Arizona they lived in mostly unfurnished tarpaper barracks without plumbing, insulation, or cooking facilities, surrounded by barbed wire and watched from towers by guards with machine guns....

It seems like everyone is worried about global warming, but you (or at least I) never hear anything about the lesser-known but possibly more important phenomenon of global dimming. Could you give us the straight dope on this, since no one else seems to know anything about it? –G.S., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First some vocabulary. At any given moment earth receives about 174 petawatts (174 billion megawatts) of solar energy, about 30 percent of which is reflected immediately back into space, mainly by clouds....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rapper Kitty (formerly Kitty Pryde) shot to internet superstardom last year with her “Okay Cupid” single, a woozy bedroom jam from the least likely rap star out there: an awkward white girl from Florida. But it didn’t take long to realize that Kitty’s the real deal: in the spring she toured as direct support for Danny Brown, one of hip-hop’s hottest tickets right now (I saw their show at Bottom Lounge and my heart skipped a beat when Kitty took the stage wearing a Danzig T-shirt as a dress)....

The Most Influential Article the Reader Ever Published “We learned to live with a petty tyranny that brokered black interests to the consistent disadvantage of blacks and prevented coalitions across class and race – blacks were only blacks. Poles were only Poles.” To beat Epton, Harold Washington didn’t need a lot of the white vote, but he needed some, and it wasn’t clear he’d get it. Washington’s race spoke for itself: Epton went after his character....

Cheryl Mann Gustavo Ramirez Sansano On the cusp of its 15th season, Luna Negra Dance Theater has announced that current artistic director Gustavo Ramirez Sansano, who moved here from Spain to take over the reins from founder Eduardo Vilaro in 2010, has resigned and will return to Spain tomorrow. His longtime friend, Monica Cervantes—the acclaimed LNDT dancer and budding choreographer who arrived in Chicago with him three years ago—has already gone back to Spain, and probably won’t return to this country....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a chapter titled “Not Baseball’s Golden Children,” about surly stars, Castle–an author, sportswriter for the Times of Northwest Indiana, and syndicated radio host of the seasonal baseball series Diamond Gems–writes about his methods for getting the notoriously recalcitrant Bonds to open up to an out-of-town journalist. Castle earned Bonds’s trust by swapping him memorabilia concerning his father, Bobby Bonds, resulting in a 2002 interview in which Bonds talked of the joy he felt in being accepted by the fans after his 73-homer season, following years of being considered a distant star....

AG: The other day when I asked you how long it took art followers to catch up with you, you replied that you weren’t especially approachable when you were young, and had a hard time being serious. You mentioned that early on your supporters were not audiences, per se. Can you expound on that?SK: I really liked humor in sculpture, painting, and conceptual art, so I was fine with being pretty inaccessible....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Move over Reese Witherspoon,” said Us Weekly when it was announced that Alaskan singer-songwriter-poet Jewel would star as June Carter Cash in the Lifetime original movie Ring of Fire. You might recall that Witherspoon won an Oscar for her portrayal of Carter Cash in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. One time Jewel played Jewel on The Young and the Restless....

QI have an awesome relationship with an awesome guy. He loves me and takes care of me. I’m GGG and he’s vanilla. I only draw the line at poop, animals, and children. But he’s never asked me for anything other than vanilla sex. Which is why I don’t know what to do. I went downstairs late the other night, and he was sitting on the couch masturbating while stroking the cat, which was sitting on his chest....

Jason McLeod, the (now former) executive chef at Ria and Balsan, challenged Chris Pandel, chef at the Bristol, to come up with a recipe using jujubes for this installment of our weekly feature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He would have liked to try working with the fresh fruit, but it’s hard to come by in February, so dried jujubes it was. “It’s essentially a date,” Pandel said....

The Minneapolis rock band Lifter Puller, who were together from 1994 to 2000, had a way of inspiring obsession in their fans. I picked up their final album, Fiestas + Fiascos, only about a month before they split and became enthralled with it too late to see them live. So when they reunited in New York in 2002 to play a farewell show for the East Village club Brownie’s, I spent two entire paychecks to fly out and be there....