Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s Food & Drink, Mike Sula reviews Nellcote, the Randolph Row restaurant named after the Côte d’Azur villa where the Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street. Here, amid the wrought iron, marble, crystal chandeliers, and thronging see-and-be-scenesters, chef Jared Van Camp (Old Town Social) is offering an ambitious grain-to-table program, milling the flour for breads, pastas, and pizzas in-house....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » September 1993, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s a shimmering Indian summer Sunday afternoon and I’m walking alone across the Schenley Park Bridge, above what readers of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh will recognize as the Cloud Factory. I’ve just left a writers’ conference at the University of Pittsburgh where literary lions like Tobias Wolfe and Joyce Carol Oates have held forth, and I’m headed for WRCT at Carnegie Mellon University to talk about it on a friend’s radio magazine....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David O. Russell’s fictionalized drama about Abscam, the FBI sting operation that nailed more than a half dozen U.S. legislators on bribery and conspiracy charges, made me nostalgic for the 70s—not for all the bad hair, splayed collars, gold chains, and plunging necklines, but for an era when grown-up movies like this one came out almost every week. Scripted by Eric Warren Singer (The International) and given a comic punch-up by Russell, it centers on two con-artists-in-love (Christian Bale and Amy Adams) who are sucked into the operation by a dodgy FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) and forced to entrap the beloved mayor of Trenton, New Jersey (Jeremy Renner, playing a role based on Congressman Frank Thompson)....

Experimental Sound Studio presents the Outer Ear Festival of Sound, an annual celebration of “sonic arts” that this year runs through December 13, featuring sound installations, performances, workshops, and more. The festival kicks off with the sound installation 25 Acres of Coins, presented in conjunction with the Poetry Center of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute‘s sound department; an opening reception runs from 4:30 till 6 PM on Thursday, November 5, at Sullivan Galleries (36 S....

This makes the third Pipeworks beer I’ve reviewed in six months of writing this column—excessive from certain points of view, I admit, but restrained when you consider the alarming number of releases the brewery has rolled out since October. My excuse today is that Pipeworks posted to Twitter that they were “very proud” of Raspberry Truffle Abduction, and the last time I heard such strong language from them, it was cofounder Beejay Oslon telling me he thought Citra Ninja was the best beer he’d made so far—a sentiment I turned out to share....

It’s been a big year for Rockie Fresh. The 19-year-old rapper entered 2010 untested, having just released his debut mix tape, the spotty but promising Rockie’s Modern Life, which got his name onto local hip-hop blogs like Fake Shore Drive for the first time. He’s heading into 2011 a full-time artist, with some big-name endorsements from the Chicago hip-hop scene and beyond. His second mix tape, The Otherside, came out two weeks ago, and it’s already inspired Urb magazine to call him “the Derek [sic] Rose of rap Chi-Town has been waiting for....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are several different levels of fucked-up in this situation. Cannon and Drama aren’t street-level bootleggers, for one. Check out the video report from Atlanta’s Fox affiliate and you’ll see that the CDs (“mix tapes” are usually CDs) the authorities are seizing (check out those butch FBI-style RIAA windbreakers) aren’t burned copies of the new Young Jeezy. They’re the latest installment of the latest Gangsta Grillz mix tape, and every rapper on it is there by his own free will, not from getting his shit jacked over Limewire....

QI’m writing on behalf of a 19-year-old guy with cerebral palsy. A“Your reader shouldn’t make assumptions about what having sex or being sexual means to his friend,” says Cory Silverberg, coauthor of The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability. What if your friend doesn’t want to get into bed with a girl, but head into a dungeon with one? Or two? Or what if your friend is gay? Or what if all he really wants is to make it with a plush toy or a picnic table?...

Q You are known far and wide as an arbiter of all aspects of sex and especially definitions of sex, so we’re hoping that you’ll give your definitive opinion on an interesting conundrum. A Let’s say you and I met in a bar, DEFINE, while the wife was out of town, and we hit it off. And let’s say I took you home, stripped you naked, made out with you, sucked your dick, ate your ass, spanked you, tossed you in a sling, fist-fucked you, and then—with my right arm buried up to my elbow in your ass—slowly stroked you with my left hand until you blew a massive load all over your stomach, chest, and face....

Bryan Murray Jon Irabagon Morton Grove native Jon Irabagon, who studied jazz at DePaul University, has become one of the strongest, most flexible, and daring saxophonists at work today. Since he moved to New York in 2001, his playing and reputation have been rising steadily. In recent months he’s appeared on a slew of good records—all of which offer plenty of proof of just how good he’s become. As usual, Irabagon gets to strut the full diapason of his abilities and ideas in Mostly Other People Do the Killing, the notorious piss-take quartet led by bassist Moppa Elliott that simultaneously celebrates, deconstructs, and mocks the entire history of jazz (the band is rounded out by drummer Kevin Shea and monster trumpeter Peter Evans)....

On this date 42 years ago—February 10, 1969—federal district judge Richard B. Austin issued a ruling aimed squarely at a persistent Chicago problem. “Existing patterns of racial segregation must be reversed if there is to be a chance of averting the desperately intensifying division of whites and Negroes in Chicago,” Austin wrote. Lucky we fixed all that. But most African-Americans are clustered in two areas, as they were in the 1960s: a massive one on the south side, and a smaller one on the far west side....

As I type this, I’m waiting for my breakfast to be ready. The recipe I’m following, Tangy Tamarind Chickpeas, from the new The Indian Slow Cooker by former CLTV reporter Anupy Singla, said it was only supposed to take 12 hours. But it’s been cooking for about four days, and the chickpeas, which still have the texture and taste of hard, hot chalk balls, show no sign of absorbing the continually replenished liquid they’ve been roiling in off and on all week....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rugai said that last month she had decided on her accord that the plan needed a fourth round of revisions in order to satisfy her colleagues and make sure community leaders across Chicago wouldn’t be freaked out or angry that the council had passed something that critics dubbed—quite incorrectly, mind you—“the toxic dirt ordinance.” “I had decided to hold this long before our offices received hundreds of robocalls using inflammatory language,” she declared....

The city has downsized this year’s Taste of Chicago, cutting its length in half and moving it off the Fourth of July holiday, but it’s still bringing a diverse and impressive music schedule to Grant Park. The Petrillo Music Shell, at the northeast corner of Columbus and Jackson, hosts the big national names each evening at 5:30 PM (except Sun 7/15, when the show starts at 3:30), and for the first time the city is selling reserved seats close to the stage—they’re $25 a pop, but thankfully it’s still free to watch from the lawn....

Richard Linklater messes with Texas again, seeking comic inspiration from his home state for the first time since Dazed and Confused (1993). His source material here is a Texas Monthly article about the 1996 murder of a wealthy 81-year-old widow, Marjorie Nugent, by her 39-year-old gay companion, Bernhardt Tiede, in small-town Carthage. The story provides great roles for Jack Black as the sunny title character, Shirley MacLaine as his dyspeptic victim, and Matthew McConaughey as the good-old-boy D....

Monday, May 18, was a big day for Chicagoans who care about where their food comes from. More than 600 people descended on the Harold Washington Library to hear Michael Pollan preach the gospel of local, seasonal, sustainable eating. Hundreds more flocked to the grand-opening party for the new 75,000-square-foot Whole Foods at Sheffield and Kingsbury. And about 20 gardeners, foragers, artists, and activists congregated at a Little Village cottage to meet a man from LA....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to “How Al Jazeera America Tackled the Crisis Over Syria,” a report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, AJA covered the “Syrian crisis” like the other cable news channels, not like a story you’d think it was born to own. Its focus was on whether the U.S. should respond militarily, and like CNN and the others, the message it most frequently conveyed was yes, the U....

Everybody’s talking about Mayor Emanuel’s proposal to create a “trust fund” that would use private money to build infrastructure, though nobody seems to understand how it would actually work. But that’s not stopping aldermen from getting ready to approve it as soon as next week. Let’s review what we know—or think we know—about the trust, and what no one has been willing or able to explain. WHAT WE KNOW: Emanuel has proposed a pool of money to be raised by private investors and managed by a nonprofit organization overseen by five mayoral appointees, one of whom would be James A....

After five years of commuting by New York-based former artistic director Lawrence Weschler—a situation that stretched him thin and created a second-city vibe around the whole affair—the Chicago Humanities Festival has hired itself a local leader. As a very little kid, Bunzl says, one of the first differences he noticed between himself and his playmates was that they were surrounded by extended family, while his relatives were scattered across the globe....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a good reason it was named Upton’s Breakroom. With four tables and only room enough to seat eight to a dozen customers (a dozen is being generous, by the way), the narrow cafe attached to the Upton’s seitan factory at the corner of Grand and Hoyne is meant more for the vegan to-go crowd than for those who like to linger....