Q I was hanging out with a guy who’s in a relationship. I told him nothing could happen, and we decided to keep things friendly. A while ago, I made the drunken mistake of climbing into the backseat of a car with him, and things got racy pretty quickly. He asked if I was on birth control; I told him yes, because I was, and he penetrated me and came inside me after one thrust....

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s bleak drama about the end of the world. Two wealthy sisters, one depressive and the other well-adjusted, try to process the awful reality that a rogue planet is about to collide with the earth. In a final scene both poignant and terrifying, the older sister gathers up her young son and all three of them lie down on the lawn of their vast estate, holding one another as the planet fills the sky overhead....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the White Sox and Cubs won Monday afternoon, it placed them both — however briefly — in first place.* The Cubs opened with a 4-2 road trip — the first time in more than 20 years they won two road series to start the season — then won an impressive home opener. The Sox, after a stumbling start, were equally impressive at home Sunday, then won their Monday start on the road in Detroit against the Tigers in a 10-6 slugfest that found the Sox’ Paul Konerko and Jermaine Dye hitting their 300th homers in back-to-back at-bats....

I spent only an afternoon in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, but the fearful silence in public places left a lingering impression. The reasons behind it are explored by writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in his accomplished first feature, about the Stasi, the country’s secret police, which had a staff of over 90,000, plus countless informers, and spied on friend and foe alike. The fictional story here, set between 1984 and 1991, focuses on the investigation of a popular and patriotic playwright (Sebastian Koch); that the captain assigned to his case (touchingly played by Ulrich Muhe) is mainly sympathetic and working surreptitiously on the playwright’s behalf only makes this more disturbing....

JAZZ | Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You could feel the newness of it, for its time,” Rosaly says. “It’s mostly plena [music], and there’s a life to it and messages that I never felt from salsa.” Since then he’s been researching the island’s musical past—recordings by Efrain “Mon” Rivera, Rafael Cortijo, and Andres “El Jibaro” Jimenez have resonated with him especially strongly....

Daniel Kraus really likes to work. Kraus, 34, is both a published horror novelist and a filmmaker, not to mention an associate editor of Booklist, and he marvels at how busy he is. “Mostly,” he says, “I blame my various careers on a screwed-up brain that, somewhere along the line, fused together the receptors for pleasure and work.” In high school Kraus commandeered his dad’s mini-VHS camera and began making short horror movies....

In the middle of protracted negotiations over the state budget, with health care insurance, education funding, and public transportation at stake, the state’s top political leaders broke for two precious hours last week to talk about my favorite municipal topic: Mayor Daley’s tax increment financing districts. When Blagojevich figured out what Daley and Madigan were up to, he countered by calling in Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley, until then the only elected official who had dared to criticize TIFs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve groused about the lack of a dedicated Indonesian restaurant in town so I was really looking forward to the dinner Agnes Fong organized Saturday–a buffet catered by the Kusumo family of Joliet. Lucy and Handojo Kusumo are from Surabaya, but have been stateside since 1999 when Handojo got a job as a researcher at UIC. They used to just cook for fun at parties, until word got around and people started hiring them out, notably for for events at the Indonesian consulate....

Last year Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez changed their duo’s name from Buke & Gass to Buke & Gase, mostly to help out phonetically challenged folks who were rhyming “gass” with “ass.” But though they’re willing to hold your hand when it comes to pronunciation, that’s all the coddling you’ll get: what makes Buke & Gase so magnetic is their insistence on mutating indie pop into something you’ve got to bend your brain around to understand....

In this evening of two conventionally offbeat one-acts, Scottish playwright Gareth Davies tries to use unusual situations to deliver some sober truths about marriage and death. In Three Men in a Basket, a hot-air balloon slowly dives into the North Sea as its passengers change from bickering clowns to resigned stoics. In Conversations With a Twenty-Four Piece Dinner Service, a man hides in the bathroom from his shrewish, plate-hurling wife, only to learn–too late–that all she needs is a little understanding....

The Chicago French Film Festival runs Friday, July 26, through Thursday, August 1, at the Music Box Theatre. Now in its third year, the series spotlights the sort of solid genre filmmaking that U.S. distributors tend to pass up in favor of art-house fare. This year’s selections lean towards romantic comedies and suspense thrillers, though the nation’s art cinema is represented too, with some naturalistic dramas (You Will Be My Son, The Dandelions) and formalist filmmaking (Alain Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Dirty Money, aka Un Flic) rounding out the program....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Big doings in Andersonville this weekend, what with the Wikstrom’s moving sale and the soft opening of Pasticcerria Natalina, a very promising Sicilian sweet shop. Proprietress Natalie Zarzour learned her trade from her maternal grandparents, who hailed from Palermo, and with the help of relatives in the old country she steeped herself in the island’s elaborate pastry culture, which developed over centuries of conquest by and commerce with the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and Spanish....

Every fall record labels churn out box sets and special packages—sometimes elaborate, sometimes exploitive, sometimes worthwhile—designed to appeal to fanatics or end up as holiday gifts (and often both). I suppose if you have no interest in jazz, an eight-CD box set of music by Coleman Hawkins might seem uselessly extravagant, but all the releases I’ve collected here put music first, bells and whistles second (when there are any bells and whistles at all)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The April issue of Harper’s has a feature about the Prophet-approved MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) the U.S. military feeds its Muslim soldiers, prisoners, and associates (Afghan translators, Iraqi soldiers). Writer Jen Banbury draws a comparison between the difficulties of supplying whole armies with Islamically sanctioned halal rations and the general challenges of our various wars. Anything with vanilla, which contains alcohol is forbidden, as are most mass-produced bakery items, which contain a “nonessential amino acid derived from human hair,” and of course, meat must be slaughtered within very specific guidelines....

DEAR READERS: Last week was made of problems. The bombing of the Boston Marathon, the explosion that leveled a small town in Texas, the rising tide of antigay violence in France, the North Koreans being North Korean. And when I sat down to write this week’s column—while the manhunt was still under way for the second bomber in Boston—it occurred to me that the last thing the world needs right now is more problems....

Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston in Horrible Bosses 2 Warning: This post contains spoilers. Cheap and increasingly desperate—just after Bateman acquiesces to Aniston, she says he’s free to defecate on her during sex. Later it’s revealed that Aniston sodomizes Bateman in the throes of passion. Where comic filmmakers once looked to TV, radio, and popular music for cultural references, the writers of Horrible Bosses 2 seem to have brainstormed ideas while bingeing on Internet fetish porn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In its first two years the Intonation Music Festival helped prove that Chicago could be a viable host city for large nonmainstream concerts–in fact it might’ve been a little too successful. The festival’s organizers recently called off plans for a 2007 installment, citing the glut of big outdoor shows planned for this summer, and are turning their attention instead to a number of smaller events....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Washington Post, January 5, 1890. Nobody kept stats on these kinds of accidents back in the day, but children have been the primary victims of accidental firearm discharges for as long as guns have been around the home. It’s still a major cause of child mortality today: In 1999 there were 1776 gun deaths in the 0 through 17 age group and 3385 gun deaths in the 0 through 19 age group, though the gun lobby likes to downplay the carnage by classifying the 18 through 20 year-olds as adults....

“One of the most popular acts at Woodstock in 1969 was Sha Na Na!” jimmy The saddest part is that the people who should be uncovering this kind of duplicity are now his employees. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perfect column this week dealing with the frustrating situation that people seem to constantly want a “retro” revival of everything. This might sound strange coming from the owner of the Hideout....

I don’t doubt that Mayor Daley has done himself a favor, and his ailing wife a favor, by deciding that 22 years as mayor are enough and the term that ends next spring will be his last. But he’s also done the right thing for Chicago. If politics were more reasonable in this city we’d be looking back on the Daley era already. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the first time since since Richard J....