Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m still trying to decide whether I like Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux, which played twice at the Chicago International Film Festival. I take that as a good sign. If I still can’t categorize my response to a work of art after sleeping on it, then chances are it’s challenging my prejudices in ways I hadn’t before considered. And if the challenge proves constructive enough, then I usually end up feeling grateful for the work regardless of whether I enjoy it....

The tenth European Union Film Festival continues through Thursday, March 29, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 16; for a full festival schedule visit chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every Other Week A prime example of European movies being Americanized, this 2006 romantic comedy about Stockholm yuppies could easily be set in New York or LA....

Time asked an interesting question on last week’s cover: “What if there’s no hell?” Was this supposed to be one more thing to worry about? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As it happens, I’d just finished reading a book that grapples with the idea there’s neither hell nor heaven nor even God. Obviously, this isn’t a new idea, and Douthat wasn’t making an empirical case for hell, simply observing that a sophisticated set of metaphysical suppositions should find a place for it....

A True History of the Johnstown Flood Goodman Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On May 31, 1889, after record-breaking rainfall, a dam perched in the mountains above the booming industrial city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, burst. Twenty million tons of water tore down the mountainside, sweeping trees, rocks, animals, and pieces of small towns along with it before landing on Johnstown. About 2,200 people died in a matter of minutes....

Tonight from 5:30 to 7:30 PM, both locations of Pastoral (53 E. Lake and 2945 N. Broadway) are hosting free tastings of cheeses from venerable British cheese retailer Neal’s Yard, purveyor of well-known cheeses like Keen’s cheddar, Cashel blue, and Colston Bassett Stilton. On offer will be a three-year-old version of its Montgomery cheddar, one of the better classic English farmhouse cheeses available in the U.S., and Ogleshield, a Raclette-style washed rind cheese....

The title of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art presents a spin on the old question about the artist’s proper response to war: What does it look like to paint a void? You could reconceptualize the loss created by World War II, for instance, as an act of creation—the war didn’t just coincide with the birth of the nuclear age but served as midwife to it. Abstract artists in the postwar era responded not just by painting the void but by literally attacking the canvas to reveal what was behind it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Remember Nicholas Day’s beer float piece from a while back? (Yes, I also need help.) Yesterday I tried a beer that I believe would make a fine beer-float candidate, provided you stick to vanilla ice cream like a not-insane person. I stopped by the Local Option at 1102 W. Webster and, finding their Surly tap dry (the bartender was in the process of switching the keg from Cynic to Furious), opted for Southern Tier‘s creme brulee imperial milk stout....

The Chef: Matthias Merges (Yusho)The Challenger: Ryan Poli (Tavernita)The Ingredient: Sea cucumber Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You either love sea cucumber or you hate it,” Matthias Merges said. He used a pair of chopsticks to poke at one, imported live from a Tokyo fish market, and it moved a little in response. When he pulled the chopsticks away, thick strings of brown slime came away with them....

Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris This morning great musical thinker Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris passed away at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Fort Hamilton section of Brooklyn following a struggle with cancer. He was 65 years old. Though Morris started out as a cornetist—first in his native California, later in New York—he was known best for “conduction,” a term he borrowed from physics to describe a way of organizing, shaping, and leading group improvisation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mariotti, I hear, originally wanted to do his Obama column for the Tuesday paper, but then he decided to put it off a day and wrote about the Bears instead. One problem: there’s an understanding in Sun-Times sports that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are Telander’s days. Mariotti can write on those days if he wants to, but Telander gets first choice of subject....

Anwar Congo seems like a gentle, soft-spoken old man, but in the mid-60s he murdered as many as a thousand people when the Indonesian military, capitalizing on a brief coup attempt against President Sukarno, decided to exterminate the Communist Party of Indonesia. More than a half million people died in the purge, many of them beheaded. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s unique and unforgettable documentary The Act of Killing, Congo stands on the rooftop patio of his home, demonstrating how he would minimize blood flow by tying a length of wire to a post, wrapping it around a victim’s neck, and pulling against it with his full weight....

“Someone, you finally realize, has sufferedyour exact misfortune before you. carrying grayed-out swirls—ghosts—to greed’s unbroken refrain.” Even fishermen put out of work by the spill feel too tied to the oil industry to hold much rancor toward BP, Hardin says. “Every family has a relative working in the oil industry,” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BP has barred employees and contractors from talking to journalists and banned media from observing the worst damage, but even apparently pristine coastline offers dark surprises....

You might be wondering why, in the week that the NATO summit has arrived in all its diplomatic, paranoia-inducing, protester-luring glory, we at the Reader have devoted so much ink to the topic of travel. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fantasizing about where we might go this weekend if we could leave—and keeping that fantasy in check, meaning within a reasonable budget—we compiled three itineraries for $100, $200, and $300, along with a wildcard one....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some years ago, a symbolist painter named Gail Potocki asked me to sit for her. I was flattered and promised myself that I would go to bed at a decent hour, wake up early, apply tasteful hints of blush and mascara, arrange my hair in artfully cascading waves, and arrive at her studio on time. Instead, I showed up more than an hour late on less than an hour of sleep, hair tangled, with Baby Jane makeup that I’d slapped on in the car....

QMy girlfriend and I read your column religiously, and I have you to thank for being comfortable enough with my kinks to tell her about my interest in BDSM. She is very GGG and has indulged all my kinky fantasies and discovered some of her own. Our latest adventure has her locking up my dick in a CB-6000 male chastity device. The play/sex has been superfun so far, but we want to be aware of any health and safety concerns, specifically damage to my penis....

Want to know the day of your death, so you won’t be caught off guard or make unnecessary dinner reservations? The Internet has the answer, as usual. Simply visit the Death Clock (deathclock.com)—the Web’s “friendly reminder that life is slipping away”—and enter your date of birth, gender, estimated body mass index, and whether or not you smoke. Thanks to this highly scientific assessment, I now know that I’ll die on Wednesday, May 14, 2053—which means, the site calculates, that I have roughly 1....

In a city crowded with tamal vendors there’s no one like Yoland Cannon. For nearly six years the 41-year-old native of Leland, Mississippi, has cornered the Chicago market for hot Delta tamales, the soft, wet, sloppy, spicy analogue to the standard Mexican tamal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Food writer John T. Edge, who contributed to the Southern Foodways Alliance‘s definitive oral history of the Delta tamale, has theorized that it developed in the early 20th century when Mexican migrant laborers began toiling in the fields alongside African-Americans, and brought along these portable meals that had the unique ability to retain their heat....

Michael Shannon and Ray Liotta play real-life criminals Richard Kuklinski and Roy DeMeo When did people start saying “porn” as shorthand for pornography? It sounds like a product of the home video era, when pornographic movies became easier to come by: a flat, workaday term for an increasingly familiar commodity. Compared with the more juvenile “porno,” with the negative sound of its second syllable, it’s difficult to imbue “porn” with any sense of outrage or taboo....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His observation reminds me of a conversation I was in a long time ago with some fierce litterateurs who argued Hemingway didn’t matter anymore, though, as someone eventually pointed out, it was Hemingway they’d spent the last 40 minutes rejecting. Over at the Tribune, film critic Michael Phillips wrote a eulogy that described Heston as “an emissary from an earlier era, a rock-solid throwback in his declamatory approach to acting, standing up to external circumstances of biblical proportion....

thursday24 Big Bad Voodoo Daddy House of Blues, 9 PM Marcus Intalex, Casper Smart Bar, 10 PM friday25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » cDAN DEACON & JIMMY JOE ROCHE Nerd-riot instigator Dan Deacon has been fingered as the hot thing out of Baltimore, and he’s trying to drag all the current and former members of the Wham City collective—the scene that birthed him—into the spotlight too....