Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was feeling pretty good watching it all go down. “Only children can touch big tuna!” shouted a woman in a bandanna as she and her cohort urged little kids to bum rush the barriers and stroke the glistening fish. Their parents snapped away. We were told the fish was about six or seven years old and about half its potential size....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Little Willie John had his way with the R&B charts from 1955 to ’61, his years at Cincinnati’s King Records, racking up 17 Top 40 hits—plus a few that broke into the pop charts, including his biggest smash, the finger-snapping “Fever” from 1956. His 1960 tune “I’m Shakin’” was released as the flip of his string-sopped version of the pop standard “A Cottage for Sale,” which reached number 63 on the pop chart but couldn’t make a dent on the R&B side....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t think you can discount the circumstances. The development of the story was more suspenseful than your typical sordid famous-person meltdown. If it had started with TMZ EXCLUSIVE PARTY GIRL TOTALLY DID IT WITH TIGER, I don’t think it would have the same legs. But it started as a mystery, and then got racy, and then got weird, and then got almost self-parodically excessive in its sordid details....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After seeing a trailer for the upcoming video game Far Cry 2, I have to say that my friend Gabe over at Videogum might be right when he calls it out for its “insanely racist depictions of atrocities going on right now.” But there’s an upside to Far Cry 2’s existence: it’s led to Adult Swim putting out yet another amazing and totally free MP3 compilation, this time an FC2-branded collection of contemporary African hip-hop called African Swim....

Five young South Africans relive the pain they suffered as children and adolescents at the tail end of apartheid in Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, created in 2000. One performer was abandoned by her family at eight and faced starvation; another watched his father withdraw from his home and family after forced relocation; another still had a gun shoved down her throat in gang-ridden Soweto. These stories, shaped in collaboration with writer-director Yael Farber, are told with raw emotion and could be overwhelmingly bitter, but they’re framed by theatrical elements–singing, dancing, drumming, stage pictures–that celebrate the performers’ continued vitality and creativity....

In the whole history of horror and suspense drama, there’s never been a more promising line than “Did you hear that?” Sound leaves too much to the imagination, which is where fear takes hold. As scores of radio writers learned in the 1930s and ’40s, banging out hit anthology programs like Suspense and Inner Sanctum Mystery, you could forgo the ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties as long as you had things that went bump in the night....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the mid-1970s, an aspiring young actor from New York, Charles Busch, came to Evanston to study at Northwestern, where he couldn’t get cast in other people’s plays. So he began writing his own. One, Sister Act, was a drag vehicle for himself and his friend Ed Taussig. “We put the play on as a midnight show in a slot where they usually showed cult movies,” Busch writes on his Web site....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For two more nights, Facets Multimedia will show Chen Kaige’s latest film, Caught in the Web, a topical comedy-drama about life in the age of the 24-hour news cycle. Reviews of the movie tend to describe Chen’s take on the zeitgeist as heavy-handed, especially when compared with the work of such younger mainland Chinese directors as Jia Zhang-ke. I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment, though I don’t consider any film by Chen to be without interest....

That’s $555 million in property taxes that might otherwise have directly gone to schools, parks, police, and so on and so forth. Instead it was funneled into TIF accounts that are essentially slush funds controlled by Mayor Daley. Because there are so few oversight bodies and the program is largely unregulated, the mayor is free to spend that money virtually anyway he likes. I suspect he’s holding on to as much of it as he can in order to pay for the 2016 Olympics, should the International Olympic Committee award us the games....

Fleischer’s Violent Saturday is a rare film noir in Technicolor and CinemaScope. Yesterday I made brief mention of Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958), which screens tomorrow night at 7:30 PM at the Patio Theater, in my post about the uses and misuses of wide-screen cinematography. I should have noted that it was Fleischer who got me thinking about the subject, as reviewing The Vikings prompted me (at long last) to start investigating his extensive body of work....

It seemed like a bad omen, when, after having been at Kitchen 17 all of five minutes, the owner and head chef was forced to jet to the hospital after slicing open his hand while sharpening a knife. Blood and all-vegan restaurants don’t typically get along. But the staff at the new Lakeview spot tucked just off Broadway at 617 W. Briar Place wasn’t phased. Offering an assortment of housemade-seitan dishes, tempeh burgers, and vegan pizzas, the restaurant has the look and feel of a vegan cafe unconcerned with flaunting any sort of pomp—a suspended chalkboard menu, a dumpy kind of cafeteria-style cooler up front, a Band of Horses-themed playlist, and a small gathering of cheap seating were crammed into the modest space....

Q I’m a 37-year-old single father with a 14-year-old son. I’ve raised him on my own basically since birth, with help from some good friends and nearby family. Overall he’s a good kid: gets decent grades, rarely gets in trouble. Our relationship isn’t perfect—I work a lot, and he’s a teenager—but no major issues. Over the past year, however, I have become increasingly convinced that he is gay. I’ve found gay porn on his laptop (yes, I snoop; I pay the bill and I’m his dad), he’s shown zero interest in girls, and he has always been a tad effeminate, though I know that’s probably an unfair stereotype....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s edition of the Reader, Ben Joravsky and I report on how little evidence the city can come up with to show that it was monitoring the terms of its $10 million subsidy deal with Republic Windows and Doors from 1996 to 2006. Specifically, we sent in a Freedom of Information Act request asking the city for “copies of all reports, audits, and other documentation produced by city of Chicago officials from monitoring compliance” of the agreement with Republic....

A month ago, as opponents of this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago and the civic authorities hosting it each laid plans against the other’s order of battle, the Chicago chapter of the National Writers Union spoke up for the First Amendment rights of the protesters. “In 1968,” an NWU statement began, “the Democratic Party came to the City to nominate a president. What happened then became a part of Chicago’s history: a massive public uprising of protest against an unjust war and a corrupt political system that created a massive local reaction within the City’s police department....

Julia Thiel The good (right) and the bad (left) MAK Modern Asian Kitchen has a clean, spare look—polished wood, gleaming metal, and neutral paint—that’s oddly reminiscent of a Chipotle. It’s set up sort of like Chipotle, too, with counter service and a menu designed around a few proteins, all of which are hormone, steroid, and antibiotic free. A half dozen “bowls” (consisting of a protein, rice, and usually some kind of sauce) are joined by a few wraps and a handful of soups, salads, and sides....

An eight-part serial running about 12 and a half hours, this 1971 comedy drama is Jacques Rivette’s grandest experiment and most exciting adventure in filmmaking. Balzac’s History of the Thirteen, about a few Parisians who hope to control the city through their hidden interconnections, inspired its tale, dominated by two theater groups and two solitary individuals. Some of the major actors of the French New Wave participated (Juliet Berto, Francoise Fabian, Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Michel Lonsdale, Bulle Ogier), creating their own characters and improvising their own dialogue, and Rivette juxtaposes their disparate acting styles; acting exercises dominate the first episodes (including one 45-minute take) until fiction gradually and conclusively overtakes the documentary aspect....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Samuel Fuller’s “The Baron of Arizona” screens Saturday at the Bank of America Cinema. As Hank Sartin reported this morning in Time Out Chicago, Bank of America Cinema programmer Michael Phillips (no relation to the Tribune critic) sent an e-mail to media last night announcing that the Portage Park repertory series would end after concluding its current season December 18....

Charles Madigan suggests a “Panel of 50”: “It should find some way to form itself from the ether [Ed. note: you’d have to draw a sword from a stone] and tap a candidate for the Senate position first and for the governor’s race later and for any other significant race in the interim. It should urge boycotts of any fundraising efforts but its own. It should put tight limits on what money it can raise and how it can be used....

Eric Simonson is clearly into mousetraps. His play Honest, which had a run this summer as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Repertory of New Work, gives us Gus, a smooth operator who’s written a best-selling memoir of his harrowing—and entirely fabricated—experience with addiction, homelessness, and the radical environmentalist underground. When a reporter arrives to confront him about inconsistencies in the book, Gus plays the poor guy so mercilessly that he ends up handing over his integrity to advance Gus’s fraud, and getting bubkes in return....

The Sunday before Christmas, Frank “The Sodfather” Balestri deftly scattered fistfuls of fennel powder, crushed red pepper, cayenne, paprika, salt, and Calabrian chile paste over 50 pounds of raw, coarsely ground pork butt and some sirloin. He splashed it with wine, then he and a pair of old pals, Ron Ranola and Phil Speciale, plunged their hands into the cold meat, kneading the spices into it and plucking out chunks of white fat....