Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » OK, I’ll bite, particularly since this question comes up anytime a journalist gets heat for making up boilerplate quotes. This question came up during the Jayson Blair saga which, as you’ll recall, started over pretty innocuous falsehoods. Occasionally someone will make up something from scratch, like Stephen Glass did, but the more frequent sin is people cheating around the edges, because most reporters, even the least ethical of them, don’t have a death wish....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The great ethnomusicologist Steven Feld is responsible for this new release, chronicling a phenomenon that’s been active in Accra, Ghana’s capital, for about seven decades, but only recently came into public view. Por por music—the name is an onomatopoetic description of the sound—is basically built around the rubber bulb horns that were once ubiquitous on children’s bicycles. In Accra these horns were used on transport trucks and over the years their use expanded....

Pliny the Elder was thinking of Alexander the Great’s official painter, Apelles, when he coined the phrase “No day without a line.” The artist supposedly never let the sun set without making at least one thin stroke. The quote, in Latin, forms the title of a new exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes. Featuring 140 works made by 23 Spanish artists since 2000, Nulla Dies Sine Linea attempts to convey the heterogeneous nature of today’s Spanish drawing scene....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local avant-garde indie-rock collective Joan of Arc, the brainchild of former Cap’n Jazz and Owls front man Tim Kinsella, celebrate the release of their new record, Testimonium Songs, tomorrow night at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the museum’s First Friday series. In the midst of a selfie-themed art exhibit from Kelly Kaczynski, Joan of Arc will play two half-hour long cover versions of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter....

Michael Eklund at the fateful gas station in The Call There’s a poignant moment in The Call, the big-budget exploitation movie currently playing around town, where the villain stops at a gas station to fill up the car he’s just stolen. He has a kidnapped girl in the trunk, so naturally he wants to haul out as soon as he can. But the station attendant keeps offering his services. “Can I check your fluids?...

Orgasm and nuclear holocaust are the controlling factors in this horny, delirious fantasy by the talented Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin). The hero (Thomas Dekker) is a hip college freshman longing for gay sex but also open to the physical ministrations of a British party girl (Juno Temple); meanwhile, his best pal (Haley Bennett) has gotten into a hot-and-heavy lesbian romance with a fellow student (Roxane Mesquida) who turns out to be a witch....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Remember “metrosexual”? Remember people using, without irony, the phrase “secure in [one’s] manhood?” Either you’ve got a long memory, or you’ve just read the article “Straight Talk: A New Breed of Fashion Bloggers” in today’s New York Times‘s Thursday Style section. (Does it feel like we’re piling on the Times lately here on the Bleader? Whatever, it’s mid-January.) Can male heterosexuals feel “secure in their manhood”—which is to say, uh, not be gay?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the first 11 minutes of last night’s game, the Bears caught only two passes, both thrown by Manning. One was returned 48 yards by Tim Jennings for a touchdown. The Giants had possession of the ball for nine of those first 11 minutes, but the Bears and their ball-control defense were up 7-0. The Giants tied it up, but then Jay Cutler and Marshall got going....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the many reasons I love my neighborhood Cermak Produce is the regular availability of housemade salsas, usually guacamole, salsa verde, and picadillo but occasionally an oddball, such as a malevolent dark red “salsa diablo.” I’d suspect they’re an economical way for the store to use up over-the-hill produce if they didn’t look and taste so bright. The other day I came across a new one–salsa de cacahuate, or peanut salsa, a vibrant orange solution of ground peanut and red chile flecks that finishes with a slow burn and has only a very slight resemblance to southeast Asian peanut sauces....

Julia Thiel Two Brothers Revelry Imperial Red Ale I trekked out to Aurora on Saturday for the annual Two Brothers Summer Festival. I’d planned to bike there and take the Metra back, but the heat and humidity (as well as the realization that the bike trails that I was planning to ride on aren’t paved) dissuaded me. The crowd was much different than the bearded beer geeks and bros I see at most beer events in Chicago; the festival seemed to draw more people from the suburbs than the city....

I realize that movies are just products to the companies selling them, but every once in a while I’m reminded what a joyless and cynical world these people live in. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Tad Friend records an October weekend he spent shadowing Tim Palen, copresident of theatrical marketing for the elbow-throwing distributor Lionsgate (Saw, Sicko, Religulous, The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Deliver Us From Evil). Like every weekend in Hollwood, it’s an opening weekend, and Palen is sweating the box office returns for Oliver Stone’s W....

The 11th annual Columbia College literary festival offers readings, signings, and panels with novelists and Columbia faculty, this year under the theme “Cities of Words.” Events run Sunday, March 11, through Friday, March 16. All are free. For more info call 312-344-7611 or see colum.edu/storyweek. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alumni Reading Todd Dills reads from his debut novel, Sons of the Rapture, which “explores the surly restlessness of youth, the repressed anger of a still-divided country, and the confused joy of perpetual drunkenness,” and Marcus Sakey from his debut thriller, The Blade Itself, set in a Chicago uneasily strung between gritty old neighborhoods and gleaming new loft condos....

Potential Ariel Schrag (Riverhead Books) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ariel Schrag’s comics are autobiographical, but they don’t belong in the highbrow tradition of literary memoir. Her three major books—Awkward, Definition, and Potential—each chronicle a year of her high school experience in Berkeley, but they don’t do the look-back-in-sorrowful-wisdom thing; instead, they’re more like on-the-scene reports. Potential, which covers her junior year, was recently republished by Touchstone Books as a trade paperback (the first two came out earlier this year in one edition, and Likewise, about her senior year, comes out this fall)....

What soured Mike Leigh on Life Is Sweet? Earlier this year the British writer-director recorded a commentary for the Criterion Collection DVD of his 1990 drama, and at the very end, as the credits are about to roll, he admits that it’s his least favorite of the films he’s made. Leigh doesn’t explain, and earlier in the commentary he seems quite proud of, even moved by, certain moments. I suppose that’s the luxury of being Britain’s greatest living filmmaker: when you’ve got a track record that includes Secrets & Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All or Nothing (2002), Vera Drake (2004), and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), you can afford to be picky....

Something tells me the Brazilian movies are going to be a tough sell this year. But in the wake of Chicago’s unsuccessful Olympic bid, it’s worth noting that every year since since 1965 the Chicago International Film Festival has done what the 2016 committee only promised, welcoming people from around the world to compete and share their gifts. Following are reviews of selected films making their Chicago premieres through Thursday, October 15 (though repeat screenings after that date are also noted); for reviews of films premiering Friday, October 16 through Thursday, October 22, see next week’s issue....

Matt Maroni’s the man with the plan—the proprietor of chicagofoodtrucks.com and a crucial contributor to the proposed local food-truck ordinance, which is currently in the hands of 32nd Ward alderman Scott Waguespack. While he waits for the sausage to get made, Maroni’s opened up Gaztro-Wagon, an Edgewater storefront. For now, the namesake truck is parked out back. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cold sandwiches—there’s no AC here—include salmon with watercress, creme fraiche, and mache and a lobster-roll naanwich....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week some folks were reenacting the Days of Rage in Grant Park, but the reenacting of significance was happening in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where cops were using charges of conspiracy to commit riot–rarely seen since the Chicago 7 trial–to raid homes and jail protesters. Now that windows are being broken and protesters are being gassed you might start to see media coverage, but more disturbing, to me at least, were the pre-convention raids, which have gotten very little attention outside independent media and the blogosphere....

Audrey Niffenegger is really into cemeteries—particularly London’s Highgate Cemetery, resting place of Karl Marx and Douglas Adams and stomping grounds of the fabled Highgate Vampire. Niffenegger—whose best-selling first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, is now a movie, opening nationwide August 14—worked as a guide at the cemetery in 2004 as research for her new book, Her Fearful Symmetry. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between stints at two artists’ colonies this summer (Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan, and Yaddo in upstate New York) Niffenegger, 46, found time to make her regular pilgrimage to London, where she likes to “hang out” at Highgate and still gives tours of the cemetery....

Can an artist be ahead of his time but behind the curve? A bold original but a throwback to an earlier era? This violent contradiction may explain why comedian Ernie Kovacs—who died in an auto accident nearly 50 years ago, at the full flower of his creativity—still seems like such a singular talent. His 1950s broadcasts became the blueprint for satirical TV comedy, with their recurring oddball characters, their parodies of other programs, their fake commercials....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Or if you had a lover who decided to marry somebody else, there are magical techniques you could use to make the new spouse impotent or infertile. There were also people who used magical formulas to conjure demons. That was much more frowned upon. “The people who are using that kind of magic are chiefly clergy....