Santina Croniser Carl Akeley’s fighting African Elephants, Sue the T-Rex, and a pterodactyl presided over the Lively Water Whiskey Festival With the popularity that whiskey is enjoying these days, there appears to be plenty of room for multiple whiskey festivals in Chicago. After all, WhiskyFest Chicago regularly sells out months before the event (in fact, tickets for next spring’s event went on sale yesterday, and VIP tickets are already gone)....

Florida Georgia Line Ever since rap music appeared on the cultural landscape it’s been positioned as country music’s diametric opposite: black, urban, and morally lax versus white, rural, and socially conservative. It’s a tidy explanation, and a politically expedient one, which is probably why it’s stuck around this long despite the ample evidence to the contrary. Spend any amount of time deep in flyover country and you’ll quickly get used to hearing gangsta rap blaring from pickups driven by the most shitkicker rednecks imaginable, or seeing dozens of retirement-aged white line dancers happily doing their thing to unbelievably raunchy Dirty South stripper rap deep cuts....

I bring you two insights. Your assignment is to accept the idea that in the newspaper world they could count as insights, not as self-evident truisms that managers of a more farsighted industry would have been honoring for decades. Thorson is associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and director of research for the school’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, whose mission is to “develop and test ways to improve journalism through new technology and improved processes....

The Chef: Michael Shrader (Urban Union)The Challenger: Ben Sheagren (Hopleaf)The Ingredient: Curly parsley Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The relative similarity of the two varieties notwithstanding—”they both taste the same,” Shrader said—curly parsley has been somewhat reviled by chefs and serious cooks for years. That may be a reaction to its former ubiquity as a garnish—though Mark Bittman praises it in How to Cook Everything....

Accanto Accanto shares a building and an owner with Lucky Vito’s Pizzeria—but that’s about all. With a separate entrance and brown-and-beige decor, the little restaurant exudes the fine-dining aesthetic of another era: polished tables set with look-of-leather runners, shiny silver show plates, and textured-gold hardcover menus. Chef Domenico Acampura is from Milan, but his small menu—and the big prices—reflect his stints at Cirque 2000 in New York and places like Dubai; it’s as continental as Italian, with contemporary twists....

When Dino Perez was a teenage busboy at Rinconcito Sudamericano, his parents’ Peruvian restaurant in Bucktown, he never dreamed that two decades later he’d be running the show. But earlier this month his mother, Elizabeth, moved across Damen to the kitchen of Rio’s d’Sudamerica, the Latin American fusion spot he opened in 2006, and helped him create a retooled, mostly Peruvian menu. The transition will be complete after November 15, when Rinconcito closes after 28 years....

Walking into musician/guitar repairman Geoff Benge‘s Lakeview home was what I imagine it would be like to drop by Don Draper’s place. That is, if Don Draper were a rocker instead of an ad man. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Benge greeted me in the foyer of a dentist’s office and led me up a long and winding stairwell walled with Mondrianesque Formica paneling....

Nowadays, the tropicalia movement and its ripples of influence are thought up here to be as crucial a part of Brazilian music as the berimbau. But as their Luaka Bop bio reminds us, when Os Mutantes (together with Caetano Veloso and Brazil’s current minister of culture, Gilberto Gil) went electric at a fairly trad pop-music event in the mid-60s, they were booed as sellouts to a North American imperialist aesthetic. Really, of course, the Mutantes never sounded like they’d been colonized by anyone (from this planet at least), but then, the eclectic, playful, and surreal have never sat well with functionalist nationalism of any stripe....

Who owns the Mercury Theater? Two months after the Wrigleyville playhouse and two adjacent restaurant spaces were sold for a reported $3.3 million, that’s still a mystery. Walter Stearns, the Mercury’s new executive director—and outgoing artistic director of Porchlight Music Theatre—says he’s just an employee; the owners are a “small group of investors” incorporated as Southport Theatre LLC. Stearns says he put the group together but isn’t part of it and won’t reveal the members’ names....

thursday2 cOUMOU SANGARE The liner notes to Seya (World Circuit/Nonesuch), the extraordinary new album by Malian singer Oumou Sangare, credit more than four dozen musicians, but such is her power and magnetism that even the biggest, most elaborate arrangements register as little more than artful settings for her dazzling jewel of a voice. And despite dashes of Western pop flavor—electric bass and guitar, Hammond organ, plush horn and string sections—the songs retain a deep connection to Malian music in both their core instrumentation and their basic structures....

Seems Pigpen Theatre Company was artfully primitive right from the start. According to a meet-the-artists essay in the program for Pigpen’s The Old Man and the Old Moon—running now at Writers’ Theatre—the company members were freshmen at Carnegie-Mellon University when they did their first work together, a short piece about a man hunting a killer bear. The school “gave us the keys to this multi-million dollar theater with all the latest gadgetry,” Pigpenner Arya Shahi is quoted as saying, “and we made a show out of puppets and cardboard....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Music Box Theatre is promoting this weekend’s revival of The Telephone Book as a guilty pleasure (“Mr. Skin presents!” the website boasts), though this 1971 underground comedy is not nearly as dirty as you might be led to believe. True, the film received an X rating upon its initial release, and most of its characters are self-proclaimed perverts....

The time has come to consider the curious contradictions in Mayor Emanuel’s views of how government can help save or create jobs. Something’s wrong here, people. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But at some points we have to wonder whether there’s one standard for the connected well-to-do and another for everyone else. However, Emanuel claims the city will save $100,000 by farming out the service to NTT while drastically cutting down waiting times and improving service at the call center....

The Tomorrow Never Knows festival began Wednesday and runs till Sun 1/15, with four days of shows at Lincoln Hall, Schubas, Metro, Hideout, and Smart Bar. Acts at Lincoln Hall include Tycho and Active Child on Thu 1/12 (sold out), Theophilus London on Fri 1/13, Grouplove on Sat 1/14 (sold out), and Two Gallants and Carter Tanton on Sun 1/15. At Schubas the entertainment includes Plants & Animals on Thu 1/12, Gauntlet Hair on Fri 1/13, a sold-out Chairlift date on Sat 1/14 (with Class Actress, Willis Earl Beal, and others, and White Mystery, Mannequin Men, and more on Sun 1/15, preceded by a closing-night party at 8 PM....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few weeks go Madigan left open the possibility that she might run for Senate instead. And why not? Incumbent Roland Burris is widely viewed as a goner, and the lineup of other potential contestants—state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, RFK son and Merchandise Mart president Chris Kennedy, Urban League president Cheryle Jackson—is relatively well-funded but weak. Madigan spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler declined to comment, but the word is that Madigan is torn between what could be a relatively straightforward path to a Senate seat and a reluctance to have to leave her young kids behind as she schleps to DC....

courtesy of Milk Factory Productions 3.5.7 Ensemble In a city as large as Chicago, where sizable musical communities consist of far more subsets and cliques, it’s all but impossible to keep tabs on everyone or to even be aware of all that’s going on. I’d seen the name of the 3.5.7 Ensemble plenty of times over the last half-decade or so, but until recently I’d never heard the group’s work....

Jessica Koscielniak/Sun-Times The “Bat Cave” The Sun-Times just took readers for a spin. They traveled Chicago’s ‘Bat Cave,’ as the banner headline across page one of Monday’s paper dubbed the 2.5-mile busway that links lower Randolph Street and McCormick Place. Columnist Neil Steinberg discovered the busway when Cook County Board president Tony Preckwinkle took it as she and Steinberg returned to the Loop from a visit to the county jail....

Chicago’s role in the development of 20th-century literature is well-known: the city has nurtured writers as different as Nelson Algren and L. Frank Baum, and Poetry magazine, founded here in 1912, published new work by talents ranging from Pound and Yeats to John Ashbery and Gwendolyn Brooks. “I didn’t discover Lovecraft till I was in my 20s, but when I did I felt an immediate kinship,” says Sherman, a 43-year-old British expat....

One of the animated images from Watchers of the Sky One must tread carefully when critiquing a documentary like Watchers of the Sky, which concludes its weeklong run at the Music Box tonight. The film nobly raises awareness of genocidal campaigns and the humanitarian efforts to stop them, but offers little in the way of visual interest or rhetorical finesse. Too often critics respond to the challenge of writing about films like these—call them content-driven docs—by focusing almost exclusively on the subject matter and issuing judgment based on whether the information is interesting or newsworthy....

The baseball season lasts a long time. This is a wonderful thing, but even when your team is winning, there are occasional blowouts and slow stretches—and to fill the downtime, every big-league announcer has to develop a knack for creative filibustering. Few are better at it than Hughes, largely because he has a ridiculously precise memory. Someone will note that it’s the anniversary of the day in 1998 when Sammy Sosa hit three homers against Milwaukee—and Hughes will casually recall that Cal Eldred was on the mound for the Brewers, it was about 83 degrees at game time, two of the homers were towering fly balls while one was a line drive to left-center, and he himself had eaten a tuna sandwich for lunch that afternoon....