Best Bets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the biggest hits of 1946 was William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, a wrenching drama about a trio of World War II veterans trying to adjust to civilian life. Stories of returning Iraq war vets haven’t gotten quite as warm a welcome: Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, released earlier this year, was a resounding flop, and Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave (2006) never even made it to Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday Daniel Raimer, chief legal officer of the file-locker service RapidShare, met with tech-biz figures and law enforcement officials at the Technology Policy Institute’s multidisciplinary Aspen Forum. Like other file-locker services, RapidShare has attracted substantial criticism because it’s seen as abetting copyright violations on an epic scale. File lockers are of course popular for legitimate purposes too, like sharing large files between collaborators—the project files for a digital-recording collaboration between two geographically distant musicians, for instance—but when combined with blogs and other social media they provide an easy way to share copyrighted material without the exposure of seeding on a P2P network, where snoops can sniff out your IP address and serve you with multimillion-dollar RIAA lawsuits....

Both Jason Kahn and Jon Mueller are percussionists first and foremost, but they’re concerned less with the impact of sticks on drumheads than with what happens after the sound leaves the instrument. There’s only one stark snare crack on their new Supershells (Formed), recorded in concert 16 months ago at Milwaukee’s Hotcakes Gallery–for the rest of the album they pile up metallic reverberations and piercing electronic tones that expand until they seem to press against a wall, creating a feeling of confinement that gives a palpable sense of the room’s lively acoustics....

The Chef: Blair Herridge (Browntrout)The Challenger: Ian Rossman (Frog N Snail)The Ingredient: Bailey’s Irish Cream The ingredient isn’t exactly in line with Browntrout’s mantra of local, seasonal, sustainable, either. Still, Herridge used local bread, eggs, milk, and cream for his bread pudding with coffee ice cream and Bailey’s caramel sauce. Video by Michael Gebert/Sky Full of Bacon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bailey’s bread pudding with coffee ice cream...

RABID RABBIT Many of the first recordings of the song sound better suited for a serenade scene in an early talkie than for a long bath with a razor, but in RR’s hands “Gloomy Sunday” is definitely miserable enough to push a potential suicide over the edge. Nearly 12 minutes long, it moves from sludge rock to an everything-is-melting psychedelic interlude and then into a vocal part where Lamont, Solotroff, and RR bassist and singer Andrea Jablonski sound like a gang of cenobites performing some sort of macabre musical theater....

VON HAZE Thanks to technology it’s now possible to get sick of a musical trend before anyone else figures out what it is. “Drag music” or “witch house,” or, in the terminology of a scandal-raising Pitchfork item, “rape gaze,” seems to be about wedding DJ Screw’s atmospherics (hip-hop beats pitched down to a slo-slo-mo blur suitable for tripping on cough syrup) to 4AD-ish goth (ambient synths and serif-heavy typefaces). Then again, despite the media attention the subgenre’s attracted, it’s still only a couple of months old and based on about three albums’ worth of material, so I say it’s still up for grabs....

Bearded, burly Tim Burton assembled a small crowd around a tall, moss-spackled hard maple tree just outside his log-walled sugarhouse, in southern Medora, Indiana. He dipped a cup into the tin bucket hanging from the sunlit south side of the tree and ladled out some cool, clear sap, sloshing a bit on the ground in the process, and then stuck a hydrometer into it to measure its sugar content. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike King, who began programming the CFS in 2003, departed in May to take a job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s cinematheque, but Michael Phillips (not the Chicago Tribune critic), who came on as a projectionist in 2004 and became coprogrammer two years later, is staying on. (His film-related writing can be found at Goatdog.) I’m always glad for the chance to see titles like these screened in a theater, but the real value of the series has always been its esoterica....

Tom Krell never meant to be an indie-world It Boy. Last October, when he started posting a series of free EPs under the name How to Dress Well, his blog at howtodresswell.blogspot.com was just an infrequently updated collection of short posts about music he liked (Bobby Brown, Fever Ray, Gorgoroth, Salem), consisting mostly of YouTube videos and the occasional spread of bite-size record reviews. That content provided some clues about what had inspired the music on Krell’s EPs—ghostly, washed-out lo-fi pop shot through with a surprising streak of radio R&B—but otherwise How to Dress Well remained a black box....

I think I know where Edward Kim is going with the mentaiko kimchi udon he’s serving at Mott St, the pan-Asian-street-food/night-market-inspired restaurant that’s his follow-up to the celebrated and more straightforward Ruxbin. In Japan there’s a current culinary trend called itameshi, essentially a Japanese take on Italian food that might produce, say, a tangle of spaghetti tossed with fish eggs, seaweed, and soy sauce. With the udon, Kim throws in a Korean twist, as he’s wont to do, dressing the noodles with a light, almost creamy, kimchi-based sauce that contains thousands of tiny pollack roe that lend a great texture to the soft noodles....

I’m a 22-year-old male from Canada in a long-term relationship. The sex is fantastic, we’ve always been GGG, and our bedroom habits include talking dirty and light bondage, which she loves. However, my girlfriend sometimes complains that I “degrade” her in the bedroom, and she thinks that this is representative of a larger lack of respect for her. I’m very respectful outside the bedroom: I buy her flowers, I write to her when she’s away, and I make sure to treat her friends well....

Governor Blagojevich doesn’t get to appoint a successor for Rahm Emanual in Congress, so he’s set a special election to let the voters in the Fifth District decide who goes to Washington. It’s going to cost about $2 million to cover the March primary and another $2 million for the April 7 general election, even though it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that the winner of the Democratic primary will take the cake....

Barbara Stanwyck (left) in All I Desire Last night nearly 150 people came out to the Patio Theater to see Douglas Sirk’s All I Desire—an impressive figure considering the screening had been booked at the Portage until two days before. As you may have read, building owner Eddie Carranza shuttered the historic movie palace late Friday night, announcing that it would be closed for the foreseeable future. Almost immediately the Patio offered to host the Northwest Chicago Film Society‘s revival of Desire, and the Music Box offered to host the group’s presentation of Portrait of Jason on Wednesday....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just listened to the new Marilyn Manson leak–OK, most of it–over at Stereogum, and I have to agree with their assessment that “Heart Shaped Glasses” sounds more than a little like the Killers circa 2004. But listen to the bass line and you can hear that Trent Reznor isn’t the only old-timey gloom rocker biting the DFA. And there’s something about the cadence and delivery of the vocals–and even the lyrics, a little–that suggests some exposure to Craig Finn and the Hold Steady....

As far back as the 50s, Roger Laguardia’s little restaurant and grocery in Bainoa, Cuba, was famous for its stewed oxtails. “It made him very, very popular,” says his son Jorge. “They still talk about them.” But when his father opened Bucktown’s Cafe Laguardia 13 years ago, they weren’t a big seller and appeared only infrequently as a special. Many Chicagoans will recognize pão de queijo as the warm cheesy buns served at all-you-can-eat churrascarias such as Fogo de Chao....

The notion that Tank Sushi and onetime Sushi Wabi owner Franco Gianni innocently named his diffuse small-plates joint in the heart of Boystown after his carpenter father, as Eater reported, is cute in light of the way the phone is answered during Sunday brunch, with a cheerful “Morning, Wood!” Ha. Get it? A boner joke in the gayborhood. Oh, you stop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just finished complaining about the preponderance of unfocused small-plates restaurants last week and here’s yet another, with its beet salad and pork belly, flatbreads and pasta, charcuterie and cheese plates, oversweetened cocktails and perfunctory wine list....

This Is the End From a sociological perspective, one of the more interesting things about the comedies of Judd Apatow and his usual collaborators—This Is the End being the latest—is their casual attitude towards marijuana. Even the outright stoners in these movies aren’t dropouts or members of a selective counterculture, a la Cheech and Chong. If they aren’t gainfully employed, then at least they’re conversant with the mainstream—in fact they tend to be the films’ most relatable characters....

The Columbia Journalism Review plays darts every issue with unworthy journalists, but its Darts & Laurels feature for May and June threw one at the entire “U.S. news media.” Launching a dubious metaphor, CJR took the American media to task “for failing to pick up a long-distance signal.” “There is a vast conspiracy among the press, especially newspapers, not to write about the biological studies, especially the epidemiological studies done in Europe,” Brodeur told me this week....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just the day after Kevin Warwick’s coffee saga ran in the Reader, the Atlantic‘s blog featured a post on new research showing all sorts of beneficial effects from drinking coffee. Most recently, a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that coffee consumption is associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes (interestingly, this holds whether it’s regular or decaf)....

The African Festival of the Arts, presented by the Africa International House, claims to attract more than 250,000 people each year, which makes it one of Chicago’s largest summer neighborhood fests. Its 21st installment, which runs Fri 9/3 through Mon 9/6 in Washington Park (51st and Cottage Grove), features an eclectic mix of notable musicians. Among the highlights on opening night are nu-jazz vocalist Julie Dexter and local house DJ Steve “Miggedy” Maestro....