Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was quite surprised to learn in the past few days about some negative reactions to a passage called “Green California” in my just-published book, Slow Food Nation, and wanted to take a moment to try to explain my intentions and clarify what I believe happened. First of all, I want to apologize for any offense caused by this passage, whether to your organization or the many farmers who are your members and collaborators....

The fourth Chicago International Documentary Festival runs Friday, March 30, through Sunday, April 8, with screenings at the Beverly Arts Center; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division; Facets Cinematheque; Harold Washington Library Center; Portage; Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee; Univ. of Chicago Doc Films; and Wilmette. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $7 for seniors and students, and $7 for shows before 2 PM or after 10 PM. Passes are available for $250 (all screenings), $125 (20 screenings), and $70 (10 screenings), but only the first includes admission to the opening- and closing-night galas; for more information call 773-486-9612....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In my ongoing look at the conversion from celluloid movie exhibition to DCP (digital cinema package), I recently stopped by the Gene Siskel Film Center to check out its current set-up. The projection booth at the Siskel can accommodate multiple formats—not just film and DCP, but, as head projectionist Brendan Doherty showed me, everything from Quicktime files to old videocassettes....

Don’t Kiss Me, Lindsay Hunter’s second collection of ultrashort fiction—26 stories in 192 pages—gives voice to a strange and often disturbing cast of characters who abuse and are abused by the people around them. The writing is unconventional: single-sentence prose poems without terminal punctuation, short paragraphs in all caps, a faux-dramatic script. This formal experimentation is a decided strength of Hunter’s; so is her ear for pleasant-sounding phonetic figures, as in her description of Peggy Paula, a woman, like many here, devoid of self-esteem: “her lips cherry red and raw when she saw her reflection in the toaster....

Farben Presents James DIN A4 Berlin musician Jan Jelinek has been making music under various guises for almost 20 years. Early on (meaning the late 90s and early 00s), Jelinek was primarily known for being one of the pioneers of glitch house, a genre in which the skips and scratches of damaged CDs and brief snippets of music are restitched into a twitchy, highly digitized form of house and techno music....

Happy Valley, a searching documentary about the child sex-abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University, concludes with a scene of Matt Sandusky, the grown adoptive son of convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky, constructing a basement rec room in his home as his own small children romp around nearby. Matt plays only a small part in the complex story, but his sad situation epitomizes a movie that looks past his father’s crimes and the cover-up by Penn State officials to ponder the culture that permitted them....

Patrick Semansky/AP Photos Republicans are like: Zzzzzzzzz. Rooting through old files, I came across a Mike Royko column from August 13, 1992, that was headlined: “GOP sets its sights on Hillary Clinton.” It’s already started, observed Royko. “I’ve heard right-wingers describe her as a Nazi, a pinko, a baby-snatcher, and a vicious, ambitious, grasping man-hater. At least they give her credit for versatility.” Critical thinking on grudges is close to unanimous....

Top Shelf Productions Given its subject matter, it’s probably wrong to describe Jeff Zwirek’s Burning Building Comix as one of the coolest graphic novels of the year. Because it’s about just what its title implies: a burning building. So let’s just say it’s probably the most cleverly designed graphic novel of the year. (“Probably” only because the year’s just a little more than half over and a superlative would be presumptuous....

An OCD for Effort? Pro-Business in Hyde Park Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It wasn’t “Hyde Parkers.” Most of us didn’t have the right to vote on this proposal. It was 254 voters in the 39th precinct of the 5th ward, many of whom live in a single high-rise next door to the vacated hospital and think they are entitled to “air rights” and peace and quiet (no more ambulance sirens, either)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Akino Kondoh’s “Ladybirds’ Requiem” Akino Kondoh’s animation Ladybird’s Requiem, drawn in pencil, pastel, and acrylic, is among the 13 contemporary Japanese shorts screening in New Nippon Thursday 12/3 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The films “draw from the country’s rich experimental film and hand-drawn animation traditions—’flip book’ paintings, diary films, and time-based collaborations between avant-garde artists and musicians,” writes SAIC grad student Kelly Shindler, who curated the show for the Film Center’s Thursday night Conversations at the Edge series....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lil B, the 21 year old rapper from the Bay Area, frequently refers to himself as “the Based God.” “Based” is, like his other preferred slang terminology (“rare,” “swag”) is an extremely amorphous concept, but it’s generally meant to imply a state of extreme superiority over other human beings, and specifically other rappers. He is so based, according to many of his songs, that he can do things that other rappers and human beings—or at least ones who identify themselves as dedicated hip-hop fans—can’t....

I’ll return to the topic of that barrel shortly. First, though, who’s behind Nomad? Basically it’s Mitch Einhorn, cofounder of Twisted Spoke and owner of Lush. He’s not a brewer himself, but with his background as a chef and his knowledge of beer, wine, and spirits, he’s able to work with a brewer to get what he wants. For this go-round he used six barrels from the Stitzel-Weller distillery, five filled with that imperial brown ale and the sixth with a hoppy stout....

The Reader‘s first review of Moto (I didn’t write it), published shortly after it opened in January 2004, always bugged me. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Even back then it read like we were rejecting an invitation to play from the weird but possibly brilliant new kid on the block. A few years later another critic, Martha Bayne, filed a new, more positive review of Homaro Cantu’s “full-immersion experience” in the “lunatic fringe of contemporary cooking,” but the chef never forgot the first one....

Our three picks for dance Russian Masters A choirboy turned choreographer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Rite of Spring, the Igor Stravinsky/Vaslav Nijinsky collaboration for Ballet Russe, was so shockingly, discordantly new when it premiered in Paris in 1913 that the audience rioted. After a handful of performances, Nijinsky’s deliberately awkward choreography—for a fertility ritual that ends in death by dance—disappeared. In 1987, historian Millicent Hodson pieced a version of it together for Robert Joffrey, who also commissioned reproductions of the original sets and costumes (ancient Russian, perhaps with a whiff of Native America), and made it part of his company’s repertoire....

I grew up surrounded by different cultural influences in an old medieval city in Western Bohemia, right on the border with Germany. I always found it intriguing that all of these disparate elements were concentrated in a relatively small area. One way to perceive this difference was through objects, like the mixture of Czech, German, and Bohemian buildings. Every day as a child, I would walk past a 600-year-old Gothic fountain....

“Nobody talks to children,” observes James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. “No,” agrees Natalie Wood, “they just tell them.” Nicholas Ray, who directed the 1955 movie from his own story, earned a reputation as a filmmaker who not only talked to young people but listened to them. He made his debut with They Live by Night (1949), a sensitive treatment of teenage lovers swept into a life of crime, and followed it with Knock on Any Door (1949), about an impoverished Chicago kid who winds up on death row....

QMy boyfriend and I have been together for two years and we live together. Recently, his ex was killed in a car accident. They were not on good terms, and he often made scathing statements about her. I made the mistake of saying the following several days after her death (after offering him my sympathy on numerous occasions): “I don’t know how to help you grieve in this situation because you didn’t like her....

“I’m sure the mayor will be looking to the president-elect for some help from the federal government . . . “ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This meeting was no different. The council ran through an agenda that included—in addition to the text message ban and the Block 37 expenditure—approval of new energy efficiency standards for buildings, the mayor’s plan to consolidate several city departments, the issuance of $1....

Presented by Goethe-Institut and Facets Cinematheque, this retrospective on German director Werner Schroeter collects ten of his operatically inclined avant-garde features, and two of his short works. For a full schedule see facets.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Black Angel This eccentric 1974 film starts as a documentary on contemporary Mexico but gradually mutates into an avant-garde drama about postcolonialism in Central America....

To Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist and a curator at the Oriental Institute, the objects in the museum’s display cases represent the origins of modern civilization, tools people used to do their daily work. To the rest of us, they look like oddly shaped pieces of stone and clay. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A lot of professions in the modern world were invented in the ancient Middle East,” says Teeter....