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Problem solved. Crisis averted. Revenue has finally begun to flow to Internet news sites directly from the heretofore freeloading public. Those of us who feared this day would never come can drink a glass of warm milk and get some sleep. Kachinglers (of which I’m now one) agree to pay a flat fee of $5 a month that will be distributed among the Kachingling Web sites we favor. To support one of these sites we click on its Kachingle medallion, and from then on, every time we go to that site it keeps score....

I am an illustrator and designer and the owner and operator of Hotbox mobile gallery. Hotbox is essentially a delivery truck that I turned into an art gallery. I contact a lot of people that inspire me—sometimes they’re my friends, sometimes they’re friends of friends, but for the most part it’s just people that I see around the city that I think are doing something really cool. They’re usually pretty excited about being able to paint a huge truck themselves, to showcase their art in a really interesting way....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a telephone conversation with executives of his newspapers, Eason sounded relentlessly chipper, and he emphasized that all his company seeks from bankruptcy is the opportunity to restructure its debts. Liquidation is not being considered. “This is a profitable business,” he declared. “The company has a good cash flow. It has a good market position. Online revenues more than doubled in the last year....

When I got Gary Numan on the phone in mid-September, the 52-year-old electronic-pop pioneer was on his first family vacation outside England. He and his wife were staying in a rented house in Kissimmee, Florida, with their three children, ages seven, five, and three, and the family was preparing for a trip to Disney World. The kids were already riled up—I could hear them in the background. “They’re just horrible little things,” Numan said, laughing....

QI’m an 18-year-old straight female. Two nights ago, I went to a party. My ex-boyfriend was present, but my current boyfriend was not. I had several beers, and while I wasn’t drunk, I was tipsy. I had to go to my car to get my cell phone, and my ex offered to accompany me. When we got to the car, he pushed me against the car and started making out with me....

Q I’m a 27-year-old divorced woman. I married the first man I ever had sex with, and we had a very vanilla sex life. He refused to try any play with dominant/submissive roles. My fantasies have always involved submission, and my favorite porn features women being submissive. A Keep talking to your boyfriend, leotard, and you’ll be just fine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A I measured out three tablespoons of half-and-half, GSP, and you couldn’t drown a kitten in it, much less a GGG sex partner....

NEMETHFilm(Thrill Jockey) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nemeth, who mainly uses synth in Radian, plays electric guitar here too—though everything’s so processed it can be hard to tell what’s what. His washes of controlled feedback and thick, luminous waves of humming resonance hover, throb, and burst, underlined by a hypnotically regular pulse that’s either hammered out on percussion or gently implied by electronics. Bits of dialogue and ambient sound from the films add an extra layer of activity here and there, but the core of the music is a matrix of beautiful long tones on synth and guitar, flecked with subtle repetitions like the clinks of tuning-head harmonics on “Field....

WATCHMEN s Directed by ZACK SNYDER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, the cold war ended for real four years after the series concluded. We now know, more or less, what a world dominated by the U.S. looks like. Yet even after two decades, Watchmen doesn’t seem quaint or outdated; on the contrary, it seems more prescient with each passing year. In the comic, American dominance leads to paranoia....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The 1990s recovery provides a useful comparison. Like the current recovery, the 1990s recovery was initially relatively weak, with investment growth in particular resuming only about eighteen months into the recovery. But in the 1990s, investment growth recommenced without any tax cuts — and then strengthened modestly following a tax increase. Moreover, overall investment growth during the 1990s business cycle, with its large tax increases in 1990 and 1993, was substantially stronger than during the current business cycle, with its large tax cuts in 2001 and 2003....

For many reasons, I’ve been thinking about former mayor Jane Byrne a lot lately. As you can imagine, the pickings are slim because so many politicians are afraid of Emanuel and his money. As one operative put it: “If you put your dick on the table, they’ll cut it off.” Anyway, what we have here is Chicago’s version of a political catch-22. Any politician with the name and standing to take on a powerful mayor knows it’s crazy to take on a powerful mayor....

The Chicago Reader is one of the few alternative newsweeklies in the nation that still publishes long-form film criticism, and over the past 40 years we’ve presented work by such talented writers as Noah Berlatsky, Fred Camper, Cliff Doerksen, Andrea Gronvall, J.R. Jones, Joshua Katzman, Dave Kehr, Patrick Z. McGavin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ben Sachs, Lee Sandlin, Hank Sartin, Bill Stamets, Elizabeth Tamny, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, and Albert Williams. The index below isn’t complete yet—we’ve made it only as far back as 1993—but we plan to keep adding to it until it is....

Built by ladies, celebrating ladies, the second annual Chicago Women’s Funny Fest draws comics from LA to PA who are prepared to lampoon whatever aspects of the feminine mystique they find particularly hysterical: boy problems (Crush), beauty regimens (ManiPedi, Portion Control), girlhood (the Improvised Baby-Sitters Club), sexual identity (Women of GayCo), smarts (Math for Girls), boobs (Stacked), sweetness (the Cupcakes, the Pop Tarts, Pirate Sugar), and gross (Heavy Flo, Wisesnatch, Just the Tip)....

Ashtray Boy is coming back! They’ve announced a July 11 date at the Empty Bottle, as well as performances on WNUR and WHPK, July 14 and 20 respectively. This venerable indie-pop outfit set a new and confusing standard for global citizenship in the 90s, managing to be a Sydney-based band and a Chicago-based one at the same time. Dozens of Chicago musicians took a turn through the door (including Liz Phair, Mike Hagler, Dave Trumfio, Andy Creighton, Mark Greenberg, Geoff Greenberg, Reader contributor J....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like everything else by the singular writer-director Leos Carax, Holy Motors (which opens Friday at the Music Box) is so intensely personal that uninitiated viewers might wish they were provided footnotes before going in. To cite just one of the film’s cryptic gestures, between the final shot and the end credits, Carax briefly fills the screen with a photograph identified by only a few words in Cyrillic....

If you happen to have a car (and are sober enough to drive it), the possibilities are endless, which is exactly how I wound up at Johnnie’s Beef in Elmwood Park with Michael Sanchez and Monte LeMonte. Sanchez and LeMonte coproduce and cohost I Shit You Not, a storytelling series in Logan Square dedicated to, well, shit. Accidentally shitting your pants in public, to be specific. In the show, comedians and monologuists share stories most people would rather forget....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or maybe the blame lies with the journalists who wrote those first reports on McClellan’s memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. It might take a closer reading than they had time for to tease out what’s actually new and important in it (if anything is). A reporter on deadline would have skimmed the book for the seemingly good stuff, the passages that preach to the choir of Bush loathers who are McClellan’s likely readers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In my short review of Magic Mike, I posited that Steven Soderbergh had taken a cue from the 1970s comedies like The Bad News Bears in the movie’s sweet-and-sour tone. And what do you know, in a recent interview with MSN Movies, Soderbergh cites Hal Ashby’s Shampoo and The Last Detail as influences. I haven’t revisited either film in years (I really should), but since seeing Magic Mike, I’ve been spending time with the work of Bad News Bears director Michael Ritchie....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new House Theatre of Chicago fantasy, The Iron Stag King: Part One, employs stunning aesthetics and technical savvy. But Keith Griffith reports that the show is hard to follow and lacks relatable characters. A commentary on power and government may be woven loosely into the plot, but who can tell for sure? Another recommended comedy is Commedia King John....

Happy Monday. Was Lollapalooza fun? If you’re still coasting, high as a kite, on the scandalous grind session you had during the Major Lazer set and the subsequent Missed Connection you posted and plan to hear back from very soon, you should ignore today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “I Called the Cops,” from Iowa City’s Slut River. When I wrote about them earlier this year, I commented on the kind of vibes a band called Slut River is usually going to impart....

After 20 years of nonprofit programming, this was supposed to be a time for celebration at HotHouse. Instead what’s been playing out at the music and performance venue since last summer is a classic institutional tragedy: a runaway board fighting a possessive founder while the organization they both claim to serve suffers for it. Seven months after the HotHouse board officially dismissed founder and executive director Marguerite Horberg, programming has been cut back, staff has been slashed from eight full-timers to one, and a call has gone out for $220,000 in donations to be raised by the end of the year–$70,000 of it by June 30....