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Last week the biggest thing in hip-hop scandals was the Rhymefest/Lupe Fiasco beef. (It’s a slow time for rap gossip, I guess.) It started with SOHH interviewing Lupe about the field of potential presidential candidates, even though he doesn’t “believe in voting on that level,” whatever that means, but came out pro-Hillary, saying that “Obama doesn’t really impress me like that,” and also that President Barry would bomb Iran. Rhymefest took Lupe to task on his MySpace blog for his bad facts and intellectual laziness....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Irish guitarist Cian Nugent established himself as a formidable exponent of American Primitive guitar when he was still a teenager. Five years ago he appeared on the third volume of Imaginational Anthem, the sporadic genre overviews released by Tompkins Square, and he went on to release two terrific solo albums, including Doubles (VHF) in 2011. He’s retained his ear for detail and melodic embellishment on his recent Born With the Caul (No Quarter), but he’s radically altered the complexion of his work by strapping on an electric guitar and surrounding himself with a full band, the Cosmos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What surprised me most about the screening of Paradise: Love I attended on Saturday night was how much warm laughter I heard in the audience. I was familiar going in with the work of Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, so I knew to expect shocking imagery that blurred the line between art and exploitation; I even anticipated that some viewers would leave early in disgust (as they did at the Chicago premiere of Seidl’s Import/Export in 2008)....

A couple of summers ago I DJed a corporate-type event (the annual rooftop party for my friend’s work) and, long story short, the two other DJs experienced technical difficulties and I ended up spinning on a backup laptop whose music collection I hadn’t updated in several years to an increasingly inebriated audience that wanted to dance to the latest Gold Coast dance hits. One girl requested something she kept calling “Avicii Levels” before finally handing her iPhone over for me to plug in....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Lizza’s article makes it clear that he has the institutional insight to join this small company of presidents who used moderate means to achieve previously unthinkable ends. I think of this as the Pilate tradition in politics. Someone like William Jennings Bryan or George McGovern could not have done this (neither–need it be said?–could Howard Dean), because they were runing Jesus campaigns....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Verily, the things of which democracy is made of: soporific WGN host Milt Rosenberg is UNDER ATTACK from angry angry Obama supporters, thus depriving Chicago of one of its best insomnia cures. You can hear the results here. I get no pleasure in saying the only person who comes out unscathed is guest Stanley Kurtz, who actually makes an attempt to discuss the only interesting thing about the Obama/Ayers connection–the mostly separate role they played in local public schools....

Hazard unto them who would call a culinary form unfuckupable: they may wind up eating cupcakes in hell, or Lincoln Park. Still, I submit that the doughnut has been largely successful in resisting the worst tendencies of those talentless prospectors who heaped such saccharine disgrace on the cupcake—so far, anyway. In the past year we’ve had doughnuts from Fritz Pastry; from the Doughnut Vault; from downtown’s new Firecakes; in a beguilingly wonderful PB&J dessert at Billy Sunday; and, the best of the lot, from the burgeoning empire Glazed and Infused....

Ed Burke We all know by now that Mayor Daley isn’t the most polished speaker—he’s known worldwide as a muttering Mr. Malaprop. But not every old-school Chicago pol is so uninspiring at the podium, and if there’s a Pericles of the City Council it’s 14th Ward alderman Ed Burke. Burke has served as alderman since 1969, the longest uninterrupted stint in Chicago history. He chairs the finance committee, which has oversight of most of the city’s major financial transactions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in 1998 I wrote a Reader profile of Columbia College professor Dan Dinello, whose latest film, Shock Asylum, was then screening in the Chicago Short Comedy Video and Film Festival. Nowadays Shock Asylum is most notable for being the big-screen debut of Stephen Colbert, who’d been collaborating on various TV projects with Dan’s older brother, Paul Dinello. But tonight the spotlight is on Dan as he retires from Columbia after 33 years....

Jason Cevallos of the Office first encountered dragon fruit at Next: Tour of Thailand, the second incarnation of Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas’s ever-changing Fulton Market restaurant. Served with rose water for dessert, it was “an amazing palate cleanser,” he says, so initially he was excited when GEB’s Dave Michalowski challenged him with the cactus fruit (also called pitaya). But while it’s touted by some as a superfood high in fiber and antioxidants, dragon fruit, as Michalowski warned, is next to nil in flavor....

In early March, Mike Oquendo and four fellow Latino comics did something he says is out of the ordinary: they put on a show in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. Better known as Mikey O of the Mikey O Comedy Show—or, for the March outing, Mikey O’s Comedy Cantina—Oquendo joined local stand-ups Gwen La Roka, Vince Acevedo, Abi Sanchez, and Joey Villagomez at the southeast-side Jovial Club, at 96th and Commercial. The show sold out....

Restaurants $$$ $15-$20 Blue Nile Ethiopian Restaurant We had conspicuously overordered—an injera-lined platter each of yebeg alicha (lamb stew), lega tibs (a red beef stew), a veggie combo, and lamb tibis (sauteed chunks of lamb)—but at meal’s end we couldn’t stop rooting through the remains to pick out the toothy, caramelized whole cloves of garlic buried there. The buttery pureed red lentils in the veggie combo answered my call for spiciness; the lega tibs, oily and red, and yebeg alicha, greenish and creamier, were both cooked in kebe, butter simmered with onion, garlic, ginger, cardamom, turmeric, and cumin....

It’s hard on the wallet to be a social butterfly these days–all those new dresses you have to buy so that people don’t see you in the same outfit twice! A penny-pinching party girl might head to Borrow a Dress Couture, a new boutique near Belmont and Sheffield that offers designer dresses for rent. Not only does it save you money (and closet space), it gives those who didn’t luck into a sizable inheritance the otherwise unlikely chance to swan about in creations by designers such as Badgley Mischka, Marchesa, and Alexander McQueen, which can retail for hundreds or thousands of dollars....

Running into exes can be, how do I put this, really awkward. It was decided that neither of you could commit to each other so the commitment was made to go your separate ways. Seems simple enough but sticking to it can prove to be, and how do I put this, impossible at times. People are creatures of habit so not falling back into the same routine is a hard. You shared a significant amount of time with another person and whether it is realized or not, emotional attachment was made along with any number of other dependencies that were intentional or unintentional....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A year or so ago, I sat down and read the four Gospels in one fell swoop and somehow the jaggedness of some of it shook my faith, which maybe was based more on visuals—Jesus tending his flock, and little children gathered at his knee, sunbeams bursting through storm clouds, and so forth—and then I read about how the early church cobbled the Scriptures together, which has to raise doubts in anyone’s mind....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pastoral will be serving free duck foie gras on homemade crostini at both its Lakeview (2945 N. Broadway, 11 AM-7 PM) and Loop (53 E. Lake, noon-6 PM) locations this Saturday in an impromptu celebration of the city’s repeal of the foie gras ban–never mind that the repeal doesn’t go into effect till later this month. This may be your last chance to taste the forbidden liver while it’s still forbidden; after that it’s just controversial like before....

In 1990 Bob Odenkirk briefly joined the Second City in Chicago, where he appeared in a critically lauded sketch revue called Flag Smoking Permitted in Lobby Only or Censorama. For his friend and castmate Chris Farley, he created the character Matt Foley, a motivational speaker who scared teens with a warning about his own disastrous situation: “Thirty-five years old, thrice divorced, and living in a van down by the river!”...

Christopher Polk/Getty Images It took too long to give these things out. Recently I got a chance to look at archival film of the 1949 Academy Awards ceremony, which was hosted by actor Robert Montgomery at the Academy Theatre in Hollywood. The big winners that year were Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, which took best picture, actor, art direction, and costume design, and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which won best director, screenplay, and supporting actor (Huston’s father, Walter)....

Julia Thiel Salmon, kabocha squash, edamame, white rice with sesame seeds, and pickles I’ve seen several comparisons of Arami Go to Chipotle, which is actually pretty odd if you think about it. I’m assuming that they’re referring to the dizzying array of options for the bento boxes that the Japanese counter-service restaurant offers: for a protein, you can get beef short rib, a chicken breast or thigh, pork belly, salmon, shrimp, grilled or fresh tofu, spicy tuna tartare, or sashimi....

From James Benning’s Easy Rider On Friday at 8 PM the Nightingale will host the Chicago premiere of Easy Rider (2012), a sort-of remake of the counterculture classic by famed experimental filmmaker James Benning (One Way Boogie Woogie, Landscape Suicide, Deseret). Like much of Benning’s work, this Rider is a landscape film that meditates on places as a means of considering the society around them. “I divided the original film into scenes,” the director has written, “and then replaced each scene with one shot filmed at the original location....