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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local rapper-singer James King, aka the GTW, has a colorful fashion sense; when I read that his latest track, “Bleach Pool,” refers to an ex who messed up his clothes with a pool of bleach (as the title suggests), it’s easy to assume the relationship didn’t end well. Whatever animosity exists between King and his muse is largely hidden in the dude’s lyrics for “Bleach Pool,” as it’s so easy to get lost in the texture of his soft singing you could make it through the track a few times without realizing anything bad had ever inspired the track in the first place....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Saturday, I helped to judge the Golden Rasher Awards at Baconfest again (lunch time shift only*). Unlike last year, when there were categories that rewarded both creativity and deliciousness, my fellow judges and I were simply arbiting the Most Creative Use of Bacon. This presented a dilemma in that some of the entries, while audacious in their employment of cured pork belly, were not necessarily things I’d choose to eat more than once....

There’s a sign that hangs prominently above the kitchen window in the back of the Charlatan, the new West Town Italian joint from chef Matt Troost and his partners, who also operate the University Village Italian bar-food spot Three Aces. It says Che cazzo fai?—a common Italian curse idiomatically meaning “What the cock?,” or, as an irritated American chef might say, “What the fuck are you doing?” Maybe that’s the reaction Troost has when he hears some of his waitstaff garble the language (while taking an order for wine, a confident server discreetly uncorrected my pronunciation of Puglia as “POOG-lia....

You may recall that when I got on my high horse about this Friday I insisted you watch a CNBC video that was vastly more of a watershed than the whole Cramer-Stewart thing, or should have been. Perhaps lost in the jawdropping meltdown of the CNBC hosts was the agreement of Roubini and Taleb that compensation based on disastrous short-term risks are at the heart of the crisis. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you may recall, in December aldermen bitched about being pressured to approve the privatization deal in just two days in December, but did it anyway. Then, as public outrage grew, aldermen Joe Moore and Leslie Hairston introduced separate resolutions last month calling for additional hearings on the terms of the deal and the performance of LAZ Parking, the contractor hired to manage day to day operations of the meters....

Best Rock or Pop Act aplatetectonicmusic.com. amyspace.com/projectmayhem617. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Reed formed this quartet, which also includes saxophonists Greg Ward and Tim Haldeman and bassist Jason Roebke, to interpret lost postbop classics written in Chicago in the late 50s. The rapport within the band is electric, particularly between Ward and Haldeman, who alternate sharp contrapuntal lines, cajoling ad libs, and inspired solos—and neither ever simply lays out while the other takes the spotlight....

What a concept: men dancing. Or, more accurately, men thinking about dancing. Chunky Move, a Melbourne-based group that won a Bessie in 2005, tackles it in I Want to Dance Better at Parties, choreographed by artistic director Gideon Obarzanek. He projects video interviews he did with five ordinary men who talk about whether they dance and why, then adds onstage performances by five dancers (including two women) who flesh out the anecdotes and, presumably, the men’s feelings....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the Bleader Tuesday, I had my say about that day’s column by Dennis Byrne in the Tribune. Byrne had argued that Republican views on abortion are more diverse and moderate than Democrats and commentators—pointing to Todd Akin—made them out to be. If so, I said, the GOP has been taken over “by an extremist minority,” for vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan is an absolutist and so are the authors of the abortion plank in the 2012 Republican platform....

If everyone were as skilled as Whitney Gaylord, Ikea might go out of business. Gaylord, who moonlights as a librarian at the University of Chicago, is the talent behind Maker, a custom furniture company offering everything from tables to beds to lighting, all of it built from wood and other materials sourced from the Chicago area. When Gaylord needs a piece of furniture, she imagines what she wants and then creates it....

Update: Hey, Tom Dart’s “in”. Update IV: Valerie Jarrett? Sounds plausible. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Update VI: I like Miner’s take on the flipside of “Chicago’s going to suck to be mayor of”: “Only the worst demagogues can’t imagine anyone but themselves correcting their own mistakes.” Eric Zorn isn’t surprised that Mayor Daley isn’t running for reelection, but my reaction is similar to Rich Miller’s: “My first thought is I never figured he’d go out while he’s held in such low regard....

In my experience, the most inescapable songs at this year’s SXSW were, in descending order of inescapability, Trinidad James’s “All Gold Everything,” UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You),” and “I Love It” by Swedish electro duo Icona Pop, with assistance from edgy British pop star Charli XCX. The first I had expected and the second was a pleasant surprise (turns out it’s a traditional Texas spring break anthem). “I Love It” differed from the other two in that it’s not a rap song and that I heard it less often in DJ sets than I did coming from the packs of girls singing it in the streets....

You couldn’t get much farther from the frothy romance of Bollywood than this grim but moving independent drama by Anurag Kashyap. Ruth (Kalki Koechlin), an Anglo-Indian beauty traumatized by her mother’s death and her sister’s suicide, immigrates from the UK to Mumbai to track down her absentee father. Her life there is defined by men and their crummy desires: she works in a massage parlor, giving hand jobs for extra cash, and her boyfriend is a miserable drug addict who badgers her for sex....

If you’ve stood at the corner of Michigan and Adams this summer and looked up at the banners on the face of the Art Institute, you may have met the expectant gaze of Kathleen Kelly Newton, a sun-washed, copper-haired Victorian beauty, resplendent in a froth of white ruffles and pale golden bows. Kathleen Kelly was born in 1854 to Irish parents in Lahore, the “Pearl of Punjab,” where her father, an officer in the British Indian army, was stationed....

So who is thinking of running for mayor? And who should be thinking about it? “There’s no obvious candidate,” says a prominent Chicago political operative, meaning no one who has it all: the track record, the money, the name recognition, the charisma, the connections, the energy, and the guts. Political insiders have been mentioning former city inspector general David Hoffman as a mayoral prospect for a couple years. The buzz spiked this past June, when he issued a blistering report on the city’s parking meter deal, and his strong second-place finish in the Democratic primary for U....

Chilam Balam Twenty-three-year-old Chuy Valencia is only the latest—and possibly the youngest—graduate of the School of Bayless to come out of the Frontera/Topolobampo kitchens and stake his own claim. After a pit stop as chef de cuisine at Adobo Grill, in late August he opened Chilam Balam, a cramped but not claustrophobic subterranean spot offering a small-plates menu along with a list of monthly seasonal specials—mostly more antojitos plus a few larger plates....

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Fultz replied, according to court records. They then agreed to meet up shortly for an exchange. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His mother died a couple of years later, and one of the cousins Fultz was close with was killed in a gang shooting. With his aunt working full time and raising other children, Fultz often felt like he was on his own....

The Sun-Times plays to its strengths, and one of them is packaging. The paper has turned its Friday movie coverage into a separate broadsheet section and ballyhooed it shamelessly. “Blockbuster New Section Starts Tomorrow” announced the front page June 21, and when the sun rose on the big day itself, the cover shouted, “Brilliant New Movie Section Starts Today.” The good news is that the Sun-Times would never dare boast like that if it couldn’t count on Roger Ebert to do some heavy lifting....

Q I’m a bisexual woman, age 20, and I’m threesome-ing it with my best friend and her boyfriend during a stay abroad. I knew the girl (who’s mostly straight) beforehand. The girl thinks it’s hot when I participate—i.e., when it’s all three of us in bed—but she gets jealous when her boyfriend and I do anything without her. This seems unnecessary, because I don’t get jealous when she’s alone with her boyfriend, and he doesn’t get jealous when she and I do things alone....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It rained, we saw, we konked out. The first day of the Pitchfork Music Festival will be remembered for some excellent performances and for a couple hours of rain that made many festival attendees realize just how irritating Saturday’s call for rain will be. Yet despite the weather, we were not deterred. Peter Margasak was there right at the start to snap a photo of the gates opening on to a muddy field, Miles Raymer was off to the side of Clams Casino’s set watching Danny Brown chilling (and possibly smoking weed) with fans, and a Dirty Projectors set recalled the H....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Monday, Lincoln Square’s once-great Delicatessen Meyer closed its doors, and I was tempted to declare it a sad day for sausage. The truth is Meyer had been in a downward spiral for months, something I’d failed to notice until I visited recently after a long absence. What was once a bustling, old-world-style German deli, shelves and cases packed with specialty meats, dark breads, European butter, German spirits and wines, and imported chocolates and candies, staffed by a disciplined platoon of starchly efficient, white-clad Eastern European ladies, looked like it had been looted by starving cossacks....