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Now that the feds have cracked open the piggy bank, the rush is on to grab some loot before the next guy gets it. Americans for the Arts, a leader in the coalition of arts organizations that submitted policy recommendations to the Obama administration last month, recently submitted its own nine-item gimme list for the economic recovery package. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The grants, Americans for the Arts says, would “speedily disburse” money to “all the arts disciplines” and provide jobs for artists....

Avec At first, sitting on a bench between strangers in this cedar-lined, saunalike room makes me feel a little apprehensive, like I’m wrapped in naught but a sweaty towel. But as the wine flows and the evening grows long, everyone’s gabbing like pals, offering around bits of robust cheese or chorizo-stuffed dates and dredging juices off empty plates with warm rustic bread. Chef Koren Grieveson’s Mediterranean “peasant” food is paired with an ever intriguing and ever changing selection of uncommon wines and cheeses, many of which are as unforgettable as the Spanish sheep’s-milk torta del casar, a powerful molten gob of delicious funk that may forever remain my benchmark for strong queso (if only because I couldn’t seem to wash the smell from my fingers)....

Secret Sausage Another great story, thanks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, foodborne illness is a HUGE problem in this country, because huge commercial operations raise and process animals in ways that all but guarantee the contamination of the meat. I’m talking about the new, deadly form of E. coli, O157:H7, whose growth in cow’s stomachs is promoted by a diet of grain, whose spread is ensured by the conditions in feedlots (cows standing up to their knees in excrement), and that contaminates beef carcasses (upwards of 40%) when the processing is driven by speed not care (allowing stomach contents to come in contact with the meat)....

Ben and the Man Classic, Ben. Glad you finally got your picture after all these years. About time to start writing that book and put “Junior’s” career in the proper perspective before the Cardinal canonizes him. “Good Government is Good Politics” was the chant of Carter Harrison I, the dad of the original father-son Chicago mayoral duo before even you and I were born. Ol’ man Daley perfected it, though, and the kid learned the lessons well on daddy’s knee....

What American wouldn’t scoff at the stereotype that as a nation we eat nothing but hamburgers? But peruse the menus of the handful of Persian restaurants around town and you might think the average Iranian diet revolves around kebabs, hummus, and baba ghanoush. Azim and Goly Nassiri-Masouleh aren’t saying there’s anything wrong with those foods, but most Iranians don’t eat them every day—if they eat them at all. “When I was in Iran I didn’t know hummus or baba ghanoush,” says Goly, who runs a day care center out of her home and speaks in a lilting singsong that must keep her young charges spellbound....

With battered junk-shop turntables and scuffed vinyl, this Englishman layers leisurely loops into dense and beautiful compositions. On the recent Songs for Europe (Asphodel), he and fellow turntablist Janek Schaefer use secondhand classical, folk, and pop records procured in Istanbul and Athens to shape a portrait of two cultures that clash as they coevolve. The entangled bits of music seem to fight like an old married couple, tossing and turning under a thick blanket of surface noise....

Q I’m a young heteroflexible guy who’s been a “sugar baby” for a handful of wealthy older guys. I love it! I get money, I have fun being with them, and the guys seem to like having me around. The problem is that I just got with a new guy who’s really great except for one thing: he’s HIV positive. He says that his doctors predict he won’t have a shortened life span and may not even have any symptoms that would make his life uncomfortable....

Julia Thiel Preparing the sushi at Tanoshii Sushi Mike’s The original Andersonvile location of Tanoshii has built its reputation on the sushi creations of chef-owner Mike Ham—aka Sushi Mike—who’s known for the off-menu specialty rolls he’ll make on request. Customers who order the “Sushi Mike’s Special” tell their server what they like and dislike and how many rolls they want, and Ham will come up with often-quirky combinations involving nontraditional ingredients like dried oregano, olive oil, fresh fruit, green onions, and tomatoes (not all in the same roll, though)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The state’s governor (a former Cheney administration budget official) has leased the Indiana toll road to the same Spanish-Australian consortium that’s running the Chicago Skyway (he’s taken some political lumps for it, not necessarily for good reasons). A similar arrangement may be the only way the much needed (or is it unwanted?) Illiana Expressway will get built. Read the story by Rick Richards in the Michigan City News-Dispatch (free registration required; additional coverage here)....

QUANTUM OF SOLACE sss Directed by Marc Forster Written by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade With Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, and Jeffrey Wright. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or were. The classic Bond adventures with Sean Connery and Roger Moore can still be fun, but feminism and changing notions of gender have made their pandering feel garish....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Freedom and national security, McCain answered, beginning his rambling answer. “We can’t right every wrong, but we can do what America has done throughout our history, and that is be a beacon of hope and liberty and freedom for everyone in the world; as Ronald Reagan used to quote, a shining city on a hill. And so there are conflicts that we can’t settle....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Have you heard the news? The White Sox, not the Cubs, have obtained ace pitcher Jake Peavy from the San Diego Padres, contingent on Peavy agreeing to the deal. The Sox reportedly give up a package of youth including promising young pitchers Clayton Richard and Aaron Poreda, who will be missed. Yet otherwise what’s not to like? It commits the Sox to competing this season with the last of their core group from the 2005 world championship (I never get tired of writing that clause), but as Peavy is signed through 2012, with a club option for an additional year, he also gives them an ace in front of John Danks and Gavin Floyd for the next-wave Sox of Gordon Beckham and Dayan Viciedo....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until Fat Possum Records released The Dawg Years last year I’d never heard of Texas singer-songwriter Blaze Foley (born Michael David Fuller), and I’m sure I have plenty of company in that regard. A new documentary called Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah, directed by Kevin Triplett and produced for Austin public-access TV show Between the Scenes, screens at 7 PM on Sunday at the Hideout as part of the closing festivities for the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Attendance at last night’s Inside Chicago Fashion panel discussion at the Chicago History Musem, one of a series of events relating to its Chic Chicago exhibit, should have been mandatory for students of the city’s many fashion design programs. Local designer Anna Fong revealed that if she had to do it all over again, she would have majored in business and minored in fashion at Columbia College, calling her job 90 percent business and 10 percent design....

This film screens as part of the Polish Film Festival in America. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this era of worldwide video communication, the idea of national cinema has begun to lose its meaning; people are becoming too homogenized to recognize any kind of geographical border, too fixated on the present moment to bother with history. Can it be an accident, then, that the most nationalistic of national cinemas, brought to Chicagoans every year by the Polish Film Festival in America, is so locked into the past?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week in Omnivorous I wrote about Carole Travis-Henikoff, a cookbook author, gastronomist, and anthropologist who’s just published an entertaining social history of cannibalism called Dinner With a Cannibal. She grew up in her father’s Los Angeles Scandinavian restaurant, Karl Andersen’s Chatam, which in its day catered to a regular parade of Hollywood swells. Her prepublication party–an abstracted anthropophagite feast (the photo is by partygoer Bill Richert)–didn’t include her dad’s recipe for steak tartare, but given her point that we all have “cannibals in our closets,” I think it might come in handy if the global food crisis continues to worsen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The soul of CSW was its young editor Chris Sprow, who’d edited the old Chicago Sports Review since its inception in 2003. CSR constantly teetered on the brink of financial disaster, and in 2006 Sprow approached Reklama as potential investors. Owners Igor Golubchik and Vlad Veren had the money and believed in the idea, but they wanted control. So they brushed off the Review‘s owner, Tom Alexander, and hired Sprow to start a whole new sports paper....

Ever tried working your way through one of the world’s great art museums without a plan? Before you even finish with the Middle Ages, you start coming down with a case of Madonna fatigue—the feeling that you can’t possibly look at another canvas or statue depicting the mother of Jesus. In fact, given the enormous number of Annunciations, Nativity scenes, Pietas, and Assumptions in which she’s had a starring role, Mary is probably her son’s only serious competition for the title of Most Painted Figure in Western Art....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They soon have three easy-to-differentiate daughters: earnest Gert, athletic Jenny June, and jazz-kitten Nelly. A fourth child’s stillbirth sends Marietta into a deep depression, from which she doesn’t recover until the family adopts John N, whom they find floating down the river in a basket, like Moses, but with a snake for company. Shy and sensitive, John N makes a pet of the snake, talks to it, and gets answers in clear (if heavily sibilant) English....

People Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now he’s working on a sextet for the Seldoms, Whiff of Anarchy, that looks at group energy in a different way. The inspiration for the piece, which previews at the Loyola University Museum of Art 10/28 and 11/8, was “this cheesy show on Bravo about the best riots and disturbances of 2007: football games with riot behavior and other things around the world,” he says....