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As much as I hated it when I saw it last spring, I’ve got to admit that the Goodman Theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real got one thing profoundly right. Director Calixto Bieito added a character—Williams himself—and had him wander through the show, bearing witness and serving as a kind of human sacrifice to the god of addiction. True to his overall aesthetic, Bieito did his best to degrade this figure, who wore a cheap raincoat, drank from a paper bag, jabbered, and spat out a bottle cap during his death throes—a crude reference to Williams’s actual death by asphyxiation....

Julia Thiel Kennebunkport Pumpkin Ale: According to the Internet, this is Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale, labeled for sale at Trader Joe’s. It smells like gingerbread and tastes intensely gingery with a little clove, which I liked until the sweetness came through and overpowered all the other flavors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hoppin’ Frog Frog’s Hollow Double Pumpkin: I know, the name is a mouthful....

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....

Q My husband has a cuckold fetish, which we’ve indulged through two drunken threesomes with two of his best friends. The first time, he really had to talk me into it. The second time, he steered me in that direction and I took the wheel. I now have had sex alone with Friend Two a few times. My husband was OK with it at first, but now he wants it to stop....

There was once a Bermuda triangle of cocktail destinations in Logan Square. One of the triangle’s three points was occupied by Lula, that elegant old-timer—at least by Logan standards—who tolerates crowds but never rowdiness (she retires early). Charting a course north-northwest you’d encounter the second point, the rough-hewn Longman & Eagle—a place that not only encourages rowdiness but will offer you a place to crash upstairs. And to the southeast of the two there laid in wait that siren of craft cocktail bars, the Whistler: pared down, a little esoteric, also packed....

All too often, restaurants that claim to serve Kobe beef are party to one of the most pervasive fictions perpetrated in the industry. The menu at River North’s Siena Tavern advertises a “Kobe meatball,” and servers describe it that way too. The idea that this new River North circus might have actually been grinding the exorbitantly priced flesh, extending it with bread crumbs, and forming it into oversize meatballs—even $17 meatballs that are fluffy and light in their roasted tomato sauce blanket—was difficult to swallow....

“Eddie, you got it comin’. Enjoy every minute, my friend,” said Studs, who knew Eddie’s life hadn’t been easy. They parted, and several months went by before Studs ran into him again. This time Eddie didn’t look so good. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “How’s that romance?” asked Studs, and Eddie shook his head. “It’s over, Studs,” he said. “I had to let her go....

thursday24 Thursday24 David Daniell & Douglas McCombs, Jack RoseSunny Day Real EstateUrinals Friday25 Mark Mallman Saturday26 Otis ClayDeathSleepy SunAllen Toussaint Sunday27 Thee Oh SeesOs MutantesEvan Parker & Ned Rothenberg Wednesday30 Frank Rosaly Daniell and McCombs headline; Rose opens. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401, $10. —Bill Meyer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SUNNY DAY REAL ESTATE It’s hard to believe there was a time when the word “emo” didn’t carry a truckload of negative connotations, just as it’s hard to believe that you used to be able to smoke in restaurants or that people once communicated primarily by talking to one another rather than with acronyms and occasionally pornographic ASCII pictograms....

On top of all the media accolades they got for releasing one of the best records of 2006, TV on the Radio recently attracted some attention for being hipsters. Black hipsters, specifically–or “blipsters,” as the New York Times put it, disingenuously citing urbandictionary.com for backup. Fifty-two years after Chuck Berry’s first hit, white people still think of black people in rock bands as a novelty, a phenomenon curious enough to qualify as a pop-cultural trend....

Amy Schroeder was a 19-year-old women’s studies major at Michigan State when she created Venus in 1995. Feminism was the point of her education, and it was the point of her fanzine. “Though I was surrounded by conservatism, I started reading about the feminist movement and Gloria Steinem while I was in high school,” she told me the other day in an e-mail, “and it excited me just as much as the rock that was popular in the early to mid-90s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Northwest Chicago Film Society presents Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, screening in a new 35mm print. One of the most important voices of classic Hollywood, Lubitsch was a master of pre-Code comedy, adept at sizzling dialogue and sexually charged characterizations. On its website, the film society describes Ninotchka as “the ultimate Lubitsch picture,” which it very well may be—in fact, I’m hard-pressed to find any Lubitsch film that’s anything less than great....

This week Will Sergeant of Liverpool postpunk band Echo & the Bunnymen chats with moody-minimalist Chicago husband-and-wife duo My Gold Mask, aka Jack Armondo and Gretta Rochelle, about the parallels between Sabbath and Joy Division and their mutual love of Lynchian simplicity. Echo & the Bunnymen play the Vic on May 17. My Gold Mask play Ribfest Chicago on June 10 and Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (opening for Blonde Redhead) on July 21 18....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week Beyonce frustrated music critics everywhere by releasing her latest album, Beyonce, online and unannounced. (This complicates year-end lists, which music writers are often required to submit way before the end of the year due to publication deadlines and the growing impatience of the lists’ intended audience.) Well, Beyonce isn’t the only one who submitted a best-of-the-year candidate right before the finish line—British electronic-music artist Burial (aka William Bevan) also chimed in with Rival Dealer, his latest in a line of recent EPs on phenomenal electronic label Hyperdub....

Handlebar 2311 W. North 773-384-9546 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first time I visited the Handlebar, my former roommate ordered the “Meal of Three Sides.” But instead of mixing them up like any sane person would, he adamantly rolled with three sides of the smoked Gouda mac ’n’ cheese. “Best in the city,” he said confidently, handing his unread menu back to the server....

Dusty Groove 1120 N. Ashland 773-342-5800 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every bin at Dusty Groove is likely to contain some fascinating shit you’ve never even heard of before, but the store’s most berserk section is soundtracks. Sure, you can probably find the latest Danny Elfman opus if you really want it, but instead of the usual graveyard of cut-rate Batman Forever CDs there’s tons of mostly vintage film music spanning a range of styles, from biker rock and blaxploitation funk to spy jazz and European porno lounge....

If you drink enough lattes, you will come to realize that some are indisputably better than others. But, once you account for differences in quality, you have to admit, there’s a sort of sameness about them: espresso plus steamed milk, maybe a flavor shot or some sweetener. It almost makes you feel sorry for baristas. Why shouldn’t they get to experiment with flavors the way chefs and bartenders do? But you should exempt the baristas at Ipsento in Bucktown....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since the news came out that Cal Robbins — the infant son of incredible DC rock people J. Robbins and Janet Morgan — has a terrible and most likely fatal disease, a bunch of people have gotten it together to help them out. Apparently doctors and hospitals don’t accept scene cred as payment for their services, so on top of individual donations to the family, benefit shows have been announced all over the place....

Now that “slow cinema” is an established subgenre of contemporary art movies, Tsai Ming-liang’s filmmaking may not seem as unique today as it did in the mid-90s, when the Taiwanese writer-director first came to international prominence with Vive L’Amour (1994) and The River (1997). The films of Lisandro Alonso, Corneliu Porumboiu, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (to name three heavy hitters of the past decade) have familiarized audiences with a style based on long, static takes, minimal dialogue, and inexpressive performances....

In the apocalyptic world of print media there are the upper reaches—where a Sam Zell scratches to save the bankrupt Tribune Company from $13 billion in debt. And there are the lower reaches—where $8,000 is a big deal. That’s what D.C.’s alternative weekly, City Paper, figured it would save by dropping syndicated comics. “The art director didn’t know what to make of his comic either, so he sent him what I imagine was a form rejection letter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, I’m not going to defend Savard’s use of “Indian,” and neither evidently are the Hawks. Even though you only need to go back to the Wild Tchoupitoulas‘ great eponymous album of the mid-70s to find those New Orleans Mardi Gras revelers referring to themselves proudly as “Indians,” and it’s still the American Indian Movement that drives so much work for equal rights, we should all have moved beyond Columbus’s bonehead appellation by now....