I have to admit that I’ve fallen off from picking up monthly comics, I’ve mostly relegated my reading to the trade collections. But loyal friends have been talking up Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass enough to make me change my slackerly ways, and luckily, the first collection is out in just a few weeks. And now, there’s a trailer that has me excited for a movie based on a comic book I’ve never read. Well done:

UPDATE: CT’s family has posted to the Facebook page that he’s been found. Great to hear.

SECOND UPDATE: The reading tonight has been canceled.

Friends of writer, musician and co-editor of the local literary mag THE2NDHAND CT Ballentine are worried that he’s gone missing, and have filed a missing persons report in an effort to find him. CT was last seen on Friday November 6 at 3pm, and none of his friends or family have heard from him since.

Ballentine should be a familiar face to anyone who’s attended a reading at Quimby’s, The Hideout or the Hungry Brain in the last five years. He first started producing a series of radio plays for THE2NDHAND a couple years back, and serialized a novella on the mag’s website. He also plays in the band Cup ‘n’ String and started the reading series/fund-raiser So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel? which kicks off tonight at the Whistler at 8pm. The reading is still going on, and friends of CT can grab fliers there to help canvass the city. There’s a Facebook page where people can share information.

Yes, I know, a Facebook page: Haven’t we seen this kind of thing before? But the general sense of alarm I’m hearing from those close to CT makes me take this seriously. And I’ll say this: I’ve known CT for a while now, and he’s a creative and talented writer, and above all a great guy. I hope he strolls into the Whistler tonight, wondering what all the fuss was about.

Twilight: New Moon will be slipping onto the night sky and area theaters this month and turning every vampire fan into a howling maniac. We’ve begun collecting New Moon events so you can plan your lugubriously romantic month of bloodlust and make-believe accordingly.

November 9
Twilight Saga: New Moon cast tour – Fox Valley Mall, Hot Topic
Cast members Ashley Greene “Alice” and Kellan Lutz “Emmett” stop by Fox Valley on a 15-city tour which also features live performances from bands on the movie soundtrack (Death Cab for Cutie, Anya Marina, Sea Wolf, and Band of Skulls are all possibilities), and a question and answer forum with some cast members. Visit hottopic.com for more details.

November 19–22
Classic Cinemas’ Charlestowne 18 Cinema Theatre New Moon welcoming party
This movie theater’s premiere event features prize drawings (posters, photos and books signed by the Twilight stars, T-shirts and Bella’s bracelet) every two hours. Free goodie bags for the first 100 fans at the event. Patrons are invited to dress and compete in a Twilight costume contest held every day.

November 20
Hilton Chicago/Indian Lakes Resort New Moon Package
Twilight obsessives pony up for the V.I.P. treatment with an an exclusive screening and meet-and-greet with actress Ashley Greene from the movie via the Hilton Chicago. There’s a Hilton’s All-Access Package ($259) with luxury overnight accommodations for up to four people, four tickets to Bella’s Birthday Ball (6–8pm), transport by Windy City Limousine, private meet-and-greet and four tickets to a private New Moon screening. And there’s a Movie Madness Package ($199) that skips the meet-and-greet. For reservations, call: 630-529-0200

We will update this page as more New Moon events are announced.

Found magazine co-creator Jason Bitner’s latest book and web project, Cassette from my Ex, inspired me to dust off a late-90s mix tape from an old college boyfriend. The tunes were a pleasant mix of hip-hop from the era—think Souls of Mischief, Rasco and Colt 45—while the B-side delivered indie rock stars like Yo La Tengo, Shellac and Jon Spencer. With boom boxes in short supply this decade, I wondered how hard it would be to digitally re-create the mix on a well stocked digital play-buy-and-share site like LaLa.com. The results were a little surprising.

The tape: Made in Madison, Wisconsin, circa 1998. Not withstanding the requisite intro, outro, instrumental interlude, Bill Cosby comic bit and a track by the mix maker’s own cheeky rap act, the original tape was packed with 27 proper songs. Nothing on the tape was more obscure than early Quintron and nothing was more mainstream than Rick James’s bawdy classic, “Give it to Me Baby” (subtle, I know).

The site: With more than 7 million songs in its library, LaLa.com seemed a promising source for turning up music that’s at least a decade old, plus it’s fully licensed so you get the convenience without the guilt. The site also lets you listen to songs in their entirety for free, buy unlimited web-only plays for 10 cents per song or download MP3 versions for 79 cents. One of its best features is that it gives you access to any existing music library you might have such as iTunes so you can listen to your music on any computer anywhere. It also lets you share playlists with friends via email or embed your playlists on a web site.

Results: The site’s offerings are vast, especially when it comes to new music. Older material wasn’t as easy to come by: Of the 27 songs I searched, only ten turned up. I was pleasantly surprised to find Thee Headcoats’ “I Don’t Like the Man I Am,” although the lack of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut,” Yo La Tengo’s “Somebody’s Baby,” the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Cool Vee” and Shellac’s “Mouthpiece” was disappointing. Worse, a search for Fugazi resulted in this message: “This artist’s albums are not yet available for listening on Lala,” though we wonder if that might have more to do with persnickety frontman Ian MacKaye’s famous indifference to making a buck.

Poets talk about community more than just about anyone else. Go to a slam or open mike and you’ll hear countless folks at the mike thanking the community or passing the hat to support the community. There’s no setup here: It’s actually one of the things that makes the scene here an inviting one. But it’s funny that that community has never really extended itself online.

Naperville’s Sourcebooks has launched the most complete poetry social-networking site we’ve seen to date in PoetrySpeaks.com. Users can log on, create a profile and upload their own poetry (written or recorded). There’s also plenty of poetry on there to browse and listen to. It’s not just user-generated content, either: I just clicked on Emily Dickinson’s face. You can preview recordings of famous and not-so-famous poems, and buy them for 99 cents a pop (though text versions are free), all of which means the site aims to turn a profit.

Of course, now that everything is supposed to be free online, it’s easy to think that people won’t pay for, of all things, poetry. But PoetrySpeaks.com is an extension of Sourcebooks’ enormously popular Poetry Speaks books, which have sold nearly 200,000 copies. So, hey, if it works, you might have to change that old Internet adage: People will only pay for porn and poetry.

For our final installment of 10 Days of Cookbooks, we turn to that odd category of books that look, feel and read like literature and yet contain recipes nevertheless. Often these are food memoirs, and often the recipes are completely tossed aside. That’s my experience with these books, anyway. I keep my reading books out of the kitchen, for fear of getting sauce on them.

In this respect, Far Flung and Well Fed is no different from the others. But it’s a crucial food book this fall, because like the best cookbooks, it deftly expands the food knowledge (and appreciation) of all who read it. For those not familiar with Apple, here’s a quick bio: He was a reporter for the New York Times for 40 years. He covered Washington, and war, and whole bunch of other newsy things. He filed stories from all over the world, and aside from his writing (which he was justifiably famous for) he was known for two things: Having a legendary expense account, and using that account to eat. Inevitably, he would file a story about the restaurants he visited and the chefs/producers/artisans he met. This is a collection of those stories.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read the entire book yet. It’s divided into geographical sections (West Coast; France; Asia), and then into quick articles within those. I don’t suspect I’ll finish it anytime soon, either. I prefer to read this book as I used to read Apple when he was still alive (he died in 2006)—that is, once or twice a month, in the pages of the paper. That way I can savor his incomparable way with words, make it last. Because if I’ve learned anything from reading Apple, it’s that it pays to make all things pleasurable last.

Photo: Martha Williams

This one’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? You need to buy Gourmet Today, because there’ll be no Gourmet Tomorrow.

Photo: Martha Williams

Two years ago I tried reading Judith Jones’s autobiography, The Tenth Muse. But despite my healthy effort, I failed. It was a terrifically boring book, and had Judith Jones been anybody but Judith-Jones-The-Famous-Editor-Who-Published-Julia-Child-and-Anne-Frank, I’m sure it would have never found a publisher.

Does that sound harsh? Sorry, but I’m a little down on the woman. I’ve been enamored with her new cookbook—The Pleasures of Cooking for One—for weeks, and I was in the middle of a daydream of sitting beside her, stroking  a cow, when I read her snippy comments about Gourmet.

Since then, she and I have had a complicated relationship.

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Lidia Bastianich’s new cookbook, Lidia Cooks From The Heart of Italy, is not sexy. It doesn’t have a million photos, and the few photos it does have can be a little unappetizing. It doesn’t have recipes from the parts of Italy you’re probably thinking of when someone says “the Heart”: No Tuscan cuisine will be found. But what it does have is an incredible amount of substance: carefully written recipes that show respect for the peasant foods of Liguria, La Marche, Sardinia and more.

The recipes are mostly simple to prepare and work a nice amount of flavor out of basic ingredients. A simple salad of boiled potatoes, cauliflower, red onion and apple and a side of boiled cipollini onions sauteed in balsamic vinegar both turned out lovely and delicious. I don’t quite know what happened with the ditalini pasta tossed with broccoli rabe—I followed Bastianich’s instructions for de-leafing, peeling and sauteeing the green, but the dish turned out inedibly bitter nonetheless. For some reason, I still trust that this is a cookbook full of hearty, good food. Maybe that’s because it’s written by a chef who has never intended to be flashy—who is instead a patient, earnest teacher.

Photo: Martha Williams

A common initial reaction to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Cookbook (a new $50 version of last fall’s $250 Big Fat Duck Cookbook), is that the recipes aren’t doable. Not exactly true. They are doable—it’s just that not many home cooks would want to invest the time and energy. Blumenthal himself writes, “The recipes are complicated and I make no apologies for that…To change any part of these recipes so that they are more easily achievable would be to compromise—something this book does not to.”

He’s not kidding. To replicate the dishes served at Blumenthal’s Michelin-starred house of molecular gastronomy in Bray, England, would take immense patience, an average of six hours spare time and, for starters, a digital scale to weigh out ingredients like malic acid, isomalt and “National Starch Flogel 60” by the gram. This is not your mother’s cookbook.
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