Yung Tae Kim ollied, kick-flipped, and grinded on the plastic skateboard packaged with the Tony Hawk: Ride video game last fall and reached a conclusion shared by critics and gamers alike: it wasn’t very good. But while most of those critics shrugged and moved on in the months that followed, Kim would soon leave his classroom at Northwestern and find his way to Robomodo, the Chicago company that created the game....
Errol Morris must have needed a break from life’s misery after taking on capital punishment (Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.), the U.S. debacle in Vietnam (The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. MacNamara), and the torture at Abu Ghraib (Standard Operating Procedure). He certainly gets it with this side-splitting documentary about Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who was charged in 1977 with having kidnapped her Mormon boyfriend during his missionary training in England, manacled him to a bed, and forced him to have sex with her....
Chandler West/Sun-Times Media A bike lane—John Kass’s unhappy place. Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to make something go away is to ignore it. But rules usually have exceptions, this one included. For instance, you can’t ignore away cancer, disfiguring goiters, bleeding hemorrhoids—or, it would seem, John Kass. The Tribune columnist has made a hobby and cottage industry of engendering contempt for Chicago cyclists or, as he calls them, “the Little Bike People....
Based on an Austrian novel by Marlen Haushofer, The Wall tells the story of an unnamed woman (Martina Gedeck) vacationing with friends in an Alpine hunting lodge that’s situated deep in a secluded valley. One evening her companions decide to visit a nearby village for some dinner; when they haven’t returned by morning, she heads toward the village to find them, only to learn she’s surrounded on all sides by an invisible, impenetrable wall, cut off from the world outside the valley....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was sad to hear of the design documentary Objectified for the first time in the context of tomorrow’s screening at the Music Box being sold out. Fortunately, Coudal comes through with hope: send them a pic of your favorite object, and you might win a pair of tickets. Full disclosure: I won on the basis of my Bodum travel mug/french press, photographed with my second favorite object, the T-Mobile G1, which has been surprisingly non-buggy for a first-gen electronic gizmo....
I go way back with Roland Burris, Governor Blagojevich’s pick to replace Barack Obama in the Senate. I don’t know him—though years ago we took the same plane to New York City. He sat in the seat in front of me and as I recall requested an extra bag of peanuts. Burris ran for the U.S. Senate in the 1984 primary against Paul Simon. I voted for Simon—didn’t everybody? But I voted for Burris for comptroller again in 1986, and supporting him over Jim Ryan in their 1990 race for attorney general was a no-brainer....
Later this month new indie book imprint Sinecure will begin shipping a coffee-table book about private press records called Enjoy the Experience: Homemade Records 1958-1992, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy. In lieu of flipping through the pages of Enjoy the Experience I recently combed through Sinecure’s blog, which is where I discovered an outre pop project from New Jersey musician Damian Vecchioli called Damian & the Criterions....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Borrowing from the scheduling complexities of the more arcane religious holidays, FCBD falls on the first Saturday of May that follows the release of a film adaptation of a well-known comic book franchise. This year’s big film is X-Men Origins: Wolverine, out May 1, making Saturday FCBD for 2009. Below is a list of stores in the city that are participating, with a note of any quotas on free comics and description of other planned festivities....
When you give a sociopath the ability to time travel, nobody wins. But that’s what novelist Lauren Beukes does in The Shining Girls, the atmospheric, mind-bending, creepy tale of a time-traveling serial killer and his extraordinary victims, woven through the history of 20th-century Chicago. In the 1930s, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house on the west side. When he walks out its front door, he’s transported to whatever part of the future he’s thinking of....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Sula has nothing against street food. On the contrary—that’s why he’s a bit affronted by a full-service restaurant pairing wines to “elevated street food” in a city historically hostile to its eloteros, fruteros, and tamaleros, not to mention food trucks. And much of what’s on the menu at the Peasantry, Alex Brunacci’s Lincoln Park follow-up to Franks ‘n’ Dawgs, bears just a passing resemblance to street fare: elotes are shucked and precariously piled with chicharron, hazelnuts, and blue cheese; “gyros” are served on roti and in addition to being fancy (octopus, pork belly) have sweet, fruity garnishes that tip them out of balance....
For 40-plus years David Mamet has used theater to probe the sorer spots in the American psyche. In plays from American Buffalo to Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, he’s shown how damaging the imperatives of self-reliance, self-interest, and self-preservation can be to people steeped in free-market capitalism. Trying to get ahead in such a system, especially if you’re starting near the bottom, is the surest way to lose your soul. His best plays dissect our collective neuroses with unsparing accuracy....
Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Alderman Ameya Pawar should’ve haggled for the #11 bus. On Monday, 47th Ward alderman Ameya Pawar led 100 or so seniors to a CTA public hearing where they demanded that the agency restore full service to the #11 Lincoln Avenue bus. The #11 bus was a perfectly fine service that ran, roughly, from Howard to Sedgwick along Lincoln. Alas, the CTA board—at the urging of president Forrest Claypool, a mayoral appointee—cut the Western-to-Fullerton leg in 2012....
The stereotype of black-metal musicians as murderous, church-burning, white-supremacist pagans in corpsepaint was out of date ten years ago—by now the style has worked its way into almost every corner of the underground, and you can find just about as many kinds of black metallers as you can metalheads in general. However, it’s still unusual to encounter one who spends just as much time obsessing over arcane modular synthesizers and ancient analog drum machines as he does practicing tremolo picking and blastbeats....
Rogers Park is an edgy place. Bordered by the lake and Evanston as well as its sister neighborhood, West Ridge, it has always been influenced and shaped by its juxtapositions between built environment and natural world, between city and suburb. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like the city of Chicago itself, the area was settled thanks to a fortuitous combination of geography, railroads, and greed....
“I hate yellow mustard,” Spiaggia bartender Brendan Smith protested after the Palm’s Mike Freeman challenged him with the condiment. But thrown a curve, Smith went with it, devising a take on an old-school Brandy Alexander. His twist combines cognac with a honey-mustard gelato he made by adding French’s mustard to a base of sugar, water, eggs, cream, and a bit of Miele Thun acacia honey. The name means “dessert mustard” in Italian....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not the hugest Wilco fan, but Jeff Tweedy’s a nice guy so I wouldn’t be opposed to playing a guitar with his name on the headstock—like for instance the absolutely gorgeous Jeff Tweedy Signature SG that Gibson just announced. Holy shit is this thing beautiful. (Click on the pic to enlarge.) That finish is called “Pelham Blue,” and if you look closely at the photo you can see that the tailpiece cover has an old-timey lyre design etched into it, which references design details from the earliest Gibson instruments....
Before September 13, the night Jonathan Miller appeared on the reality show Shark Tank to pitch his year-old custom energy bar business, Element Bars, Inc., his Web site got about 200 unique visits a day. That night it racked up 25,000. The next day brought another 20,000. Less than two weeks later sales had soared from 1,000 bars a week to 10,000 bars, and Miller had hand-signed 1,500 notes apologizing for the backlog that had delayed deliveries....
“Ummmm . . .” I thought for a moment. “Chrétien de Troyes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t think I’ve heard of that one before.” About ten years later, I was in journalism school and looking for something to write a big, long story about for my masters project. I’d heard somewhere that romance was the only genre in publishing that was dominated by women, and that was the reason it was given so little respect....
Philip Montoro,Reader music editor Mgła, With Hearts Toward None It’s pronounced “mgwah,” roughly, and it means “fog” in Polish. I’ve been listening obsessively to this 2012 album at work: hideously lush with corrosive dissonance, its stark, dessicated black metal harrows its mournful melodies with regimented rhythms. I especially like the busy, intricate cymbal work, which glitters atop the music’s seesawing churn like silver filigree on the face of a seaside cliff, giving its hopeless trudge an almost sprightly swing....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year, Fortune also acquired Chicago specialty distributor JDY Meats, adding a range of nonseafood gourmet products such as Iberico hams and artisanal goods. They had always offered a small array of upscale nonseafood products like sushi rice for their sushi customers, but this represented a much bigger commitment to them—and required building out two more loading docks and the associated warehouse space....
