In the front window of Sun Wah BBQ, glistening barbecued ducks dangle by their necks like so many succulent victims of avian suicide. Provided you were smart and ordered in advance, one of them belongs to you. Sun Wah has a really great, extensive menu, but their Beijing Duck Dinner makes it a destination. A barbecued duck is wheeled to your table on a little gurney to be carved, and the neat little disks of meat are placed on a platter....
Like most groups that decide it’s time to ditch the gangsta lean, fast-rap innovators Bone Thugs-n-Harmony started wrestling with their emotions a few years ago, churning out a few standard-issue repentance tracks with every new release. Maybe it’s just declining sales, lawsuits, and inner turmoil finally catching up with them, but on the new Strength & Loyalty (Interscope) they reveal an emotional heft and moral certitude previously hinted at but never fully realized....
Each holiday season in the U.S., Christmas cheer fills shopping centers and radio airwaves like an avalanche of fake snow. Growing up Jewish in this environment, one of my few respites from the stampede of Santas was Adam Sandler’s goofy ditty “The Chanukah Song.” His lyrics don’t deal so much with the cliched trappings of Hanukkah—menorahs, chocolate gelt, dreidels, the fist-size sugar-caked jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot—as with who might be celebrating it....
Theater & Performance The Night Season An American film crew upsets the life of a family in a small Irish town. A Vitalist Theatre production. a 9/8-10/17, Theatre Building Chicago, 1125 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, $25. Village of K A play based on Dostoyevsky’s Demons. a 9/10-10/11, Side Project Theater, 1439 W. Jarvis, 773-588-9092, $12-$18. The Fantasticks Porchlight Music Theatre performs the 1960 musical about a long-term love. a 9/11-11/15, Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W....
When Mayor Daley is credited, as he often is, with turning Chicago into one of the greenest large cities in the country, his admirers rarely cite much besides his penchant for planting and a few small-scale demo projects carried out with his support, like the garden on the roof of City Hall. But there’s more to making the city green than prettying up the Loop. The city’s actual performance on environmental issues—confronting climate change, industrial pollution, and municipal waste, for starters—is somewhat mixed....
As a Chicagoan, I make a point of being annoyed instead of starstruck when film crews take over city streets. But my resistance melted away one afternoon last spring when I turned the corner onto the 2400 block of Lincoln and saw it dressed to look as it did the day John Dillinger was shot down by federal agents outside the Biograph. Walking past the theater, its marquee ringed with a banner that read cooled by refrigeration and iced fresh air, I felt as if I’d stepped into an old gangster movie....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As far as such icons go, this one’s elusive—more obscure than an Audrey or Katharine, but no less chic. She was at the height of her visibility from the late 40s to late 60s, which makes evidence of her contributions hard to come by today. You might glimpse her on the A&E Channel, if it were to air the 2001 episode of Biography titled “Jackie Gleason: The Great One,” in which she discusses the 13 years she spent as Gleason’s (mostly) live-in girlfriend....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lampo, the quirky Chicago experimental-music presenter, celebrated its 100th concert last month with a performance by British turntable artist Philip Jeck at the raw Chicago Avenue space 6Odum. Lampo’s been producing concerts at 6Odum since 1999, but Jeck’s was the last; Lampo organizer Andrew Fenchel promises a new venue when shows resume in the fall. A fund-raising call recently went out asking for help with the costs of relocating, which includes buying a new sound system and building out the space....
Now that the International Olympic Committee has saved us from ourselves and Mayor Daley’s Olympic dreams have been dashed (one more time: thank you, thank you, IOC!), let’s have a little chat, Chicagoans. Just amongst ourselves. Now that it’s over, the slant in the media, even the New York Times, is that our city’s in mourning. Mourning? Are you kidding me? If the past polls are any indication, most Chicagoans are relieved, if not jubilant....
“I guess I’d better die now…. Otherwise a lot of people are going to be really disappointed!” —from “As Del Lay Dying,” an excerpt from The Funniest One in the Room by Kim “Howard” Johnson, April 3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your article “The Right to Rant” [Michael Miner, April 3] about the Okons was really informative. Our alderman has repeatedly stated that his vote on zoning issues reflects the community vote....
Shaping Up the CTA Next article—why are people riding buses less often? Routes not in the right place? This is a reversal of a long pattern—more on bus, fewer on rail. Neither good nor bad, but I am curious. —sjl Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every other major urban transit system has trains with different end points so as to provide more service where there is more demand; why doesn’t CTA already do this?...
I want to thank Dennis Rodkin for writing and the Reader for headlining the 2/2/07 article “What Sex Am I?” As a sexologist, I believe this story is important because it helps readers to think outside the socially constructed either/or categories of male/female or heterosexual/homosexual. The scientific evidence demonstrates that rather than a binary either/or, there exists in nature a spectrum of biological variability. With this broader perspective we can more readily affirm individuality rather than stigmatize differences....
The Reader‘s J.R. Jones sparked a lively discussion two weeks ago with his review of Outrage, a new documentary about closeted pols with antigay agendas. I weighed in myself, not letting the fact I hadn’t seen the movie stop me. Then I headed over to the Music Box with my wife to see the film. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In other words, Outrage presents a case for outing that it isn’t totally committed to....
Q I’m a straight man. From high school through college and after, I loved me some women. Then I met my present girl ten years ago. I fell head over heels for her. I still love her. But little by little, she’s become boring to me. Our sex life has cooled. Days run together with mundane activities like watching TV, going to the store, and hanging out with our kids....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Dan Savage is a fascinating guy whose career I was in a position to follow from his Madison days up til now. His work has, over all these years, had a real impact on the culture, mostly in good ways, I think. And it’s been interesting to watch him try, in fits and starts, to develop a working ethics to go along with his more technical advice (in fact I’d like to write an essay on this very topic some day)....
I probably haven’t listened to anything on cassette since my formative years, which were deep in the 1980s—a glorious decade, mind you, in which sad new-wave boys wore makeup and cordless phones roamed free. And while I’ve noticed an increasing trend of bands releasing albums on the unlikely format of cassette tape, I’d rather not call the medium a “throwback,” or this movement a “resurgence,” because cassette tapes never truly went away ....
Art Shay: Chicago Accent The Essential Art Shay: Selected Photographs Art Shay’s story is a jam-packed American epic, a stew of history and chutzpah that would be hard to believe if he hadn’t snapped the evidence all along the way. Two exhibits opening this month, at Stephen Daiter gallery and the Chicago History Museum, bear witness to the photographer’s life and work. He went from the sidewalks of the Bronx, where he grew up, to wartime skies over Germany to Life magazine in its postwar heyday....
A couple weeks ago Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered his view of the state of Chicago in his budget address to the City Council. It was a mix of facts, half facts, boasts, and outright spin that’s become an annual rite. Fortunately, not everyone buys the mayor’s take on things. That’s why I headed over to the drafty old UE Hall at 37 S. Ashland for last Wednesday’s budget hearing sponsored by the City Council’s progressive caucus....
A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “She’s been coming to the Chicago area for 25 years. She just bought this piece of property in the Elburn area. It’s a former boarding school. It’s going to be an ashram, and so we are working hard to get it ready for Amma’s visit. Her first program here this year is June 30....
A late arrival at the mumblecore party, Lynn Shelton established herself as a filmmaker to watch with Humpday (2009), in which two straight pals dare each other to couple on camera for an amateur porn video. That film ultimately collapsed under the weight of its dubious premise, but in this one the center holds despite a comparably far-fetched story line. A young man (Mark Duplass), still inconsolable a year after his brother’s death, is urged by the latter’s girlfriend (Emily Blunt) to chill out at her family’s cabin, where he unexpectedly encounters her attractive sister (Rosemarie DeWitt)....
