Bars Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cary’s Lounge & Liquors This longtime old-man bar and package store run by Pete Valavanis, the eldest son of Cary, has been hipped up some, offering eight beers on tap (including Goose Island 312 and a Belgian), live music on weekends, and free pool Monday through Thursday, when there’s also league play. And it’s not every tavern that has the category “Politics” on its Web site....
Why are we so fascinated by monsters? On Monsters by Columbia College philosophy professor Stephen Asma offers some tentative and mostly pro forma answers drawn from evolution, psychology, sociology, and history. Really, though, the book is less focused on explaining our interest than capitalizing on it. Asma has a lucid, engaging style, and he uses it to provide a thoughtfully breezy survey of the bizarre and the lurking. Did you know ancient griffins may have been inspired by protoceratops bones?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I first started going to Toronto a dozen years ago, and this visit didn’t stack up to a number of previous trips. That’s not a knock on TIFF’s programmers: they pick movies only from what’s available and ready by Toronto’s deadline (and not claimed by another festival insisting on exclusivity). If it’s a so-so year at Cannes, you can’t expect Toronto to pull rabbits out of a hat four months later....
It all started with a misremembered line from an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. A few years back my band at the time, Mannequin Men, was on a monthlong tour with Cheap Time from Memphis, Tennessee, and during a post-show late night drive probably a week or so into it our guitarist Ethan and guitarist/vocalist Kevin started talking about an episode of Unsolved Mysteries during Dennis Farina’s stint as host concerning a UFO sighting at a British military base....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which got me thinking, yeah, that goes for me too. A lot of things missing from any del Toro film—like those seamless dramatic transitions Andrew Tracy wishes he could find there. Which is a bit like asking for Mies van der Rohe when what’s in front of you is Frank Gehry. Not much invisibility in the joints, where structural members meet, and of course the guy doesn’t know how to do windows....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the four shorts I was able to see, my favorite by far was William Joyce and Brandon Oldenberg’s charming fantasy The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Produced by Moonbot Studios of Shreveport, Louisiana, this 15-minute computer piece follows a frankly Keaton-esque hero as a hurricane pulls his terraced hotel into the sky and whisks him away to a land where books fly around like gentle birds....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Host of WBEZ’s show-biz interview feature Studio 312 for seven years, Carrane will use the Q&A format first to create a scene between himself and his guest and then to delve into the process behind how the scene was made. Carrane has some of local improv’s heaviest hitters scheduled for Improv Nerd‘s first month of Sundays: Noah Gregoropoulos (9/18), Susan Messing (9/25), TJ Jagodowski (10/2), and Jet Eveleth (10/9)....
Local alternative-rock station Q101 kicked up some dust late last month when it allowed an afternoon DJ, Electra, to play the new White Stripes album, Icky Thump, in its entirety, well in advance of its June 19 release date. What she played wasn’t a promo; it was a leak that the station’s music director, Spike, had downloaded off the Internet. The broadcast immediately drew the ire of Jack White, who called Q101 two hours later–from Spain, no less–to chew out Electra....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the weekend the Tribune reported that the Chicago Children’s Museum has hired mega PR firm Hill & Knowlton to twist arms, and with local children’s advocacy groups falling into line, the odds are even better that Mayor Daley will get the City Council votes he needs to move the museum out of Navy Pier and into Grant Park, despite the opposition of area residents....
The last time Jeff Mangum toured behind the songs he wrote for Neutral Milk Hotel, the world was a very different place. One difference in particular is that in late 1998, when the band hit Chicago on the only real tour it ever did to promote its landmark album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, it was booked at tiny Lincoln Park club Lounge Ax. When Mangum rolled through early last week as a solo act, he played two nights at the 1,000-seat Athenaeum Theatre, both of which sold out in minutes—online scalpers were selling tickets for almost $200 in the days just before the shows....
In May 2001 Chicago proudly unveiled the Englewood Tax Increment Financing District, local aldermen proclaiming that it would transform one of Chicago’s poorest communities. Nine years later, Coleman and Troutman are both gone—Coleman lost her seat to JoAnn Thompson in 2007 and Troutman got busted for taking bribes from developers in 2008. And Englewood remains untransformed. The TIF has generated virtually no new commercial development at all. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
On Thursday, January 19, the U.S. Justice Department shut down Megaupload, an extremely popular file-locker site that claimed 50 million users per day. Seven of its employees were charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering and criminal copyright infringement, and four were arrested in New Zealand, where the site’s flamboyant founder, Kim Dotcom (ne Schmitz), rented a mansion. File lockers tend to promote themselves as productivity tools that provide an easy way to circulate files too big for e-mail among groups of collaborators, but in reality they’re barely sub-rosa troves of copyrighted material—I’m sure more of their operators would get visits from the FBI if it were easier to hold them legally responsible for the piracy committed by their users....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was nice to see owner Mark Fishman introduce The Shining at the Logan Theater on Friday night, even if his speech was little more than a reminder not to text during the movie. Taking pride in your theater (as Fishman did in interviews around the time of the Logan’s reopening) is one thing; it’s another to show up for a midnight screening just to wish your patrons well....
Leor Galil The holiday season is arriving, and with it comes the constant stream of yuletide music pumping out of car radios and shopping centers. Of course there’s more to seasonal music than the corporate coffee-shop dreck we all love to hate, and among the many releases dropping on Friday are a couple Christmas hip-hop reissues from excellent Boston label Get On Down: Run-D.M.C.’s “Christmas in Hollis” single and Profile Records’ Christmas Rap compilation, which both came out in 1987....
As 2007 turned into 2008, it was a bright new morning in the city of Chicago—or so said Mayor Daley in a state-of-the-city op-ed that ran in the Sun-Times on January 1. “2007 was winner for city, and ’08 looks good,” the headline declared, and the essay that followed was classic Daley rhetoric, dedicated to the proposition that his leadership has enabled our city to overcome tremendous obstacles, none of which can be laid at his feet....
I was listening to the Cubs on WGN radio earlier this week, when what popped up between innings but an ad for the Lyric Opera. “Wow, the Lyric is doing Porgy and Bess this season,” I thought, then did that head-wobbling cartoon double-take to wonder, “What is the Lyric doing advertising during baseball games?” Well, when you think about it, it makes considerable sense. The Cubs have that well-to-do Ravinia element to their audience, as well as ample corporations buying season tickets to give away to clients, and both segments would figure to have an interest in two of the toughest tickets in town....
When he still lived in a building overlooking Humboldt Park, Mark Pepp was given Stanley Applebaum’s The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record as a gift from a friend. While perusing its pages, he noticed that the twin bison sculptures parked just in front of the east entrance to Humboldt’s formal gardens were also pictured in his book, perched atop one of the White City’s magnificent bridges. Upon further investigation—including an e-mail to the Chicago Park District—Pepp discovered that the sculptures came about in 1909 when landscape architect Jens Jensen was commissioned to create two outdoor art exhibits: one in Garfield Park, the other in Humboldt Park....
If you want to know how to make 1,800 hotel units magically disapper, I urge you to study the mysterious case of the Wolf Point Development, the three-tower project planned along the Chicago River near Kinzie. Why couldn’t I have been that smart? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On May 29, the developers unveiled their project at a meeting hosted by 42nd Ward alderman Brendan Reilly....
Well. You don’t get notices about minstrel shows every day. Especially not minstrel shows performed by high school students with the support and encouragement of their teachers and intended to promote multicultural sensitivity. This deserved more attention than a mere listing in the events calendar or even one on the Agenda page. I e-mailed the contact on the press release right away, a teacher named Harry Slater. In addition to raising awareness, performing minstrel songs and dances would allow students to feel racism in their bodies....
A Hijacking In this week’s issue Ben Sachs gives four stars to Pedro Almodovar’s latest, I’m So Excited, and Drew Hunt has a three-star review of Julian Roman Polsler’s philosophical fantasy The Wall. You’ll also want to check out A Hijacking, a first-rate thriller about a Danish shipping vessel overtaken by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. And we’ve got new reviews of Despicable Me 2, a sequel to the 2010 children’s animation; The Hellbenders, a 1967 spaghetti western by Sergio Corbucci (Django, Navajo Joe); Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, a comedy concert shot at a sold-out Madison Square Garden; The Lone Ranger, with Armie Hammer as the masked man and Johnny Depp as Tonto; Midnight’s Children, which marks the screenwriting debut of novelist Salman Rushdie; and The Way Way Back, a coming-of-age comedy with Steve Carell, Toni Colette, Allison Janney, Sam Rockwell, and some kid....
