I spent last Friday at the Congress Theater for the Chicago installment of the Hard Festival tour headlined by Rusko, Crystal Castles, and Sinden. I expected it to be kind of a rave, which it wasn’t. However it did turn out to be a pretty good time, if almost sickeningly hot and sweaty inside. I mention the hot-and-sweatiness in the review I wrote up for this week’s Reader, but I didn’t have room to really convey exactly how disgusting it was in there....
CLASSICAL | Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Composer and Aperiodic director Nomi Epstein says she didn’t realize how underappreciated Cage was in the States till she attended Germany’s Darmstadt festival in 2010. “I was shocked that nearly every lecture given by the list of European notables mentioned Cage,” she says. “It was an enlightening experience for me to consider Cage’s influence was so strong and so alive in European circles of academia, when in America his works are often presented briefly on the day in class that graphic scores and 4’33” are discussed....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the intriguing characters Nelson came across in the archives was “Concerned Sgt,” a whistle-blower who after My Lai began writing anonymous letters to army brass. “I am a US GI now in Germany, and I worry a lot about Vietnam, and the wrong we are doing there to the Vietnamese people, and to Gis like myself,” said the first of his three letters....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “This fall, I bought a share in a CSA [“community-supported agriculture,” a kind of farm co-op]. Every week, I get a box of whatever produce the local farmer is currently harvesting. Here’s the problem: It’s nice to get fresh vegetables, but I often don’t know what to do with the full haul—and end up throwing a good chunk of it in the trash....
The test that detected the Asian carp’s environmental DNA, or eDNA, above the electric barrier is new: it was developed in the past year by New Zealand scientist Lindsay Chadderton and scientists at Notre Dame. They say this is the first time DNA testing has been used on such a scale to find evidence of invasive fish in freshwater, and they think their method will ultimately be used around the globe to detect invasive species and protect endangered ones....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between the gun-slinging bloodthirstiness of Chief Keef and his circle and the you-really-better-watch-that-throne ambition of Million Dollar Mano’s Treated Crew, local rapper Kami de Chukwu comes across like a breath of fresh air with his goofy sense of humor. His new mixtape, Light, features beats by Groundislava, Jonwayne, Nosaj Thing, and a bunch of other chill dudes who are heavily influenced by Flying Lotus and Los Angeles’s fantastic medicinal marijuana....
When Al Jazeera bought Current in January for $500 million, the Qatar-based news network announced that Al Gore’s little-watched cable operation would be turned into Al Jazeera America, which would compete with CNN and Fox. Al Jazeera America is now dealing with a stack of 12,000 resumés. I reported this unhappy development on the Reader‘s blog, the Bleader, and promptly got an e-mail from a Nishith Sharma bringing cheerier news. “I am a co-founder of Frrole, a fast growing local news app that has many times been called the future of news,” said Sharma, writing, it turned out, from Bangalore, India....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The program features Jim Trainor‘s violent torn paper stop motion inspired by log ants Leafy Leafy Jungle; Andrew Stewart’s photocopier-made Errata; Lale Westvind’s Flesh Gun, in which “moustachioed perverts in a spaceship fire upon a deformed, nude woman daily”; Gonzalo Escobar’s doll and toy meditation Strategies of Trust; Lisa Barcy’s cutout and sand romance Mermaid; Jon Satrom’s EAGPOSTMUCNG; Basia Goszcynska’s Land Escape; Emily Kuehn’s The realTime and Life of John James Audubon; Lori Felker’s Zwischen; Clara Kim’s cutout Doppelgänger, Jared Larson’s “Photoshop craziness” Abnliumearteidon; Ernest Kim’s ink-and-paint ship-in-a-bottle tale Oh, My Captain!...
In its second year since splitting off from the Taste of Chicago, the Chicago Country Music Festival moves from the parkland surrounding Soldier Field north to Grant Park, where it will present two days of free country, roots rock, and honky-tonk this Saturday and Sunday. The last big outdoor festival presented each year by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, it starts at 11 AM both days and features three stages of music, a Kids’ Corrall, and a Dance Stage offering line-dance and square-dance instruction....
Jason O. Watson Beantown is in a snit over Jon Lester. The way sports are set up, there’s got to be a winner and a loser. Back in the golden era of the NHL, a lot of those games ended in ties—a sentimental nod, I thought, by the cluster of six cities surrounding the Great Lakes to the war once fought in those precincts. The War of 1812 ended in a draw and then in the “world’s longest undefended border”—thus fulfilling a biblical prophecy I’d never heard of until five minutes ago when I googled “longest undefended border....
On Saturday the Tribune reported that the Virgin Megastore on Michigan Avenue would shutter its doors in July; a clothing store will take over the 40,000-square foot space. While it’s hard to mount an enthusiastic defense of such a mediocre store, following the loss of Tower last fall Virgin became the only genuine deep-catalog shop in the city. It’s shocking that the third largest city in the country is so poorly served by music retailers—please pardon me, Reckless Records boosters....
When word got out that in the 11th hour, just before its June 1 adjournment deadline, the Illinois house had voted to extend the home owner’s exemption, friends started calling me to ask if it meant their property tax bills were going down. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The longer explanation? A property tax bill is based on two basic variables: a property’s assessment and the tax rate applied by the county, city, parks, and schools....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The worthiness of the ban isn’t the point–as Mayor Daley has decreed, we’re done debating that one for now. But no one’s talked much about the fact that it was overturned at the bidding of a nonprofit city contractor that happens to make a lot of donations to a lot of elected officials–and will undoubtedly be weighing in on other issues before the council....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t usually indulge in online quizzes, but when the words “Ikea or Death” popped up in my Twitter feed earlier today, I had to investigate. The folks behind Pittsburgh marketing firm Gatesman & Dave came up with the quiz, which presents a selection of words that could conceivably be for a piece of Ikea furniture or a black-metal band....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In A Raisin in the Sun, the Younger family, led by proud, weary matriarch Lena, receives a sudden windfall of $10,000—proceeds from a life insurance policy on Lena’s recently deceased husband. Convinced that he can bring the family out of poverty by becoming a conscience-free capitalist, Lena’s son Walter wants to use the money to go in with questionable cohorts on a liquor store....
Plus: Parties & Events | Music Ben Pao The “group share” menu, priced at $23.95 per person, allows patrons to choose starters, three main dishes, and a side to be served family style. 52 W. Illinois, 312-222-1888, benpao.com. Blue 13 Celebrating its first year by offering two “grown-up New Year’s Eve” packages: a five-course prix fixe dinner menu from 5 to 10 PM for $100 and, from 10 PM to 2 AM, a party with heavy appetizers and a champagne toast for $30....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the contest to work, the art should be just begging to have something smart written under it. Every few weeks the contest works. But most of the cartoons sit there stupidly, the cartoonist having tossed in some incongruity passing for wit, or at least the kernel of wit. The August 26 New Yorker just came in the mail, and I turned to page 74 to see if this was one of the good weeks....
I used to rush home from school at lunch to catch the first half hour of Bozo’s Circus on WGN (after the first half hour we switched to Let’s Make a Deal). And in honor of my sister Sue’s ninth birthday—in 1966, when I was six—we got coveted seats on the set. I got to thinking about that day recently, when I read that Larry Harmon, who owned the licensing rights to the character and was largely responsible for Bozo’s iconic look, had died at the age of 83....
Jimm Dispensa thinks baseball fans have it made. “If you go into a bar to grab a beer and watch a game,” he says, “and somebody sets in on some historical baseball fact, and you enter the conversation and correct them, you’re not only expressing camaraderie, you’re expressing a sick attraction to the minutiae of that sport.” But it’s different for people like him. When your favorite pastime is local politics, it’s not so easy to slip into a neighborhood bar and geek out with a stranger about the 12-candidate pileup in the 15th Ward....
Avec At first, sitting on a bench between strangers in this cedar-lined, saunalike room makes me feel a little apprehensive, like I’m wrapped in naught but a sweaty towel. But as the wine flows and the evening grows long, everyone’s gabbing like pals, offering around bits of robust cheese or chorizo-stuffed dates and dredging juices off empty plates with warm rustic bread. Chef Koren Grieveson’s Mediterranean “peasant” food is paired with an ever intriguing and ever changing selection of uncommon wines and cheeses, many of which are as unforgettable as the Spanish sheep’s-milk torta del casar, a powerful molten gob of delicious funk that may forever remain my benchmark for strong queso (if only because I couldn’t seem to wash the smell from my fingers)....
