Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The controversial current cover of Time magazine reads, “Are You Mom Enough?”; the image is of a young woman breast-feeding her three-year-old son (it illustrates an article on attachment parenting). It’s just one example of the ways our culture is fascinated by motherhood—and the countless ways it can go wrong. That’s also the topic of Are You My Mother?...
We’re good with pizza in Chicago, but overdue for a bagel renaissance. For far too long we’ve put up with horrible facsimiles of the boiled-and-baked (or steam-injected) New York style from chains that phone it in on an industrial scale and from venerable suburban independents that have seen better days. If Reno, led by Telegraph chef Johnny Anderes, were churning out nothing but these bagels it would still be an opening of major importance....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Isaacs wasn’t aware of any other reporters present, and no stories showed up in the dailies. There was simply Isaacs’s excellent report, posted online at PioneerLocal.com. I write more than enough about the lamentable downsizing at Pioneer Press and throughout the desperate Sun-Times Media Group. All the more reason to point out the superior work Pioneer Press is still capable of doing....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Do you ever get the feeling that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a bit of a stage hound? Hilary at Anti just sent me notice of an upcoming release they’re obviously very proud of: “His Holiness the Dalai Lama, composer Philip Glass, sitarist Anoushka Shankar, the throat-singing Gyoto Tantric Choir, and TOM WAITS – performing with the Kronos Quartet and Greg Cohen – are among those featured on HEALING THE DIVIDE: A CONCERT FOR PEACE AND RECONCILIATION, out July 10 on Anti....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer struck a nerve this week when he described the food at a new restaurant as “bland enough to appeal to the Midwestern tourist.” An angry letter writer took him to task as “arrogant,” and plenty of other aggrieved readers jumped into the ensuing discussion on his blog and another on Chow’s media blog, the Grinder, to haggle over the question of whether flyover country is a stark wasteland of meatloaf and green Jell-o....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a fairly devoted sci-fi nerd, I know remarkably little about The Hunger Games. I know that there are some sort of games involved, and that these games have something to do with some type of hunger situation. I know blah blah something something the Capitol. I know that my smart friends like to point out that our society’s seemingly insatiable appetite for a movie portraying children murdering one another for the amusement of a fictional corrupt and decadent society is, from a certain somewhat reasonable perspective, not all that different from that fictional corrupt and decadent society’s thing for bloodsport....
Of all the changes in music distribution over the past decade, the biggest by far is that the technology is now commonplace to allow consumers to acquire music online without paying for it. Defenders of this practice, myself included, have described it as the harbinger of a revolution. We predicted that making music free on the Web would render record labels, management firms, and other industry power brokers unnecessary, allowing artists to build followings without relying on middlemen....
Mauricio Vaca never intended to become a martyr for free and open parks. He just wanted to enjoy the Pitchfork Music Festival with his girlfriend and maybe snap some pictures of the acts. He asked the guard if he could check the camera bag. “I’d be willing to pay to check it,” he says. “But she said no.” The guard ushered Kagan out of the concert. Vaca was waiting for her on Ashland....
You might remember that 2012 was the year of the latest most important elections of our lifetime—a chance for all of us to help get the country back on track by electing candidates who would fix the economy, clean up corruption, help the little guy, and protect our rights. for saying one thing and doing something else even after you’re caught doing what you say you’re not: Mayor Rahm Emanuel—for the second year in a row!...
THE OATH Directed by Laura Poitras If you followed news coverage of the 9/11 terror attacks and their aftermath, you’ve probably heard of the two Yemeni men profiled by Laura Poitras in The Oath. Born in Saudi Arabia to Yemeni parents, Abu Jandal was 19 when he left home in 1994 to wage jihad in Bosnia; by 1997, he and his friend Salim Hamdan had been recruited by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Norwegian singer-songwriter Hanne Hukkelberg is one of the most compelling practitioners of art-pop in the past decade; since her 2004 debut, she’s made one bizarre, ramshackle, and endearing record after another. This winter she released her fourth album, Featherbrain (Propeller), and few releases this year have so thoroughly hooked me and perplexed me. Hukkelberg seems intent on developing a new homemade sound palette for every release—this time she uses plenty of acoustic and electric guitars, but more often than not the tracks are brittle, trashy, and broken sounding, made from kalimbas, prepared piano, kitchen utensils, rocks, “clogs on a Fort Greene sewing table,” harpsichord, a whistling kettle, or a baroque Gloger organ from a church in Kongsberg, Norway....
I’ve never been too shy about my love for these Norwegians. Aside from leaving their absolutely tough self-titled debut in my regular rotation for nearly three years now, I was lucky to catch them twice in a single month last year during their tour with Converge and Torche—and subsequently clog Twitter with effusive ravings over both their thick wall of sound and out-and-out mission to simply fucking rock, regardless of a crowd’s listlessness....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Later this week I plan to post an interview I recently conducted with Brazilian film critic and professor Franthiesco Ballerini, who’s currently in town as a guest of the Mostra Brazilian Film Series. In addition to giving me an overview of Brazil’s film history, Ballerini also indulged my curiosity about what it’s like to go to the movies there....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The debate is raging over this week’s notorious New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama, but here in Chicago we’ve been there, done that. There’s a world of difference between Barry Blitt’s drawing of the up-and-comers in Islamic and revolutionary regalia and Mirth and Girth, David K. Nelson’s 1988 acrylic painting of Harold Washington in a woman’s undergarments: Blitt’s trying to ridicule Barack Obama’s more rabid opponents, while Nelson was trying to knock the recently deceased mayor’s more rabid glorifiers....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s been behind bars since August 31. He was arrested at the Bangkok airport as he was about to fly home to Australia. His mother back home has told her local paper that Nicolaides, 41, is appalled and terrified by conditions in his prison: he shares a toilet with 95 other brawling inmates, and after his calls for medical attention were ignored an ailing cell mate died before his eyes....
Justin Timberlake If you weren’t sleepy-eyed this morning, either you didn’t bathe in Union Park for the past 72 hours, or else you did and R. Kelly’s grand Sunday-night opus was so good you couldn’t wait to wake up and listen to all his hits again. Or else you’re Lil B, with the love of Buddha and the relentless energy of someone in much better shape than Buddha. Either way, there’s more good music this week....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What that means to us now is that there are five or six decades of thrilling pop music out there that Americans have never heard. The floodgates are opening, and savvy reissue producers are releasing fantastic albums and compilations that offer an authentic, in-depth, and only lightly mediated glimpse of the history of pop around the planet. For me nothing can top the double CD Authenticité: the Syliphone Years....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Related, I briefly wanted to defend Record Store Day, which touched off a debate in comments, and on various Facebook pages (best one: “when’s rotary phone day?”). Usually the arguments go along the lines of: Records sound better. That’s really in the ear of the listener; my ear is not terribly good, and neither is my equipment. Honestly, I have trouble telling the difference with anything that’s no lossier than a 192kbps mp3....
[Plus: On the “Local” Front: Noteworthy films by Chicagoans—and former Chicagoans—featured in CIFF’s Illinois[e]makers series.] The festival opens Thursday, October 7, with a screening of the prison drama Stone and personal appearances by director John Curran and star Edward Norton; see the listings for details. It closes Thursday, October 22, with a screening of The Debt, a Mossad adventure starring Helen Mirren. Blame A high school music teacher is taken hostage in his remote home by five teenagers clad in their Sunday finest; they’ve just come from the funeral of their friend, who committed suicide after being seduced and then rejected by the teacher, and they’ve resolved to kill him with an overdose and make the death look like a suicide....
Strictly Seasonal Chalkboard | North Center | $$$ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Walking into the airy, elegant Chalkboard space, it’s hard to believe it was formerly the gloomy Tournesol. But classy as the room is, the menu is decidedly friendly, offering dressed-up versions of classic American comfort food. Daily specials are listed on the restaurant’s namesake, a giant chalkboard, but often also on a paper menu that includes chatty asides from chef-owner Gilbert Langlois....
