Awhile back Fox News Chicago’s Anna Davlantes got excoriated for suggesting that libraries might be a waste of money in a digital age. It was a dopey report, but it did sort of inadvertently raise a decent question: how will libraries adapt to the increasing digitization of content? It opens up a lot of great possibilities, but the fact that digital concept is as much a new concept as a new technology also makes it tricky....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that I got out to see that much—just nine features, down from the usual 12-15, which ongoing problems with an arthroscopic shoulder (yeah, blame it on the rehab) were at least partly responsible for. But partly too it was the films themselves, more terra incognita selections than in any of the last five or six festival years, like one roulette opportunity after another....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hamilton is the Tribune intern who starred in the take-that-Sam-Zell video that recently won a Sun-Times contest. After the Sun-Times ran a big story singing her praises, the Tribune gleefully revealed what was up. I posted an item on this blog trying to give credit to the actual schemers behind the caper, John Kass did the same thing and went into more detail in his Tribune column, and there were other efforts here and there to tell the tale and get the facts right....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Wednesday Daley threw a mayoral-sized temper tantrum, telling reporters that he had to sell Midway because city employees “are clock watchers who don’t think about the customers,” as Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times quoted him. “They’re not customer-related. They’re gonna leave at 5 o’clock. They’re gonna leave at 4:30 or 4. I’m sorry. We’re on a time clock....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One glitch programmers haven’t been yet been able to iron out of Mitt Romney is the candidate’s preference for eating only the tops of muffins, based on the specious hypothesis that, during the baking process, the butter melts (that’s what butter does, it melts) and the fat sinks to the bottom. The whole-grain flour and, um, flax seeds, meanwhile, float....
When Matt Valentine (vocals, guitar, harmonica) and Erika Elder (vocals, mandolin, lap steel), aka MV + EE, tour with a band, they call it the Golden Road. But if you drove a car the way their recent releases veer between styles and sounds, you’d get pulled over. There are no songs on last year’s LP Ragas of the Culvert (Three Lobed), just woozy instrumentals that sound like a class of sitar students detuning their instruments....
Al-Khaymeih One of the spiffier places on a stretch of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean restaurants in Albany Park, Al-Khaymeih has a large menu with all the Middle Eastern standards plus a few rarities like sumac-dusted fried cauliflower and sarouj, marinated and char-broiled Cornish hen. The food is always fresh and tasty, particularly standout appetizers. The smooth, flavorful hummus goes light on the tahini; the grape leaves are tightly rolled and bursting with lemony rice and vegetables; the lamb, beef, and chicken kebabs are nicely seasoned and generously portioned; and the pita bread, served warm, is made by Sanabel Bakery, which shares its owner....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at 7:30 PM, the Adler Planetarium will host Orbit(film), a program of experimental films curated by the folks at Chicago Filmmakers. It’s the first of three of programs copresented by the two local institutions. The series, called “Strange Science,” showcases avant-garde films about scientific subjects. Tonight’s program will devote as much time to science as to art: the films will be followed by a lecture from Adler astronomer Dr....
If children made the laws, everything we do that isn’t fair would also be illegal. The problem critics find in a federal law that could easily be called the Chicago doctrine is that it judges human conduct as a child might: behavior a parent would tell a child is bad, or an editorial writer a reader, or a prosecutor a jury, can be punished because—well, because it ought to be....
Horrorbles, which relocated to downtown Berwyn last month (6729 Stanley), may be the world’s finest museum of horror-movie memorabilia. Except for one thing: everything there is for sale. Owner John Aranza has amassed a vast collection—purchased from collectors or acquired at auction—that ranges from sculptures of Boris Karloff to 3D glasses from the original 1954 run of Creature From the Black Lagoon to hockey masks worn by Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th series (and signed by Kane Hodder, the actor who played him)....
Seeing as how I’ve become the go-to guy for cicada cookery–here are some tips. (And if you can’t get enough of deep-fried bugs, I’ll be on Chicago Tonight on May 29, 7 PM on WTTW.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A cicada is mostly protein with a fair amount of shell and very little fat. Now, fat is a carrier of flavor–that’s why we like our meat marbled–so to up the flavor quotient in cicada, I prefer to fry it and perhaps serve with some cheese....
Mr. Zero–the misogynist, racist antihero of Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionist classic–spends 25 years totaling figures for a nameless company only to be replaced by a machine. Driven to homicide, he’s tried and executed, then transported to heaven, where infinite freedom proves more paralyzing than thankless bureaucratic toil. Adapting Rice’s anguished hallucination for the musical stage, composer Joshua Schmidt pairs a bracing, angular, harmonically labyrinthine score with a stripped-down libretto (written with Jason Loewith)....
When it comes to Chicago’s future, Vinay Ravi dreams big. “Perhaps recent events have made me unduly optimistic,” writes the 11th Ward resident, “but the idea of popular revolt does not seem as distant as it once did.” So does Frank Edwards of the 49th. “The Chicago I want to live in recognizes that strong communities make everyone safer,” Edwards comments. “This Chicago would defund the Audy Home, Cook County Jail, the state prisons, and the Chicago Police, and reinvest those savings in communities that have been starved for resources for a hundred years....
Steve Kelley Each week the Tribune scans the nation’s editorial cartoons for the handful it republishes in its Cartoon Gallery on Sunday. Last Sunday’s gallery consisted of five cartoons—by Dana Summers, Signe Wilkinson, Walt Handelsman, Steve Kelley, and Michael Ramirez—reacting to the revelation that the NSA is vacuuming up data whenever we talk on the telephone or browse the net. Some of the cartoons were drawn with a light hand and others weren’t, but not a single cartoonist defended the NSA, even to the extent of allowing that President Obama had a point when he said June 20 in San Jose that “you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of all the media outlets in all the world that have been covering the shootings (including my hometown paper, which has put together one of the most comprehensive reports), the biggest break so far seems to have come from Michael Sneed, who reported Monday evening on a possible suspect. She doesn’t give a name, but the information she does give is highly specific–a 24-year-old man who arrived in the country on a student visa, via Shanghai, on Aug....
Jackie Leven Gothic Road (Cooking Vinyl) I knew he was being an idiot, but I also recognized what he resisted about Doll by Doll. Though the noisiest passages of Remember are a match for any Krautrock guitar meltdown, and Bill Price’s abrasive production fit the cultural moment—he’d already worked with the Sex Pistols and the Clash—Doll by Doll were otherwise completely out of step with punk and new wave. God knows they were usually dark and moody enough in their lyric—violence, death, humiliation, heartbreak, the works—but Leven, an avid poetry reader since his teens, had no use for what he calls the “cartoon violence” of punk....
Pelican became locally popular about ten years ago—they were the band that would crank it to 11 and play djun djun djun djun over and over again. Though their earth-shaking, monumentally minimalist instrumental metal was undoubtedly awesome, sometimes it could feel like a gimmick—but by their second full-length, 2005’s The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, they’d added relatively sophisticated dynamics, a wider range of textures, and progressive, sprawling arrangements to their sound, silencing critics who complained that the band knew only one trick....
So you’re invited to a wedding and the invitation says “black-tie only” and you don’t own a tuxedo: What do you do? Well, in my case, I pray that I fit into someone else’s. But when that tuxedo turned out to be a pair of floppy formal pajamas, I found myself without a decent tux with only a few days to go. Someone recommended Monitor to me, and when I rolled up to the Uptown shop, I admit I was reluctant to even enter, what with its anachronistic sign and garish, brightly colored tuxedos in the window display....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you can’t get enough of Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, aka the former Hollinger International press baron in the crosshairs in United States v. Black, there’s a new blog up and running that promises all Black all the time. Blacksjustice.com was launched by freelance reporter Susan Berger, who was a Pioneer Press staffer when that suburban chain was one of the more profitable elements in Black’s media empire....
On June 13 the City Council passed a resolution honoring several of Chicago’s top chefs, and as usual 14th Ward alderman Ed Burke offered the longest, most eloquent praise of the day’s honorees. “‘There’s no sincerer love than the love of food,’ the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw once said,” Burke intoned. Shaw, a celebrated vegetarian, also reportedly once said, “Animals are my friends . . . and I don’t eat my friends....
