Cynthia has breasts, a vagina, and the Y chromosome of a man. She was born with the chromosome; the breasts are largely the result of hormone therapy and the vagina is partially a surgical creation. But Cynthia, 41, is not a transsexual, at least not by choice. Her parents, counseled by physicians at Children’s Memorial Hospital, made the decision for her when she was seven weeks old. “That made me a tranny infant, I suppose,” Cynthia says....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This brand rep tag cloud says most of what you need to know. Note the size of “burnt” and “bitter”–Starbucks just isn’t very good. But more importantly it’s gotten comparatively worse than the other options. It used to be that Starbucks really was better than most coffee, because before Starbucks “gourmet” coffee was practically nonexistent. I remember being excited to try Starbucks on a trip to Seattle back in the mid-90s, because there was no Starbucks in Roanoke, Virginia (later in the decade we got one as part of our first Barnes & Noble)....
Edgewater has a lot going for it: space for new businesses, plenty of diversity, and dedicated leaders. But I suspect that sometimes Edgewater’s residents need a confidence boost. Apparently the Community Christian Church feels the same way. According to its website walkthechalk.org, the church’s #chalktheblock campaign started a little over year ago as part of its mission to replace the “hurry, worry and busy” of the city. Every other week, church and community members write simple but meaningful messages on Edgewater, Uptown, and Rogers Park sidewalks: “You are loved....
I know I wrote two weeks ago that Takashi Yagihashi’s Slurping Turtle won the izakaya/yakitori style war, a trend that’s quickly becoming as tired and oversaturated as cupcake burgers. But that was before I visited Yusho, from former Charlie Trotter’s chef de cuisine Matthias Merges, a dim, narrow, bustling spot in Avondale, a neighborhood that can actually use something along these lines. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But more about him later....
Which is easier for Americans to do: agree on a black candidate for president or agree that a racial joke is funny? The comics met at a Jaycees meeting in Harvey in 1968—Dreesen was selling life insurance then and Reid was a salesman for DuPont. They began by taking a drug-prevention program into local schools, where an eighth-grade girl told them they were so funny they ought to be a comedy team....
Angry and uncompromising, this 1975 drama by Haile Gerima follows the slow radicalization of a black woman in Watts (the magnetic Barbara O. Jones) as she contends with street crime, brutal police, invasive social workers, a husband in prison, and the pandemic despair of the late Vietnam era. “People who love money are animals,” writes her husband (Johnny Weathers), articulating the film’s bitter Marxist perspective, and the story is steeped in the mechanisms of economic violence....
With regard to the AIDS plague, Larry Kramer was a first responder. In 1982, when the Centers for Disease Control acknowledged that gay men were dying in epidemic numbers from a “cancer” no one yet understood, Kramer ran toward the fire, as they say, rather than from it. He became what a colleague from the period calls “the principal and guiding force behind the establishment of Gay Men’s Health Crisis,” a Manhattan-based organization that still provides counseling and legal support....
The Illinois Department of Human Rights will host a display devoted to the 2009 inductees into Chicago’s Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame at the James R. Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph, Monday-Wednesday, November 23-25. The exhibit will include photos and biographies of this year’s inductees. As I noted in an earlier blog (http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2009/09/16/gay-and-lesbian-hall-of-fame-inducts-new-honorees), the new inductees include leading figures in the arts, media, and medicine as well as politics and community activism....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s gotten fat and happy because of his new contract extension. Yeah, but why has he played so well on offense? Anyway, the contract is full of incentives, so he can’t just kick back and wait for the money to roll in. He’s not actually doing terribly; fans’ expectations are just too high. We can call this the Lovie Theory....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next month Fire Records is releasing Little Sand Box, a sprawling eight-CD box set collecting the solo output of Giant Sand visionary Howe Gelb—six commercially issued albums, a live effort, and a previously unissued disc of piano pieces. Both on his own and with Giant Sand, Gelb has always been a little erratic, but that’s partly due to an unfettered adventurousness and desire to avoid repeating himself....
I also made it to Mitsuwa on Sunday to witness the disassembly of the same magnificent fish Mike Sula has written about. My almost indecent enthusiasm for bluefin sashimi is, like his, colored somewhat by my understanding of the species’s dire circumstances, so I’ve done a little research to attempt to reassure myself that I wasn’t party to a bioethical atrocity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, this was a Mediterranean-caught tuna....
The third Architecture & Design Film Festival runs Thursday through Monday, April 12 through 16, at Music Box, with 31 films screening in 15 different programs. Tickets are $11, with packages available for $45 (five tickets) and $90 (13 tickets). Following are selected films screening; for a full schedule see adfilmfest.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Detroit Wild City French filmmaker Florent Tillon calls RoboCop one of his favorite movies, but his 2010 documentary owes little to Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 Motor City dystopia....
Sketchbook X Collaboraction Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few of the nerdier pieces in the festival’s lineup actually reference the exponent’s mathematical function, often using repetition to tease out literal and figurative implications of raising a given quantity to a certain power. In Cory Tamler’s Eighty-Four, for instance, a Pennsylvania town called Eighty-Four is magically squared, or multiplied by itself, so that suddenly 84 nearly identical Eighty-Fours dot the globe....
QWhat the hell do I say to my straight 14-year-old son about porn? Should I say anything? My sister tells me that all the research shows my son has been looking at porn for three years already. Am I too late? —Distressed Anxious Dad Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the alarming statistic Lauer cited—which was used to justify all sorts of proposed crackdowns on online porn—turned out to be total bullshit....
Honorable Mention Blue 13416 W. Ontario | 312-787-1400 If we truly lived in a town that cared to eat well, restaurants like chef Chris Pandel’s beercentric the Bristol would be distributed evenly instead of concentrating in overcrowded, gentrified ghettos like Bucktown or Lincoln Square. The seasonal menu at this new arrival promises interesting variety at accessible prices, including of late a broiled eel sandwich, a perfect pairing of grilled mackerel and romaine in the Caesar, and “Scotch olives,” a mutation of a Scotch egg (a boiled egg encased in sausage and deep-fried) and Italian olives all’Ascolana (fat green olives stuffed with pork and veal and deep-fried)....
We tend to think that imperialism is motivated by greed and racism, but it’s just as often inspired by altruism. From Rudyard Kipling urging colonization of the Philippines to Christopher Hitchens urging regime change in Iraq, humanitarian concerns make for foreign adventures. In case after case, empathy turns out to be another word for invasion. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Freedom Burning focuses on British antislavery sentiment in the years after 1833, when the government of King William IV essentially outlawed slavery throughout the empire....
Even Frederick Wiseman needs a fantasy life. Revered for his ascetic narrative style (no clips, no voice-over, no talking heads, no score) and probing examination of American institutions (high school, the military, the court system, public housing), Wiseman has taken detours into the dance world before with Ballet (1995) and La Danse (2009). But this documentary about Crazy Horse, the legendary Parisian nude cabaret, is so warm, colorful, and sensuous that it seems like a real anomaly for the highly disciplined filmmaker....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Super H Mart, the Korean megagrocery in Niles, opened last summer, and my head still spins in wonder at its endless bounty. To really appreciate it you need to set aside several hours, and perhaps perform some calming mental exercise to prepare for the crowds and confusion of this inconveniently laid out labyrinth of food. The variety of frozen dumplings alone is enough to inspire the same pangs of existential insignificance you can get from stargazing....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Good is not real, but evil exists!” shouts the protagonist of Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (which recently played at the Music Box), but that line could have been uttered in quite a few other movies this year. The Act of Killing, Bastards, Heli, The Missing Picture, Narco Cultura, Pain & Gain, A Touch of Sin, 12 Years a Slave, and War Witch all center on acts of dehumanizing violence—evil, if you believe there’s such a thing....
Visionary 20th-century German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, something of an astrology nut, liked to claim he’d been born on a planet orbiting Sirius. So it’s apt that, in Melissa Thodos’s Aries, trumpeter Stephen Burns plays strands from Stockhausen’s “Tierkreis” (“Zodiac”) to spur 12 dancers to movement, each representing an astrological sign. An unsettling sense of detachment flows from these fantastically complex and broken melodies, yet the historical moment the dance traces is one of ascendance....
