Mike Sula Rub’s smoked potato Rub’s Backcountry Smokehouse is the second coming of Jared Leonard’s West Rogers Park barbecue joint Rub BBQ Company, the former day trader having moved his operation around the corner from Lunt to the remote backcountry of Western Avenue in early March. A lot can be said for Leonard’s learning curve. He started out on a gas-powered offset cooker, and the results were less than mentionable....
thursday10 Thursday10 Eric AlexanderCannibal Corpse Friday11 Eric AlexanderBreakawayFlaming LipsLeftoversPelican Saturday5 Eric AlexanderBlack Bear ComboKeri HilsonMardukRussian CirclesWhite Car Sunday13 Jason Adasiewicz’s RolldownEric AlexanderUnsilent Night Monday14 Tyler Jon Tyler, Sleepovers CANNIBAL CORPSE Pick up pretty much any Cannibal Corpse record and you’re guaranteed chugging riffage and machine-tight blastbeats, arranged into songs with titles like “Fucked With a Knife” and “Skull Full of Maggots.” The band advertise their love of gore with album artwork full of butchered bodies and flayed ghouls, and their lyrics—rendered borderline indecipherable by the throaty bark of George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, who replaced original singer Chris Barnes in 1995—are just as reliably gruesome....
Earlier this spring devotees of the skull-buzzing flavors of China’s Sichuan province were dealt a nasty surprise when it was discovered that Ben Li and Wan Cai Li, partners in Chinatown’s great Double Li, had abruptly abandoned their dark, claustrophobic Cermak Road restaurant to open 8000 Miles, a Chinese-Japanese fusion joint that might as well be halfway across the planet. Ben Li’s black pepper beef is great, but traveling to far-west-suburban Roselle for it would be like flying to Beijing—hardly worth the effort, considering only five more of his Sichuanese dishes made it on the menu, which also features sushi, pad thai, and General Tso’s chicken....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Resisterectomy” at Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry This exhibition brings together stories about gender reassignment surgery and breast cancer surgery from Chase Joynt and Mary Bryson. Yasmin Nair writes that the show “locates gender not as a finite end but as a more fraught series of questions, and it’s essential viewing for anyone interested to see where those might go....
Over the past couple of years minimal electro wunderkind Nicolas Jaar has firmly established himself as a pivotal figure in the dance music world, both through his perfectly arranged recordings and his phenomenal and unexpectedly frenetic live shows. In 2011 he teamed up with his friend Dave Harrington to form Darkside, which offered a noisier, more rock-oriented direction. Recently he and Harrington teamed up again under the name Daftside to produce Random Access Memories Memories, a bracing reinterpretation of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories that’s not exactly a remix record and not exactly a cover record, but something much stranger....
A Tavola The dining room at A Tavola is dimly lit and intimate, with only ten tables, though there are 12 more out on the patio. The menu is equally tiny, so strict vegetarians may have a hard time making the most of it. I went with the halibut, lightly dusted with seasoned flour and panfried, accompanied by a lemon and caper sauce—very simple, but perfectly moist and light. An appetizer of grilled portobello and sauteed oyster mushrooms stood out for its surprisingly complex flavor....
February appears to be Artist Suicide Month at the Gene Siskel Film Center. C. Scott Willis’s documentary The Woodmans, which screens daily through February 17, profiles Francesca Woodman, the gifted young New York photographer who leaped from a window to her death in 1981. Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, opening at the Film Center on Friday, uses performance and interview clips to create an autobiography of Spalding Gray, the actor and monologuist who was fished out of the East River in 2004 after he presumably jumped from the Staten Island Ferry....
This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....
Late one night, I’m watching reruns when Daniel called and said sometime the next day the FBI would stop by with questions about the company’s books. Those words alone and I was ready to dig a hole to climb into. But Daniel knew how to handle me so I didn’t get spooked. The way he talked was like honey dripping off a spoon. It’ll be fine, Alex. Just relax and don’t get excited....
Wreckless Eric Outside World About a year ago, Ben Scott and Hazel Rigby, the main forces behind local indie-pop act Outside World, took off to New York City and since their arrival, they’ve released only two new songs—albeit great songs—one of which came out in February, and another that was posted to Soundcloud yesterday. It’s called “I Know You”—it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track—and it continues down the path the band has slowly been heading, taking their simple, sunny pop tunes and infusing them with more proggy passages and mathy, fractured rhythms....
Each week through our December 11 issue we’ll be featuring a roundup of gift ideas on a different theme. Next week look for our suggestions on locally made goods. —Heather Kenny Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bottlenotes Guide to Wine: Around the World in 80 Sips (Adams Media Corporation) provides an overview of the increasingly global wine industry. Author Alyssa Rapp traveled the world sniffing out varietals not just in Napa and Tuscany but in Israel, China, and other lesser known wine-producing areas....
Miguel Sanchez’s cart was parked on the northwest corner of 26th and Sawyer, a few blocks from the pink stucco arch that spans the street proclaiming bienvenidos a little village. A green cafe umbrella was lashed to the white wooden cart, which Sanchez built himself a decade ago, and plastic bags filled with chicharrones dangled from its sides, fastened with clothespins. Sanchez makes about $100 a day at the cart; working nearly every afternoon and evening, and picking up some painting and carpentry jobs on the side, he supports his family of six....
In a culture that valued cloistered domesticity, a foot the shape and size of a lotus bud was the ticket to a more important kind of mobility. —”Brutal Beauty” by Deanna Isaacs Moving into a post-NYT world is not the same as post-literate; it’s hyper-literate. Media moguls fret over how to make money from such service to the public. That business model hasn’t yet emerged to the satisfaction of the greed that was rampant in the industry for generations....
Now he’s settling on a new strategy—charter schools! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If that doesn’t eventually knock Prosser out of business, I guess he can always call in the building inspectors. The Noble charter needs a zoning change from the Chicago Plan Commission, a board of mayoral appointees whose usual response to mayoral proposals is: “great idea, boss!” Other than that—I love you, baby!...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You may have seen the McDonald’s ads for McCafe Mondays, but a rough survey of ten downtown franchises revealed a Free Shit scandal to rival Blayola: Less than half the outlets–at 233 W. Jackson, 119 N. Wabash, 186 W. Adams, and 600 N. Clark, aka the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s–are prepared to make good on the promise of free 8-oz drinks....
Dr. David Hinkamp works at the University of Illinois at Chicago, codirecting the Health in the Arts Program—a medical clinic that was founded to research and treat problems specific to artists and then started offering artists basic care, too, because so many needed it. But he’s long looked with envy on a similar entity, New York’s Al Hirschfeld clinic for uninsured and underinsured people in the entertainment industry, run by the Actors Fund....
Hyde Park’s Seminary Co-op is one of the best academic bookstores in the country—and also one of the clunkiest. Located since 1961 in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary, 5757 S. University, it’s a warren of narrow pathways and low-hanging pipes. Taped, color-coded lines on the floor lead to towering shelves of theology or literature. Take a wrong turn and you may end up at the iron base of an organ bellows built by the Spencer Turbine Company....
KLAXONS | URBAN OUTFITTERS 4/15, SCHUBAS 4/16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Klaxons were at the Urban Outfitters in Wicker Park on Sunday thanks to Toyota, which is aggressively marketing its Yaris models to hipsters. Two Yarises were parked out in front of the store; one had a stripe job that looked like something you’d find on a 15-year-old sweatshirt dragged out of a bin at Village Discount and the other was equipped with a thumping sound system and a huge flat-screen TV that erupted out of the rear hatch at the touch of a button and broadcast the goings-on inside the store....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m so glad to see our aldermen here saying they’ll do their due diligence to help with this financial crisis,” Action Now executive director Denise Dixon said at a press conference / rally outside council chambers earlier today. In other words, Chicago is in such a state that Dixon was genuinely fired up at the notion that members of the legislative branch would pledge to ask for a few more details about the budget and lease deals—maybe even before they vote to approve them....
The murderous little man with the hunchback? Oh, he’s just the title character, King Richard III of England. The one to keep your eye on is the young nobleman called Richmond. Though he only shows up for the first time in act five, he’s pretty much the point of Richard III—or so he was for Shakespeare and his audience—because he’s going to become King Henry VII by killing Richard at Bosworth Field....
