Who says print is dead? Taking place over two days in three locations, Chicago Zine Fest provides a chance for independent publishers to showcase their work and for writers and artists to swap ideas. Highlights follow; a full schedule is at chicagozinefest.org. Zine Fest kicks off with a discussion about writing, health, and disability with Kerri Radley, Maranda Elizabeth, and Dave Roche (Fri 3/8, 1 PM, Conaway Center, Columbia College, 1104 S....
The best indication of what to expect from 25-year-old writer Britt Julious can be found in her Twitter handle, which is also the title of her Tumblr: the witty portmanteau “Britticisms.” It’s remarkable how active she is on both platforms, even as she works at Groupon, serves as a senior editor at the terrific high/low culture blog This Recording, and writes regularly for Gapers Block, Rhizome, and Design Bureau, among others....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Smalls, you might have heard, is the tiny Filipino-Korean barbecue/fried chicken joint in Irving Park started by the folks behind the Brown Bag Lunch Truck. It’s one of those road-to-brick-and-mortar feel-good stories that is one of few nice things to come out of the mess the city made of the food truck ordinance. Smalls’s Joaquin Soler painted a tight kitchen space just off Irving Park Road bright aqua blue to distract attention from the middling strip of sports bars on the main drag, installed a Southern Pride smoker, and began smoldering brisket, pulled pork, and Saint Louis spares over cherry and hickory wood....
Challenged with peanut butter by Patrick Henaghan of Michael Jordan’s Steak House, Mike Freeman, a bartender at the Palm, thought of breakfast—he likes his pancakes with peanut butter and maple syrup. “I kind of ran with those two components,” he says. Eventually he arrived at this thermos-ready PB&J, the “P’nut-Bourbon Julep.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Freeman has challenged Brendan Smith of Spiaggia with yellow mustard....
Hockey is the most beautiful sport in the world when played well. In Chicago, for decades, it was played poorly. That, of course, has changed. But although the sight of Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, and Dustin Byfuglien crossing the blue line on the attack in perfect coordination, or speedy defenseman Duncan Keith beginning a rush from behind the net, has reinspired many a Blackhawks fan, these moments aren’t what brought the team the Stanley Cup....
In January I wrote about Lola, a 20-month-old Norwich terrier that was abducted in November from a car parked near the Newberry Library. The dog has since been found: on February 23 Lola’s owner, Mary, got a call from a man named Richard Norwood, who said he and his girlfriend had been taking care of her for a few months. He’d seen one of Mary’s signs describing her and offering a reward....
Set in an unnamed South American country in the aftermath of a civil conflict that has displaced thousands, Daniel Alarcon’s first novel, Lost City Radio (HarperCollins), is like a cross between Goya’s “The Disasters of War” and a modern telenovela. Norma is the honey-voiced host of a call-in show aimed at reuniting families and intimates lost during the long uprising. She herself is a virtual widow–it’s been ten years since her husband, Rey, disappeared....
“Education is the passport to the future,” Malcolm X said, “for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” In Tanya Barfield’s thought-provoking Blue Door, education is the path by which four generations of African-American fathers and sons rise above social marginalization—but it’s also a trap for the last living member of that clan, whose success has cut him off from his roots. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is no cheap ethnic joint. The sleek decor and attentive service may be your first hint, but the menu confirms it. Also the tray of small tastes which was presented as we scaned the menu. A pile of salmon and tuna sashimi, a pickled plum, and a stack of slivers of green apple in a tart dressing piqued our palates....
At first glance Brett Neveu’s new play looks like yet another ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama: a troubled college freshman submits a disturbingly violent first-person story to his fiction-writing class, consequently pitting an adjunct professor’s insistence on the student’s free-speech rights against the college president’s need to protect his institution’s reputation. (The story is based on a 2003 incident at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University.) But when the student turns out to be an Iraq war vet and a military criminal psychologist shows up to investigate the possibility of war crimes–among other things–Harmless becomes a Mametian cat-and-mouse game full of ethical ambiguities and sickening betrayals....
Spread across 13 indoor and outdoor venues on Saturday, September 25, the fourth annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival features a lineup packed with top-shelf local players. The music begins at 1 PM with the University of Chicago X-Tet at the James W. Wagner Stage (on Midway Plaisance between Ellis and Woodlawn) and the U-High Lab Tet at the DuSable Museum of African American History. Highlights from the daylong schedule include the Bethany Pickens Trio (Robie House, 2:30 and 3:30 PM), the Robert Irving III Quintet (International House, 3 PM), the Ernest Dawkins Organ Trio (Hyde Park Art Center, 3:30 PM), flutist Nicole Mitchell & the Black Earth Ensemble (Experimental Station, 4 PM), the Willie Pickens Trio (Hyde Park Union Church, 5:30 PM), the Orbert Davis Quintet (Hyde Park Union Church, 7 PM), Dana Hall’s Spring (Rockefeller Chapel, 11:30 PM), and New York salsa dura band La Excelencia, who also play the World Music Festival at 3 PM (International House, 9 PM)....
Miles Raymer,Reader music writer Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City (XL) I liked most of the music on Vampire Weekend’s first two albums, but their posh aura of privilege was too off-putting for me to self-identify as a fan. Their third strips away the prep-school precociousness and heavy-handed attempts to incorporate various world musics, replacing them with a much-needed subtlety, both in their sonic borrowing and in their literary references....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For this week’s issue I reviewed Office Girl, the new novel from Columbia College prof Joe Meno, and found that despite what the book looked like, uh, on paper—it’s a love story about two young artists living along the Blue Line and riding bikes together, a plot that sort of makes me want to run for the hills—it was a completely enjoyable read....
French Cancan This weekend the Gene Siskel Film Center continued its new series, titled “Great War/Grande Guerre: World War I on Film,” with a screening of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, the French classic of poetic realism. Many of Renoir’s films were unappreciated upon release, but only this one earned the scorn of the Third Reich—Joseph Goebbels declared the film “Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1” after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival....
The job of a pundit is to reduce a complex situation to something simple and then pass judgment on it. Grateful readers admire the pundit for his perspicacity. Ungrateful readers marvel at his incomprehension. I’d had a queasy feeling that applauding the Egyptian army for hitting the “reset” button on Egypt’s revolution—basically telling the country, we reserve the right to kick out your governments until you come up with one we like—would strike anyone well acquainted with Egypt as absurd....
Reviewing shorts in these pages has always been a compromise, so all this week on the Bleader I’m posting individual reviews of the five animations and five live-action shorts in contention for the Academy Award. Like the Best Picture nominees, they’re a mixed bag, though the best ones are well worth seeing; unlike the Best Picture nominees, whose “foreign” entries consist of a Woody Allen comedy (Midnight in Paris) and a silent film set in Hollywood (The Artist), the shorts are truly international....
Watching Jami Primmer’s one-woman show is like waiting at a long red light: while stuck, you can glance over a cross-section of the city and think, but ultimately you’re anxious to move on. Her 12 characters–among them a street sweeper, a retiree, a prostitute, and even a buzzing fly–lack definition, and though Primmer shifts physically and vocally with each one, since they all have similar vocabularies, they all sound the same....
Marianna Levant In Marianna Levant’s seven paintings at Gescheidle clusters of highly detailed forms float dreamily in space, their planes and curves suggesting both machinery and the natural world. All but one were inspired by clock or watch mechanisms; the exception, from an earlier group of works, was based on automobile parts. Throughout, her lyrical, rhythmic mix of repetition and variation conveys a delicate harmony. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
At the age of 12 Seijiro Matsumoto began his apprenticeship at a ryotei in Fukuoka, Japan, by wiping individual bamboo leaves in the garden of the private dining club every morning. In return he was given food, a place to sleep, and precious little else. It would be three years before he was permitted to wash the soup pots. After the bubble burst, Honda and places such as Suntory and Benkay closed....
CEILING STARSCeiling Stars(self-released) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’d never mistake GemStones for anything but a Chicago MC—on this mix tape, released by Lupe Fiasco’s label, he jacks beats from Kanye, trades raps with Lupe, and occasionally borrows Twista’s rapid-fire cadences. But between the frequency with which he swears to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” and the number of times he claims to be carrying on Biggie’s legacy, it’s apparent that he also takes inspiration from the east coast, specifically a certain former Def Jam president....
