Alain Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet screens again at the Music Box tomorrow. One thing I like about watching movies at Chicago Filmmakers in Andersonville is that they try to keep the screening room as dark as possible. There are no emergency lights, a thick black curtain prevents any illumination from sneaking in through the foyer, and it’s common practice during shows to keep the door to the back hallway shut....
For the city’s finances, July’s been a month of carnage. The perpetually broke Chicago Public Schools announced plans to empty their reserves in order to pay basic bills. The police department’s got cops working overtime—amid the latest wave of shootings— because there’s not enough money to hire police at the pace they’re retiring. Most notably, the last big downtown TIF, the LaSalle Central, will take in zero money, Orr says. That could spell trouble, since the city anticipated collecting $12....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The arrangement is similar to the Washington bureau, which was organized into one operation last November to provide superior coverage to the entire group. As you know, Kerry Luft recently was named Vice President/Washington Bureau and is blending the talents of journalists from the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune into a powerful new national reporting team....
Troy Moth Hospital Ships Hospital Ships is a rock quartet from Lawrence, Kansas, that began as the solo home project of front man Jordan Geiger, a multi-instrumentalist who’s also spent time in the bands Shearwater and Minus Story. Geiger has an obvious thing for the more pastoral end of the 60s singer-songwriter spectrum, as well as another, equally obvious thing for supremely bonkers psych rock that he shares with Ryan Graveface from Pittsburgh megaweirdos Black Moth Super Rainbow, whose Graveface Records label Hospital Ships is signed to....
Ride the High Country The fine folks behind the Northwest Chicago Film Society are wrapping up their winter programming on Wed 4/24 with a screening of the Sam Peckinpah film Convoy. (Luckily for us, NCFS is diving straight into its spring/summer offerings the following week; check out the complete schedule here.) Peckinpah’s reputation as an alcoholic with a notoriously irascible personality tends to take precedence over his films, which is truly a shame considering the singularity of his work....
This Memorial Day weekend, May 28 through 30, the second Windy City Sound Clash takes over Subterranean with four shows of punk rock, pop punk, and rock ‘n’ roll featuring 28 local and national acts. Toys That Kill headline Friday’s show, which begins at 7 PM, and the seven other acts on the bill include Dave Merriman of the Arrivals, Mikey Erg, and Dude Jams. There are two concerts on Saturday: an all-ages show at 4 PM with the Ataris, Banner Pilot, and the Menzingers and a 9:15 PM show headlined by the almighty Mushuganas, playing another of their extremely sporadic reunion gigs to celebrate the release of the “retrospective” album Lows in the Mid 90’s (Beercan)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I began asking Republicans I know–by and large people who might be natural candidates for short lists for various subcabinet policy positions in a Republican administration–how worried they were that the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, was clearly not up to the job: underbriefed and incurious. They were not worried, they told me. One of President Clinton’s problems, they said, was that the ceremonial portions of the job bored him–and thus he got himself into big trouble....
The Boston Strangler Directed by Richard Fleischer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Richard Zanuck, the 32-year-old production chief at 20th Century-Fox who greenlighted the film, dismissed Curtis out of hand when Fleischer suggested him for the role. The studio was looking at a wide range of actors—Warren Beatty, Beau Bridges, James Caan, Peter Falk, Peter Fonda, Martin Landau, Ryan O’Neal, Anthony Perkins, Robert Redford, George Segal—but at 42, Curtis was older than any of them and had been doing nothing but comedy for the past six years....
Robin Dluzen, editor in chief of Chicago Art Magazine is having nightmares about: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not since my adolescent discovery of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch have I felt the same heavy, sinking feeling in my stomach from a work of art, visual, written, or otherwise. The artist is the author, protagonist, and narrator of this digitally composed, fragmented, stream-of-consciousness piece, fluctuating between seemingly autobiographical reality and fantastical nightmares....
Streetcleaner The thing music bloggers most loved talking about this week was Kanye West’s brand-new, industrial-influenced LP Yeezus, and as much as I wanted to jump on board and make today’s 12 O’Clock Track that one song where he’s rapping about his “damn croissants,” I decided to go with another bit of industrial news from the past few days: the announcement that industrial metal pioneers Godflesh are heading stateside for a reunion tour this fall....
You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Smoke Crack The other day I was introduced to the work of Viper, a Houston-based rapper who’s been picking up a little bit of online notoriety over the past few weeks, mostly due to message board users attempting to bring him to meme status. There’s not a whole lot of info out there on this oddball hip-hop artist (real name Lee Carter), and by doing some online research, the biggest discovery I made was probably that I have way too much time on my hands....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Ben Cook joined Canadian prog-hardcore outfit Fucked Up in 2007 as their third guitar player, purists recognized him as the former front man for tough-guy moshcore bros No Warning. Not everyone realized how long Cook’s pop resume was, though. After No Warning, he fronted the Oasis-biting Surplus Sons, then went on to form glam rockers Marvelous Darlings and cave-pop duo the Bitters....
AP Photo/Courtesy the University of Chicago An undated photo of Andrew Greeley Father Andrew Greeley died last week at the age of 85, and Eugene Kennedy, a writer and former priest whose relationship with Greeley apparently wandered all over the map, said a moving farewell in Sunday’s Tribune. “We called each other friends and counted on each other but our friendship had been tested by times in which we drifted apart but could still hear each other’s voices,” Kennedy wrote....
The 15th annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, continues Fri-Thu 4/9-4/15, with screenings at the Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening this week; for a complete schedule visit siskelfilmcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I realized this morning that I forgot to include Taste of Chicago, which starts tomorrow, in my roundup of food-related events for the next week. What reminded me? According to Madelaine Burkert, Cristina Aguirre, and Alex Campbell at the Chicago Reporter, ten people who got salmonella poisoning after eating at last year’s Taste will file separate lawsuits today against Pars Cove restaurant; 790 people reported getting sick after eating hummus from their booth....
Rightly described by Dave Kehr as Jacques Rivette’s “breakthrough film, the first of his features to employ extreme length (252 minutes), a high degree of improvisation, and a formal contrast between film and theater,” this rarely screened 1968 masterpiece is one of the great French films of its era. It centers on rehearsals for a production of Racine’s Andromaque and the doomed yet passionate relationship between the director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife (Bulle Ogier, in her finest performance), who leaves the production at the start of the film and then festers in paranoid isolation....
Todd Rosenberg Sondra Radvanovsky as Anna Bolena The first act of Lyric Opera’s current production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is visually stunning, vocally impressive, and dramatically compelling. The original libretto by Felice Romani gave them a leg up on that (mad scene notwithstanding). Working with the better-than-fiction story of England’s infamous Henry VIII, Romani and Donizetti focused on a deadly triangle: the relationship between the king; his second wife, Anne Boleyn; and the lady-in-waiting who was to be his third wife, Jane Seymour....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Admittedly, I don’t know him all that well, but it looks to me like Dave Buchen is having a sweet life. A founding member of Chicago fringe titan Theater Oobleck, he’s written and performed in loads of plays, often under a pseudonym like Dave Boo-Khaloom. At some point he found love and moved to sunny Puerto Rico. Now he’s embarked on an act of extravagant artistic idiosyncrasy—a grand geste....
Sam Worley Don’t judge a pork chop by its cover. Mezcalina inhabits a neighborhood called something like “Lakeshore East,” or “Near Eastside,” but it may as well be East Bermuda Triangle—enter the address on Google Maps and you’ll be pointed straight at an undifferentiated gray block. I didn’t realize till I got there that that block was actually a building. (Actually, you know what? Maybe it’s not. I was inside it and I have no idea)....
Let’s face it. Philly cheesesteak sandwiches are for philistines. But having never been to Philadelphia, and therefore having never consumed a Cheez Whiz*-soused, grilled-gristle-and-onion bomb from Geno’s, Jim’s, Lorenzo’s, Tony Luke’s, or Pat’s King of Steaks, how can I possibly say this with any authority? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among regional beef sandwiches such as the Chicago IB, the Los Angeles French dip, the New Orleans debris po’boy, the Baltimore pit beef, and the Buffalo beef on weck, the dominant national profile of the Philly cheesesteak can arguably be attributed to the commercial success of its appalling bastard offspring, the Steak-umm—which in turn must have something to do with the extremely low bar a more faithful Philly cheesesteak needs to meet....
