The 41st Ward, represented by the sole Republican in the City Council, isn’t exactly known as a hotbed of political activism. But if reform is your central issue and you want nothing more than to elect someone willing to take on the machine, you’re in luck if you live on the city’s far northwest side. That’s where Frank Coconate, fired city worker and political gadfly, is waging an uphill campaign for Democratic ward committeeman....
Blow Out Brian De Palma’s Scarface, a remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks gangster classic, screens at the Logan on Mon 7/29, 11 PM. As Dave Kehr notes in his review, this is De Palma’s most serious film, which makes it probably his least interesting. (The Bonfire of the Vanities is also a strong candidate, although Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography occasionally impresses.) Indeed, De Palma is at his best when he’s at his most quirky, though his perceived irreverence has earned him as many (if not more) detractors as supporters....
Today the magnificently ornate terra-cotta skyscraper that overshadows every other structure on the river, including the way more famous Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, is an office building known, rather prosaically, by its address, 35 E. Wacker Drive. But when it first went up, back in 1926, it was known as the Jewelers Building and it was, essentially, the city’s tallest parking garage. Jewelers carrying thousands of dollars worth of diamonds and justifiably concerned about robbery could drive their cars into the building from Lower Wacker, where elevators would spirit them—still in their cars—up to their offices....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » America has no HISTORY, man. OK, you wouldn’t think this would create the slightest twinge–plus, how uncool is it to grieve for the passing of fast food–but somehow I feel a little sad: Wendy’s has closed its flagship first restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. It had been open since 1969, and anybody who ever lived in Cols remembers its bizarro brick + blue-n-white striped front with the original, slightly Old West Wendy’s signage....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, as the gatekeeper I’m privy to the horrible truths about we the people, so I’m well aware that the stories that go to the moon are ones where people get killed on camera or ones in which a woman marries her look-alike sex doll. You can play along at home, as many of the Best Publications in the World have most read/most e-mailed boxes, which rarely correspond to what would populate the most-important-and-moving boxes which are as yet nonexistent....
Sam Worley Charcuterie plate There’s wanting and there’s wanting. A few disappointments present themselves straightaway on the menu at Bar Pastoral, the new Lakeview wine-and-sundry restaurant from the folks behind the Pastoral grocery enterprise, which opened its first shop in 2004. It’s since added two downtown location; Bar Pastoral represents an attempt to move the fancy cheeses and meats that Pastoral sells for take-home onto the plate, served in a convivial atmosphere that, on a recent Friday night, was the right amount of busy....
QI’m a Savage Lovecast listener, but I’m sending this question to your column because my boyfriend would for sure recognize my voice if I called the show. I’m 25, I live in Portland, and my boyfriend and I have been monogamous for five years. His dick is of average size. It’s not small enough for him to have dealt with the emotional baggage associated with “small dicks.” Yet, I’ve had sex with big dicks, and I would love to try one of those dick sheaths or extenders or whatever....
With more than 31 million views on YouTube since its release six days ago, it seems inevitable that Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop,” already infamous for its lyrical drug references and kiiinda racist video, will enter the Billboard Hot 100 at or near its top. Which is fine. The pop charts are supposed to provide teenagers with bad influences, even if Miley may or may not be “the second coming of Pat Boone....
Tony Lagouranis doesn’t fit the profile of a person likely to go wrong by following orders. He’s lived a footloose life unconstrained by a desire for professional advancement, for the approval of superiors, even for a comfortable home. A freethinker, he read the great works of Western civilization in college and mastered classical languages. It was his desire to learn Arabic as well that took him to Iraq. The United States was at peace then....
Author and Northwestern prof Chris Abani recommends Teju Cole’s latest novel Every Day Is for the Thief. Chicagoans recommend the webcomic Space-Mullet, a pair of contemporary art mags, and Lisa Alvarado’s Still, Life Chicagoans recommend Roxane Gay’s Ayiti, comics confab Brain Frame, and T-shirts from Skim Milk. Chicagoans recommend The Gogo Show, Geekfest, and the Randolph Street Market Chicagoans recommend Queer Comedy at Zanies, Robinson Alone, and Danger 5. This week’s Culture Vultures recommend Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and Jeffrey Gusfield’s Deadly Valentines....
The 14th European Union Film Festival runs Friday, March 4, through Thursday, March 31, at Gene Siskel 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 through Thursday, March 10; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amer This French-Belgian feature (2009) pays tribute to the Italian giallo, a flashy horror genre of the 60s and 70s whose breast-and-blade fetish helped birth the American slasher film....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back when she lived in Chicago in the mid-aughts, violist and musicologist Amy Cimini immersed herself in the city’s experimental and improvised-music scenes; among her many projects were the Civil War, with guitarist Adam Sonderberg and bassoonist Katherine Young, and the duo Architeuthis Walks on Land, also with Young (who continues to be one of her most steadfast collaborators—AWoL plays at Elastic on June 28)....
I think I am going to change the regular formula on this entry. There will be no story at the end because I did hear one of the best break-up stories on Friday night so what I will do instead is add that to the regular entry and then plea for people to submit good date stories. The inbox is flooded with bad date stories and I am beginning to think that everyone is totally capable of fucking up a relationship or date so to change it up a bit I will post some good stories once they start coming in....
Mike Sula Pizza, Himmel’s It’s difficult to remember what a relative pizza desert Chicago was 13 years ago. We’ve always had our deep dish and our cracker crust, but long before Spacca Napoli, Pizzeria da Nella Cucina Napoletana, Reno, or Great Lake came along, you had to have traveled to Italy to know what acceptable Neapolitan pizza was remotely like. And then in 1999 the late Cesar D’Ortenzi, owner of Lincoln Square’s La Bocca Della Verita, opened Pizza D....
Kevin Gates’s The Luca Brasi Story When it comes to rap mixtapes, there are bad, good, and great ones, and then there are mixtapes that are so fantastic it can take weeks and months to let the whole experience seep in. These are the ones that are so strong your brain stays glued to the first handful of songs long after your ears have moved on to the end of the collection, where your brain continues to wrestle with the details of those tracks even when there’s silence....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month at Moto, pastry chef Ben Roche called me over and said, “Hey, you wanna see me make ice cream in 30 seconds?” He’d poured some soy milk into a stand mixer, along with some parsnip juice, and now he hit the switch. As he hoisted a metal canister of liquid nitrogen and tipped it into the spinning bowl, a swirling white fog rose up from the center and spilled out over the edge....
Scottish director David Mackenzie is a major artist, but he’s seriously neglected in the U.S. He won strong reviews for his unsettling literary adaptations Young Adam (2003) and Asylum (2005), but since the limited release of the latter, his work has gone unnoticed, despite the fact he’s gotten more adventurous with each film. Hallam Foe (2007), starring Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) as a Holden Caulfield-like sociopath, was an exhilarating coming-of-age movie with an adult, sometimes frightening tone; it opened here to scant press under the unhelpful new title Mister Foe....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An interesting if late-arriving story in yesterday’s New York Times discusses how the often-strict racial lines in the rock underground—namely, that black people by and large don’t dig rock music–have started to shift. The story contends that starting in the late 60s, just as white audiences were embracing Jimi Hendrix, black listeners gravitated to R & B, funk, soul, disco, and hip-hop, despite the fact that rock was largely a black creation....
According to a recent Pew Center poll, support for the Democratic Party hasn’t grown even though Republican approval ratings are plummeting. The problem? People think Republicans at least are clear about what they want: lower taxes, less government, strong defense. Democrats have “a hundred answers and it’s ten minutes before the first sentence ends,” says Peter Cunningham, president of the Bread and Butter Forum. For the Dems to win in 2008, they have to learn to keep it short and simple....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s say I owe you $10,000. Is that IOU worth $10,000? Well, I have a job, so maybe. But I work in a risky business right now, so my job security isn’t like that of, say, a Supreme Court justice. That means if you tried to sell my IOU to a friend so you could get some money right away, maybe you could only get like $8,000 for it, because everyone thinks my job is doomed....
