Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Liturgy were without a doubt the most polarizing band of 2011. For now, though, let’s leave the debate over whether Liturgy are cool or lame, or whether they’re a true black-metal band or a bunch of trust-fund poseurs, for another day (or never again), and focus on something no one can argue with: that Greg Fox can manhandle a set of drums....
KAKI KING JUNIOR (ROUNDER) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » King is most famous for her unrepentantly virtuosic instrumental guitar music, which mixes Kottke-esque fingerpicking with showy-but-sweet metal tricks—she’s one of very few women with a signature guitar model—but over the course of her three most recent albums she’s swerved toward indie rock, or something like it. First she just toyed with rock dynamics and added some quiet, tentative singing, but on Junior, she’s bringing it all, at gale force....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Von Hausswolff is a Swedish singer—her father is the fearless experimental musician C.M. von Hausswolff—but until the release of her stunning second album, Ceremony (Other Music/Kning Disk), her music was pretty run-of-the-mill. Her 2010 debut album, Singing From the Grave, served up fairly innocuous, commonplace, breathy yet introspective pop. She didn’t entirely ditch that template on Ceremony, but by surrounding her songs with massive chords played on the organ of the Annedal Church in her native Gothenberg, she radically altered the complexion of the music, giving it a severe intensity and sense of grandeur (drummer Christopher Cantillo also heightens the music’s power with some heavy, reverb-drenched beats)....
The phrase “Dutch courage” supposedly refers to the bracing shots of genever (aka Holland gin) soldiers threw back before heading into battle in the Anglo-Dutch wars. You have to wonder how many of those opening chef Joncarl Lachman downed before mustering the guts to list something called zaansemosterdsoep as the second item on his menu at Vincent—right after the maatjesharing shot. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not that a Dutch restaurant in the middle of historically Swedish Andersonville seems strange....
The pages of proofs were piled at my feet. Bourbon had been poured. We were putting to bed our biggest issue of the year—double the size of a normal book on top of having to deal with a deadline a full day early . . . and an art director who was forced to miss almost the entire production cycle because his second baby arrived two weeks ahead of schedule. We were changing the orientation of a page, and one of our fearless designers, in an attempt to address the fallout of a much-tweaked layout, asked me what the last two words happened to be on the proof I held in my hand; she wanted to triple-check that all the shifting hadn’t knocked us off course....
On November 12 Mary took her little Norwich terrier, Lola, for a walk in the park across from the Newberry Library, then went to visit a cousin who was in hospice care nearby, leaving her tote bag and Lola in her car at a meter on Walton. About 40 minutes later Walgreens rang Mary’s cell with the news that someone had found her tote bag, which contained a prescription bottle, about a mile away, near North and LaSalle....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meanwhile, Black is serving a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence in Florida and former execs Peter Atkinson and Jack Boultbee are each doing two years in other American prisons. Black and Radler ran the Hollinger empire, most of which was in Canada, and they were accused of skimming off millions of dollars in phony noncompete fees when they sold off their papers piecemeal....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s Food & Drink Mike Sula reviews Frog N Snail, erstwhile Top Chef contestant Dale Levitski’s new Lakeview successor and “little sister” to Sprout, the Lincoln Park fine-dining restaurant he and his team pruned back into life. Here he’s launched a casual, eclectic “midwestern bistro” that doubles as a coffeehouse during the day and a seasonally driven dining room at lunch and dinner, where you’ll find creative takes on standards like brandade (here served fried in the form of “stix”), ratatouille (made with poussin and a basil-scented bread crumb that transforms it into Mediterranean chicken and stuffing), and grilled “carpaccio” with Lolla Rosa lettuce leaves, asparagus, and truffled egg yolk on toast....
John Sturdy Snow Angels The Snow Angels, Chicago’s premier holiday-themed garage-rock supergroup, are back again, and on Sat 12/20 they’ll be playing their 12th annual Christmas show, this time at the Empty Bottle. Featuring members of Outer Minds, Mannequin Men, Bare Mutants, and Vee Dee—dudes who are better known in this setting as Chris Maas, Don December XXV, Wes Sleigh, Rey N. Deer, and Santa Coz—the Snow Angels play beer-soaked, rocked-and-slopped-up holiday classics, parodies, and originals, and according to guitarist Dan Lang, “we have expanded our Elvis repertoire considerably....
Shakespeare once referred to April as “proud-pied.” This Wolf doesn’t know what that fucking means, but it seems like spring is the time for new vinyl pies from White Mystery, the local sibling garage-rock duo of Alex and Francis White. After all, it was last March that their self-titled, self-released debut LP sprang into the world like flowers from the ground or some other Shakespearean shit. Well, it’s happening again! Following a spate of tour dates in the south and midwest this spring, the flame-haired group will drop their second album, Blood & Venom, on April 20....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watch it and weep. Media Burn, the video archive, has posted online a clip of Dan Rostenkowski, the Chicago Democrat who was then majority whip, welcoming his party’s newcomers to the House of Representatives in 1981 (watch it after the jump). The leadership’s job, said Rostenkowski, who’d already been in the House 22 years, is to spare you the distress of having to vote on any bill “that will embarrass you, that will certainly cause you some concern with respect to getting reelected....
Next time you’re watching coverage of the anti-Obama “birther” movement, the health care reform “town hall” brawls, or the latest outrageous comments by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, etc., consider what H.L. Mencken wrote in 1923: “The Anglo-Saxon American[‘s] history is a history of recurrent outbreaks of blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him. . . . Theoretically launched against some imaginary inferiority in the non-Anglo-Saxon man, either as patriot, as democrat or as Christian, they are actually launched at his general superiority, his greater fitness to survive in the national environment....
There’s a K-8 Christian academy in Albuquerque that trains pupils what to do in the event that their school is attacked by an insane gunman with an automatic weapon. Certain older students are instructed to bombard, disarm, and pin down the hypothetical perpetrator. Some teachers carry guns—presumably they have the kids’ backs. Smith hosts that episode’s second segment, a decidedly less absurd story about birth defects in Iraqi children presumably caused by radioactive scrap left behind from the war....
Chicago writer and documentary producer June Finfer was working on a video about Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in 1999 when she began wondering what was really behind the vitriolic legal battles between its designer and its owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Finfer has made several documentaries about architecture–collaborating with her husband, architect Paul Finfer–but none that raised such intriguing questions. Mies and his client, a prominent physician and researcher, had embarked on a five-year relationship in the mid-40s that produced the little glass palace on the Fox River in Plano, one of the world’s most revolutionary and beautiful structures–then devolved into fury....
Baking with Bertha INFO 312-239-8570 (for theater reservations and lessons) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This six-foot-six, 57-year-old hausfrau from Franklin, Minnesota (“just like Lake Wobegon, except we have a Wal-Mart and a crystal meth problem”), in her size-13 white pumps, white hose, and light blue polyester floral print dress, is the creation of 30-year-old writer, performer, and pastry chef Michael Bowen. He borrowed the name from Jane Eyre: Bertha Mason is Rochester’s mad first wife....
Orgasm and nuclear holocaust are the controlling factors in this horny, delirious fantasy by the talented Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin). The hero (Thomas Dekker) is a hip college freshman longing for gay sex but also open to the physical ministrations of a British party girl (Juno Temple); meanwhile, his best pal (Haley Bennett) has gotten into a hot-and-heavy lesbian romance with a fellow student (Roxane Mesquida) who turns out to be a witch....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Tête-à-Tête,” a group show curated by Mickalene Thomas, is rich in patterns and repetition. It features the work of ten African and African-American artists, including Thomas herself, exploring notions of black identity. In her remarkable Polaroid series, Thomas uses Polaroid prints to create a quilt of images that depict various iterations of black female selfhood. Much of the work is rooted in 1970s images of black American women....
The bad news arrived in the mail the other day: my property taxes went up. And of course I’m not the only one being asked to pay more. Folks on the west and south sides are facing even steeper increases. It’s what the Cook County bean counters call “tax-scream time” again. That’s when folks all over the city get their tax bills and start screaming.” The following year, usually in the late summer or fall, the county officially tallies the “extension,” or the amount of property tax dollars that the city has spent in reality....
A week before Christmas Josh Deth was at the bank, closing on his construction loan, when the phone rang. It was the insurance agent for the tenant vacating the two-story, yellow brick building Deth, owner of the Handlebar, had bought to house his new venture, Revolution Brewing Company. If all goes according to plan the brewery and bar should be up and running by the fall. Right now the space is 12,500 square feet of raw potential, the empty main floor dominated by a gleaming 15-bbl brew kettle—the lower wall of which, the insurance agent was sorry to inform Deth, the moving crew had just punctured with a forklift....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most importantly, such an idea is probably the most practical solution to what will be an ongoing problem to monetizing the blogosphere. For all the hullaballoo over places like HuffPo, the essential problem is that newspapers and similar institutions will lose eyeballs to things that can’t really be monetized, not in any proper form. For instance: Back in the day I might have spent more time with the Trib or the NYT if it wasn’t for Balkinization or the Volokh Conspiracy or Lawyers, Guns, and Money or Ill Doctrine or the hundreds of other Web sites I visit hourly, daily, weekly, or what have you....
