Jennifer Westfedlt may be most famous now as the longtime squeeze of Mad Men star Jon Hamm, but she’s also a damn good actor and writer, dispensing an assured Manhattan comedy of manners in movies like Ira & Abby (2006) and Kissing Jessica Stein (2001). Her directing debut is a funny and emotionally credible story of old college friends (Westfeldt and the underrated Adam Scott) who decide to have a baby together while maintaining their single lives....
ANGEL CEBALLOS Esben & the Witch Tonight the California rap trio Pac Div swings through Reggie’s Rock Club, and knowing the group’s ties to Chicago hip-hop in general and the Cool Kids specifically, it’s not too much of a gamble to expect some unannounced guest appearances. And New Jersey indie group Delicate Steve plays Subterranean with local post-post-emo rockers Like Pioneers, and the Reader-recommended local psych outfit celebrate the release of their new record at the Empty Bottle with fellow Chicagoans Toupee headlining....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aside from carrier-based music stores, musicians have been exploiting broader, less formal social networks to gain fans. The article cites the Sonoran group Los Pikadientes de Caborca whose home-recorded single “La Cumbia del Rio” became a smash thanks in large part to people multiplying the song from phone to phone via Bluetooth and Memory Stick. “La Cumbia del Rio” ended up earning Los Pikadientes de Caborca a record deal, a Grammy nomination, and 150,000 paid ringtone sales in the U....
Among America’s major newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times enjoys an unusual reputation for not reporting news. For instance, President Bush’s decision to transfer national intelligence director John Negroponte to the number-two job at the State Department was the top story in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times on January 4. The Sun-Times ignored it. Editor in chief Michael Cooke told me it was “regrettable” and “awful” that those ads weren’t better labeled....
Halfway to the slaughterhouse, I started choking on a pork rind. As I swerved in and back out of the oncoming lane I had a horrible thought: maybe I deserved to meet my end veering off Highway 69, gasping on this nameless, faceless, adulterated scrap of commodity pig, carelessly purchased as an expedient snack for a long drive through Wisconsin. It could be the karmic penalty for the part I was playing in the public consumption of a very different animal....
“Nobody could be that stupid,” I kept telling myself during Craig Zobel’s indie drama Compliance, despite the fact that it opens with the screaming white-on-black legend BASED ON TRUE EVENTS. As it turns out, plenty of people are that stupid. Between 1992 and 2004, close to 70 incidents transpired across the country in which a prank phone caller persuaded the manager of a small-town grocery store or fast-food restaurant that he was a police officer and ordered him or her to strip-search employees or customers suspected of having committed thefts or other crimes....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a number of reasons, I’ve been cooling on the NBA for a few years now. The regular season is too long, and as a result, the players don’t have any incentive to really bust it every night (full disclosure- I’ve seen a lot of Knicks games. Too many, really). Tickets are too expensive, especially for the less-than-compelling Bulls....
Writing about Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus two weeks ago, I speculated that Sebastian Silva’s direction of actors in that film—guiding them through extended improvisations within a tightly organized structure—may owe something to his background as a musician. This thought occurred to me again while watching Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen’s latest comedy-drama, which opens this week. Allen has long moonlighted as a jazz clarinetist, and he too seems to cast his movies as though preparing jam sessions, bringing together a diverse set of players to see how they’ll interact....
An as-told-to interview with a Chicago publishing whiz, for our Spring Books issue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re based in Boston, since 1832. Our trade publishing is primarily out of Boston and New York; in the Chicago area we employ more than 600 full-time people—editors, marketers, product development folks, and sales teams. We have offices in Evanston, Rolling Meadows, and Geneva. The Evanston office was McDougal Littell, which became part of HMH in 1994....
The Death and Life of the Great American School System Diane Ravitch (Basic Books) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Ravitch discovered this modest truth through honest self-questioning and sound logic, why then can’t we all read her book and do the same? Because, as Ravitch demonstrates despite herself, school reform has little to do with a dispassionate interest in improving schools and a lot to do with the manipulation and consolidation of power....
The Chef: Ray Stanis (Nellcote)The Challenger: Elissa Narow (Perennial Virant)The Ingredient: Mochiko Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His first thought was to make a pasta, given that Nellcote is so focused on the starch that they mill their own flour. It was easier said than done. “Everything I attempted was just really limp. It wouldn’t hold together,” Stanis said. “It had a weird texture....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a world swirling with danger and treachery, there’s one thing Americans have always been able to count on — the inferiority complex of our diffident neighbors to the north. The best Canadians have been able to do about it is tell themselves from time to time that they’re somehow worthier than we are, if vastly less significant — and they set great store by trifling evidence, such as the recent survey that reports Canada is a considerably happier country than the U....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrea Gronvall on the new release from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures: “Terra-cotta gnomes, the sort that decorate people’s lawns, are the characters of this bizarre feature animation, which lampoons the British obsession with gardening and upholds a long tradition of cartoons pitched to tots and stoners. On two adjoining backyards, armies of brightly painted figurines wage a relentless turf war; after a young blue gnome of the Montague household (given voice by James McAvoy) falls for the red princess of the next-door Capulet cottage (Emily Blunt), there’s some mild sexual innuendo and numerous obstacles to romance, not to mention a slew of puns, inside jokes, and tunes by Elton John....
Over the years William George has fed high-ranking politicians and celebrated screen actors, and he has the photographs on his wall to prove it: when VIPs from the south Indian state of Kerala come to visit, George’s Glenview-based Royal Malabar Catering is pretty much the only game in town. But George’s bread and butter is supplying the working Keralite expats of Chicagoland with the everyday foods of their homeland, which include a remarkable variety of meat, seafood, and vegetarian dishes flavored with a brilliant palette of spices—cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, chiles, garlic, ginger, coriander, and turmeric, often tempered by the liberal use of coconut....
Private Fears in Public Places Revisiting Alain Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet at the Music Box last week reminded me of seeing the director’s Private Fears in Public Places at that theater six summers ago. At the time, I was either unemployed or working part-time—I don’t remember which, but I was in a position to go to the movies on weekday afternoons, and I did this often to save money....
Twelve Angry Men Raven Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2007 the Brit weekly magazine The Spectator published a blistering attack on Twelve Angry Men, Reginald Rose’s venerated drama in which a lone dissenter gradually persuades his fellow jurors that personal and social prejudices have influenced their perception that the “slum kid” defendant in a murder trial is guilty. Leo McKinstry argued that Rose’s chestnut was “liberal twaddle,” typifying “the triumph of bleeding hearts throughout the institutions that should be protecting our society....
A friend of mine started working at Wrigley and Sox Park and got me into it, in 1966. He and his two brothers. I usually drove and they gave me a quarter for gas, probably enough for a gallon. At that time, beer was 40 cents at Wrigley. Now it’s $7.50. Roger Sosner, 67, doesn’t drink beer, but he’s been selling it in the stands at at Sox and Cubs games for more than 40 years, making friends with the regulars whether they buy from him or not....
Pianist Stewart Goodyear describes his early fascination with classical music as a form of rebellion–his Trinidadian and British parents preferred calypso and rock. The 29-year-old Toronto native has made a career of musical exploration, establishing a broad repertoire that includes some of his own compositions. He typically improvises the cadenzas during his concerto performances, a practice he traces back to Christmas parties at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, where he was challenged to improvise on carols in the style of composers from Mozart to Messiaen....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “He learned the skill at the feet of the master who eventually broke his heart–Berry Gordy, who dropped a career as a boxer for music, first as a record-store owner, then as a first-rate songwriter (he wrote Jackie Wilson’s “Reet Petite”) and finally as the founder and force behind one of the most evocative names in music, Motown Records…....
Speaking of sports books, Game of Shadows, the text that tore the cover off the BALCO performance-enhancing- drugs scandal, is freshly out in paperback ($15 from Gotham Books) with a new afterward covering the 2006 season. The updated material details Barry Bonds‘s turbulent campaign last year, as well as the state of the grand jury investigation (still no formal charges filed against him), and the government’s leak investigation involving authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Wiliams....
