Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How well I know!–the Old King cried from beyond the Styx–the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous moon, and when she was waxing she sailed so low she just about impaled herself on the peaks of Thermopylae. Climb up on her? Of course we did....
September sunday 9/14 Jamie Kaler aThrough 9/18, Zanies, 1548 N. Wells, 312-337-4027 or chicago.zanies.com, $25. monday 9/22 Christian Finnegan aThrough 9/27, Lakeshore Theater, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-472-3492 or lakeshoretheater.com, $15. wednesday 10/1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pablo Francisco Remember that actor in the Police Academy movies who did all the sound effects? That wasn’t Pablo Francisco (it was Michael Winslow, who was recently in a GEICO commercial), but Francisco’s voice talent is that good....
Oak Park documentarian Ruth Leitman has always trained her camera on women: Wildwood, NJ (1994) looked at teenage girls, Alma (1998) chronicled a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, and her best known project, Lipstick & Dynamite (2004), explored the postwar heyday of “lady wrestlers.” Her forthcoming documentary Tony & Janina’s American Wedding, screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center twice in October, is her first ever about a man, and it wasn’t a film she ever foresaw making....
On July 21, Mike Quigley got word that he was being laid off from the south-side public high school where he’d been teaching science for the last eight years. But all the other fired teachers, maybe as many as 1,000 of them, stayed fired. None of these teachers would continue to receive salary and benefits for a year—a protection tenured teachers believe their contract guarantees them. In fact, the teachers’ union has filed a suit in federal court challenging the dismissals and asking for their jobs back....
Although Fun’s current tour is their first ever in the States, they’ll probably feel right at home in Chicago. The Helsinki trio are recording their second album, Zu-pa! (due in April on the Finnish indie If Society), with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, and they might as well have recorded their first there, too: Szklarska Poreba (2004) owes a good 95 percent of its chewed-off textures and floor-shattering rhythms to Albini’s work with Rapeman and Shellac, as well as former Albini clients like the Jesus Lizard....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week in Omnivorous I wrote about Wanda Kurek and her 72-year-old Whiskey Row tavern Stanley’s. I wanted her to give us a recipe for one of her big, hearty lunch specials, but she keeps all that stuff in her head and didn’t want to give one up. So I asked bartender Guy Vanek for his mom’s Czech dumpling recipe, which he occasionally whips up if he arrives for work early enough....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given my well-established love of emo, I like to keep tabs on a handful of small DIY labels that have proven their merit by dropping some fascinating fourth-wave emo albums. Chief among the microlabels is one called Keep It Together Records, which is based in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, a small town a couple hours from Chicago. Primarily focused on cassette releases, Keep It Together has done a decent job of putting out music by new emo acts that are just getting started....
Ben Byer was 31 when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and given two to five years to live. His son, John, was just two. As he walked John to preschool one day afterward, the boy asked, “Are you afraid to die?” As a journalism student at Indiana University, the Evanston native traveled to Paris to study film and ended up dropping out of school to stay a while....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leon Hilton on Adam Rapp’s Animals and Plants, a Cynosure Productions show at Gorilla Tango, plus Zombie Bob: How to Get Your Foot in the Door Without Losing It, also at Gorilla TangoKerry Reid reviews a pair of bar shows: Brides of Ghost Hunter Richard Crowe, at Liar’s Club, and Seanachai Theatre Company’s Our Father, at Atlantic Bar & Grill....
Educated in the parochial schools of Catholic Beverly, Mary Fishman knows nuns. In the mid-70s, at Mother McAuley high, her principal was a nun. So were some teachers. She ticks them off: “I had nuns for French for three years. I took orchestra—that was a nun. Four years. English, I had one.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well into adulthood Fishman retained what she calls “a kid’s view of Catholicism,” the feeling that strict adherence to the church’s doctrines was requisite for any good Catholic....
This article was the recipient of a Lisagor Award in Non-Deadline Reporting, Non-Daily Newspaper or Magazine, Circulation Above 20,000. She grew up as Troy, a white, middle-class boy, in Urbana, a town of about 12,000 in western Ohio. Home life was always difficult. “Troy’s birth mother would take him to bars, leave him in public places,” says Donahoe’s adoptive mother, Kathy. “So he was put into foster care when he was 18 months old....
Q Here’s my problem: I love women. I love the way they look, I love the way they move, I love the way they sound. I like to see them naked. But the idea of actually interacting with women—trying to engage them in intelligent conversation without coming off as absolutely leotarded—absolutely fucking terrifies me. I’m a virgin at 30. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never been on a date. I’ve never even had a conversation with a woman that lasted longer than a couple of minutes and wasn’t completely superficial and forced....
Chosen Few Reunion Weekend What started in 1990 as a small picnic featuring a group of old friends from the early days of house music has grown into a four-day festival that includes a kickoff at the Shrine on Thu 7/5, a preparty at the Mid on Fri 7/6, an afterparty at L26 on Sat 7/7, and a sendoff show at the Shrine on Sun 7/8—and of course the picnic itself, which runs from 7 AM to 8 PM on Sat 7/7 in Jackson Park and is expected to draw roughly 20,000 people....
Hilary Arnow University of Chicago economist Jim Leitzel: “I don’t like the idea of putting people in prison for wanting to consume a drug.” The drug warriors fought back this week. In separate statements, a United Nations agency and a group of former DEA chiefs called on the Obama administration to thwart the marijuana-legalization laws approved by voters in Washington and Colorado last fall. The UN says the new policies violate international treaties, while the former drug czars believe it’s critical that U....
Judy Dever is a retired CPS teacher, a lifelong resident of Canaryville, and an avid traveler. She’s also a fan of classical music: “My only radio station—besides Saturday-morning Irish radio—is WFMT,” she says. She pulled over to write down the phone number, and called Symphonic Voyages, the Chicago-based company putting the cruise together, for information. By the time she decided to sign on, in the fall, she’d had several “very pleasant” conversations with the president, Eric Stassen....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The other night, my band played a basement show in Logan Square with the fairly new local duo Earring. It was my first time ever seeing the band, and after hearing how excellent they were, I felt silly for never catching them before. The band plays moody, supermelodic, shoegazey postpunk, filled out by front man Jason Balla’s lush, bi-amped guitar—in the end, the band ends up sounding way bigger than just a two-piece....
SNOW ANGELS sss WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY DAVID GORDON GREEN fROM A NOVEL BY STEWART O’NAN WITH KATE BECKINSALE, SAM ROCKWELL, MICHAEL ANGARANO, AMY SEDARIS, AND OLIVIA THIRLBY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nowhere is this more true than in George Washington, a loose-limbed tale that, in its simple humanity, erases the line between black and white, adult and child. In the DVD commentary Green explains that he wanted to establish “how the people communicate with each other and how they communicate with the land around them,” and there’s a strong sense of the characters as part of the landscape....
In honor of our spring books issue, here’s a roundup of interesting titles that have crossed my desk lately. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Modern Mixologist | Tony Abou-Ganim with Mary Elizabeth Faulkner | Surrey Books, $35 Las Vegas barkeep Abou-Ganim, a 30-year-veteran who began working near the dawn of the classic cocktail resurgence, has written a useful manual for anyone considering a home mixology self-improvement course....
The 13th annual Celtic Fest Chicago offers a range of traditional and contemporary Celtic entertainment—including music, dance, cooking demonstrations, and a “Men in Kilts” leg contest—spread across seven stages and tents in Grant Park (Jackson and Columbus). The festival runs Saturday from noon till 9:30 PM and Sunday from 11 AM till 9:30 PM. Saturday’s music culminates with Canadian sibling band Leahy and Belfast foursome McPeake, who play the Petrillo Music Shell beginning at 6 PM; on Sunday the headlining slots are filled by veteran Los Angeles-based group Gaelic Storm and Pennou Skoulm from Brittany, France....
Second, that no one really knew what to do. But in fairness I think that’s SOP for a general panel, which in my experience is really a jumping off point for further discussion and awesome Twitter discussion. So: And: I really do think that in these whither journalism discussions there really isn’t enough discussion as to whether there’s a crisis of writing in newspapers and magazines. ‘Cause I think there is....
