Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometime between walking through the door of the new Trader Vic’s and slurping my way to the bottom of a Tiki Bowl at the bar, I lost my pen. I had to borrow one from the hostess, but I’m still reasonably sure I didn’t blow my cover, even as I later scribbled down illegibles about the peanut butter sauce that comes with the bread service....
QI’m a straight guy in my early 30s with an amazing girlfriend of two years. A few months ago, I felt open enough to share my taboo fantasy: father/daughter incest. My GF, to my delight, not only understands the fantasy but enjoys participating in it! Quickly: I have zero interest in this kind of thing actually happening. I understand the kind of damage that sexual abuse can do and has done to many, many women, and I would never pursue something like this in real life....
Hey, everybody: If you missed last week’s column, I’m taking the week off because, well, go read last week’s column. Here’s a rerun from May 24, 1995, to tide you over. It features not only my mother but also the very first mention of my boyfriend. As you’ll see, last week wasn’t the first time I gave mom the credit for my very curious career. —Dan “He’s 24.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Eternals, Watchers, Low Down Brass Band INFO 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At Locks and Montana’s apartment, after a browse through a new batch of reggae vinyl, I sit down with the band for a powerful serving of soba noodles with veggies and dumplings. The Eternals’ third full-length, Heavy International, is coming out on Aesthetics in just a few days, but the talk turns, as it often does among people with a profound level of emotional investment in music, to the downfall of the underground scene–something Locks and Montana haven’t felt connected to since the mid-90s....
“He lost happiness somewhere in his childhood, and spent his life trying to go back there and find it. When he played the Scarecrow in ‘The Wiz’ (1978), I think that is how he felt, and Oz was where he wanted to live. It was his most truly autobiographical role. He could understand a character who felt stuffed with straw, but could wonderfully sing and dance, and could cheer up the little girl Dorothy....
Look, I lead a charmed life, more or less. I love my job, I eat brunch at least once a week, and the train always just shows up within a minute of me getting to the station. Things are pretty great. I’m not even sure I want a relationship, because would that person just be around all the time? But I want to get married eventually, maybe, and I’ve already slept with all of my friends that I’m going to sleep with, so I’ve been doing the online dating thing....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monday’ front page of the Tribune doesn’t look like a front page. It’s divided laterally into three ungainly parts: on the top, above the masthead, the headline “Senate Standoff Heats Up” (though the story itself is back on page 13); on the bottom, a collection of little boxes, the biggest being a full-color ad announcing a mattress clearance sale; and in the middle, the sort of feature that in years gone by would have shown up in a Sunday lifestyle section....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The acoustic Fall Out Boy set at Schubas last night (following their headlining set for the Honda Civic Tour at Charter One Pavilion) was supposed to be a mellow affair. And it started out as such. The band took the stage a little late, but everyone seemed pretty grooved out on the unplugged rendition of “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tony Lagouranis, the former army interrogator who’s the subject of John Conroy’s cover story in the March 2 Reader, has a name that might ring a bell. Lagouranis is spreading the message that while working for the army in Iraq he tortured detainees, and to no useful end, and among his public appearances is the one in a recent New Yorker article on the TV show 24 ....
We fritter away our privacy, so why not sell it off for money? Each of us is a file of personal data—our age, our sex, our address, the places we go, the things we buy. Imagine bundling thousands of these files. Advertisers could be so excited to get their hands on all that information they’d go back to paying for our journalism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Right now,” said Densmore, “There are many people tracking you and tracking me and we don’t know what they’re tracking us for because of the perniciousness of interest-based advertising dropping cookies on our machines....
up in the air Directed by Jason Reitman | Written by Reitman and Sheldon Turner | With George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Bateman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In toting up my 2009 ballots, the first thing I noticed was that, by almost any measure, this has been an incredibly crummy year for movies. The reason isn’t hard to figure out: when the recession began in late 2007, funding for indie projects began to dry up, and the bad economy only accelerated the trend of big studios shutting down their specialty divisions, which have generally produced their more intelligent and adventurous releases....
Relocating this year from Facets Cinematheque to Gene Siskel Film Center, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival runs Friday, May 18, through Wednesday, May 30. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are reviews of selected films through May 30; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The List This informative documentary calls attention to the tens of thousands of Iraqis currently targeted by extremists in their own land for having assisted reconstruction efforts by the United States Agency for International Development....
Austin Pendleton and Groucho Marx in Skidoo Every effort should be made to keep young people away from drugs, but movies like Skidoo remind you that old people should be kept away from them too. One of the many cultural stones turned over by AMC’s Mad Men was the moment when establishment types starting fooling around with LSD; among them was Otto Preminger—the imperious director of Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959)—who dropped acid under the supervision of no less than Dr....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago International Film Festival has released its “Best of the Fest” lineup, which gives viewers a chance to see some of the year’s best stuff on one night. Screening this Wednesday, October 20, at River East 21: Aleksei Popogrebsky’s Russian feature How I Ended the Summer, which took the Gold Hugo (8 PM); Hans Petter Moland’s Norwegian Feature A Somewhat Gentle Man (7:45 PM); Jorge Michel Grau’s Mexican horror film We Are What We Are (9 PM); Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Chadean drama A Screaming Man (6 PM); Daniel Burman’s Argentinean drama Brother & Sister (5:45 PM); Avi Nesher’s Israeli drama The Matchmaker (6:30 PM); Marek Lechki’s Polish thriller Erratum (5:30 PM); James Rasin’s documentary Beautiful Darling (8:40 PM); Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s documentary Louder Than a Bomb (6:30 PM); the shorts program Together Apart (8:30 PM); Hideyuki Hirayama’s Japanese drama Sword of Desperation (8 PM); Renet Feret’s French historical drama Nannerl, Mozart’s Sister (6:15 PM); Hilda Hidalgo’s Colombian drama Of Love and Other Demons (8:30 PM); and Best of Intercom, a program of “corporate, branded, educational, and interactive multimedia films” (6 PM)....
Not long after Chet Jackson arrived in West Humboldt Park in 2011, he thought he’d found a way to get the drug dealers off the corners. He’d open a restaurant. “I was dealing with a potential investor here yesterday,” Jackson told me one morning recently. “They want to open a retail operation but they’re concerned with people stealing. And I said, ‘If you’re scared of it, don’t come here.’ I’m not going to sit here and sell you a dream....
FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Presented by the Gene Siskel Film Center and Whole Foods Market, this weeklong festival collects six documentaries that focus on health and environment. Michael Graziano and Ernie Park’s LUNCH LINE examines how school-lunch programs have become politicized over the past six decades (Fri 4/22, 6 PM). Mark Macinnis’s URBAN ROOTS chronicles how a goat farm sprang up amid the economic desolation of Detroit (Sat 4/23, 5 PM)....
If you read the recent B Side story on the brief life of online microscene vaporwave, you might recall that members of the post-vaporwave set were planning a casino-themed third installment of Tinychat-based festival SPF420 for late March. Local producer Chaz Allen (aka Metallic Ghosts, who just released the EP Picture-in-Picture) tells Gossip Wolf that the date is now confirmed: Wed 3/20. The lineup includes SPF420 alum Vektroid, Mishka-approved Portland act Magic Fades, and hyperactive producer DJ Paypal....
If Koretzky, Richards, Frank, and Clark weren’t enough for you, here are even more as-told-to accounts from local labels (illustrations by Johnny Sampson): Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Billy Helmkamp, Whistler Records With the amount of attention we’ve gotten for our cocktails and live music, the Whistler as a bar has overshadowed the label. Of course when we first opened the bar much of our focus was on keeping the business afloat....
Time Off for Bad Behavior The Writer’s Burden Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A great and perceptive review—the reviewer gets it right. What’s not mentioned is that [Sean] Penn is an intensely political man, undoubtedly one of the reasons he took the role, in addition to his admiration for Harvey Milk and the screenplay by Lance Black. It’s the shoulders of the writer on which every actor stands....
CHRIS BUCK New Pornographers Since emerging in 2000 the New Pornographers have been such a model of pop-music consistency that I’ve occasionally taken them for granted. Back in August the group released their sixth album, Brill Bruisers (Matador), but it took me a while to get around to playing it. I’ve been a huge fan since the start, but I remember thinking, “Oh, cool, a new album by them—I’ll have to find some time to listen to that....
