We went to McCormick Place, because we could. We went to Grant Park to see if anyone else would (no one did). We went to the Chicago Republicans soiree at the Wit, which was about as well attended as Grant Park. And we made pit stops at Wiener’s Circle and a homeless shelter. Throughout it all, we held our breath. This wouldn’t be like last time. We’re all a little more tired, a lot more unsure....
CARLOS Directed by Olivier Assayas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I haven’t seen the shorter version, but I would hate to lose one moment of the gripping 66-minute sequence—really the heart of the movie—in which Carlos plots and executes his spectacular 1975 raid on the meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna. With a handful of commandos, he stormed the conference and took the staff and delegates hostage....
Mara Shalhoup: That’s the big question. But here’s the deal: we’ve been inundated with these ambiguous, meta endings to great TV shows. This wasn’t that. SW: I think Vince Gilligan backed himself into sort of a corner in terms of the timeline—there was just so much that had to be resolved in the last episode. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » KW: I loved the car scene, when he hit the window and knocked the snow off....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The suit accuses Zell and “his accessories” on the Tribune Company board of threatening to destroy the company and the newspapers it own, “doing so illegally, without consideration for the employee-owners, without respect for the institution, and with a focus on liquidating company assets to line their own pockets.” And according to plan — for the suit says Zell took the company private “with the intention of breaking up and selling the assets because he saw a collection of assets worth billions of dollars that he could purchase ....
This Florida-based family act (three brothers and three of their nephews) rocked the crowd at last year’s Blues Festival with the gospel of Jacksonville’s House of God church, birthplace of the “sacred steel” tradition, which adorns crowd-pleasing R & B shout-alongs with lap and pedal steel guitar. Its pioneers were inspired by the Hawaiian steel guitar music popularized in the 30s, but the genre has developed into something a lot more like Hendrix for Jesus....
We need to say frankly at the outset that the neighborhood is misnamed. The southern half may be shown on the maps as North Center, and the northern half as Lincoln Square, and since these names are now embedded in the city’s statistical compilations we may be sure they’ll endure. But the real name of the community is Ravenswood. It’s the ghost neighborhood of Chicago, whose presence isn’t acknowledged in any substantial way, only felt....
Despite playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s flaccid, repetitive dialogue, director Steve Scott’s five cast members find moments of pathos in this insular domestic drama about an upper-middle-class couple’s struggle to deal with the accidental death of their four-year-old son. But even unaffected, committed performances can’t generate the urgency missing from the script. Like many contemporary playwrights, Lindsay-Abaire too often has his characters explain rather than live their emotional lives, eliminating the kind of ambivalence and ambiguity that would make them unique....
Too many people believe that a vanilla type and a kinkster can never live happily ever after. Others are convinced that anonymous Internet hookups always end in tears and positive HPV test results. Where do people get these false impressions? Reading columns like mine. Contented couples–twosomes who have successfully incorporated one partner’s kinks, Internet hookups that stay hooked–don’t need my advice. To counter the false impression created by my column, I invited contented kinksters and happily partnered sluts to send in their happy-ending stories....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never had a boss who didn’t have a pretty good idea how well I was doing my job. If schools were run along the lines of most workplaces, principals would reward their best teachers and get rid of the worst ones, and no one would question whether they should all be held accountable for the education of their students....
thursday15 Thursday15 Best CoastWhite Hinterland Friday16 Tomomi AdachiChicago Sound MapAmir ElSaffar & Hafez Modirzadeh Quartet FintrollThree 6 Mafia Saturday17 Chicago Sound MapGraham Parker Sunday18 Cheer-AccidentVernon Garrett Monday19 Hot Chip Tuesday20 Ambrose Field & John Potter Updated Wednesday21 Charlotte Gainsbourg WHITE HINTERLAND On the 2008 album Phylactery Factory, Portland’s Casey Dienel (aka White Hinterland) used quasi-orchestral arrangements to give her songs a veneer of florid psych folk, but on its follow-up, the new Kairos (Dead Oceans), she strips all that away....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The campaign’s MySpace presence began with an unoffical page by a Los Angeles paralegal who launched it after Obama was elected to the Senate, a page that got tens of thousands of “friends.” The Obama presidential campaign got involved, and the page became essentially a volunteer effort getting guidance from the campaign (steering it around FEC regulations, sharing content)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If there’s one life lesson that I’ve discovered that I would say is worth anything, it’s that following through on your dumbest, most unrealistic ideas can produce legitimately valuable experiences. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I decided to actually put some effort into one of the highly conceptual cover bands I’ve had floating around in my head for a while, like Hot Wings (the music of Paul McCartney & Wings in the style of ZZ Top), the Smashing Pupkins (a Smashing Pumpkins cover band with a singer who impersonates Robert De Niro’s character from The King of Comedy), or the as-yet-unnamed Lifter Puller cover band (where the conceptual punch line is that we practice very hard to sound just like Lifter Puller, but since very few people know what Lifter Puller sounded like no one would know)....
Alhambra Palace The obvious question for anyone involved is: what were you thinking? Aubriot couldn’t be reached for his take, and Alhambra Palace owner Naser Rustom declined to be interviewed. But general manager Fareed Nobahar, a former restaurant owner who ran the front of the house at the Signature Room, provided some background. When Nobahar signed on in the fall of 2006, two years of planning had gone into the restaurant and it was under construction on the site of an old mechanics’ shop at the western end of the Randolph Street corridor....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chef Brian Greene has spent much of his career at North Shore restaurants such as Abigail’s American Bistro. But at the Savoy, the Wicker Park restaurant and absinthe bar where Mike Sula ventures this week, he’s focused on seafood, offering a diversity of options and influences. Things get off to a less than auspicious start with the raw bar’s oysters on the half shell, devoid of briny liquor, and an expensive and miserly portion of geoduck overwhelmed by pickled plum....
Daniel Nearing knew what he was getting into when he set out to make a movie based on Sherwood Anderson’s classic 1919 story cycle Winesburg, Ohio. He’d loved the book since he read it as an undergrad at the University of Toronto in the early 80s, and he’d come close to making a straight adaptation in Canada in the 90s. But this week, 90 years after publication of Anderson’s book, an audacious adaptation by Nearing and producer-cinematographer Sanghoon Lee makes its theatrical premiere....
For those of you drawn to National Pastime Theater’s Naked July festival for the voyeuristic thrill of staring at nude performers—in other words, you honest ones—let’s begin with brief, pervcentric ratings of the festival’s five productions. (One caveat: if you’re so completely out of sync with current cultural imperatives that you like seeing body hair as it naturally grows, stay home. The festival’s budget for shaving kits and Nair must be substantial....
The producer and three rappers who worked on today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Tears of a Clown,” live miles away from one another: Pepperboy lives in Little Rock, Main Attrakionz’s Squadda B is from Oakland, Western Tink hails from Austin, and producer and Svengali collective member Soleman resides in Chicago. It’s these kinds of cross-regional collaborations that are part of the reason these MCs and plenty of others have been dubbed “Internet rappers,” as the net has given smaller rappers the tools to cultivate a brand outside of their physical communities and build relationships across lands that otherwise wouldn’t exist....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The opening night audience appreciated the ironic humor in this evening of monologues and sketches, but the people whose closed minds might be opened by Culture Clash’s wry critique of prejudice probably won’t be buying tickets for the production, which runs through this weekend (Fri-Sat 8/15-16 8 PM, Sun 8/17, 7:30 PM, $25-$35). That’s too bad, because there’s no questioning the accuracy of their vision of America’s cultural diversity, and the performances are extraordinary....
This peculiar New York quartet radically revamps its sound for the upcoming Mirrored (Warp), expanding its palette, toning down the angular guitar licks, and putting more bounce into the beats. The first two instrumental EPs were fascinating if kind of formal, but the new stuff feels far less schematic and serious. Tyondai Braxton’s surprisingly playful vocals, enhanced by electronics, zip, chant, and burp across the harmonic spectrum with the giddiness of Animal Collective....
Elizabeth Gomez Take that, flying rat. It starts every spring with the first melting snow. The grass that grows up to the base of my building makes its first appearance, crusted and smothered by a winter’s worth of black-and-white guano. When I consider this, along with the hours of sleep lost to the weird carnal cooing that emerges from underneath the eaves in the early dawn, or the revolting gray down feathers that descend in front of my window when the flying rats groom each other, my blood boils....
