Saturday, December 209 AM – 7 PM Block 37 108 N. State Join us for the second Made in Chicago Market! This Holiday Market will be brought to life with a wide variety of amazing local items including beauty, apparel, housewares, food and drink, jewelry and more! Participating Local Vendors Food & Drink A La Card Chicago Big Fat’s Hot Sauce Chris’s Awesome Guacamole Co-Op Sauce. D-ology: Gluten Free Baking...
LATE: A COWBOY SONG Piven Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doublemindedness is required to appreciate what Ruhl tries and fails to accomplish in this warmhearted but underdeveloped portrait of a marriage between two childhood sweethearts—Mary and Crick (Noonan and Lawrence Grimm), whose relationship shifts when a former school chum, Red (Kelli Simpkins), reenters Mary’s life. Toss in a just-this-side-of-exploitative plotline about Mary and Crick’s newborn intersex baby and Ruhl’s desire to map the borders between male and female, friend and lover, even city and country, becomes clear—though the map itself can get cartoonish at points....
Few bands dominated the R&B charts in the 70s and 80s like Kool & the Gang. The group emerged from jazz beginnings in Jersey City in the 60s to become one of the heaviest and most successful funk bands on the planet, scoring massive hits like “Jungle Boogie,” “Hollywood Swinging,” and “Higher Plane” that relied mostly on fat horn riffs, deep grooves, and the ingenious bass lines of group leader Robert “Kool” Bell....
Best Established Theater Company Best Emerging Theater Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Teatro Luna finishes its current 16th Street production, S-E-X-Oh! The Remix, this weekend. Then comes the Words in Motion Festival, consisting of three autobiographical performance pieces running in repertory. Unveiled, a solo show about women in Islam, follows. And in July Filmer will revive The Last Barbecue, by her old buddy Brett Neveu, using the original cast from its 2000 premiere production with the Aardvark....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The arrival of Thanksgiving generally signals the cool-down of the touring season, when the holidays and treacherous weather make hitting the road a less-than-desirable activity for many musicians. So we’ve got a couple of weeks of action-packed offerings to take in before that happens, and every day brings a load of options. Tonight Chicago expat David McDonnell (Herculaneum) leads a strong local band at Constellation, the always charming, ever astonishing Kelly Hogan makes the trip south from her Wisconsin home for a show with minister of mope Mark Eitzel at the Old Town School, and veteran indie-rock jam band Built to Spill roll into town for a show at Metro....
Julia Thiel Cleetus Friedman at City Provisions in 2011 Last night chef Cleetus Friedman announced that City Provisions, his Ravenswood deli and catering company, would close—effective immediately. No nostalgic last days of business or closeout sales here. Friedman told me over the phone today that he realized a few weeks ago that the business was was no longer sustainable, and didn’t feel the need to drag things out. Business was OK, he said, there just wasn’t enough of it....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: The Dials “You’d be hard-pressed to find a local rock band so consistently in the pocket—whether on the napalm-hearted blaze of ‘Antonio,’ the herky-jerky robo-twist of ’18’ (with odd vocal squeaks from bassist Rebecca Crawford), or a deconstructed cover of Foreigner’s ‘Urgent’ that breathes unironic new life into that otherwise unlistenable tune, their live sound is flawless and focused,” writes Brian Costello....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His solution: a gathering of theater artists to draft a document assessing current problems and stating a vision for the future. His inspiration: the Freedom Charter created in 1955 by antiapartheid progressives in South Africa. “This Charter was more than a bunch of requests,” Hall noted. “It signified the intense need for change.” Hall’s call for an off-Loop theater manifesto generated considerable response and he’s working on setting up an informal confab in August....
In the summer of 1998, George Lewis was at work on his history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a black collective that formed on the south side of Chicago in 1965. He was transcribing recordings of the AACM’s early organizational meetings, and even though he was on a fellowship at Civitella Ranieri, a 15th-century castle in Umbria, and a warm breeze blew in through his window across a field of sunflowers, the meetings were so charged and engrossing that he almost forgot where he was....
By mid-September, a source at the Chicago Tribune tells me, that paper “will look and feel vastly different.” But however much the Trib changes, it won’t be presenting its reconfigured self as the newspaper of the future. The newspaper business has pretty well conceded that its future is online, which means the print Tribune is deciding how to dress smartly for its funeral. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seven years ago the Tribune labored for months to redesign itself to accommodate what today seems like a trifling exigency—the paper was narrowing its page by an inch to save on newsprint....
Now that Jay Stone’s short-lived mayoral campaign is over—he’s been knocked off the ballot—it’s time to ask what that was all about. The suit points out that candidates for those positions need to gather more signatures than most candidates for Illinois governor. Only 5,000 signatures are needed to run in the Democratic or Republican gubernatorial primaries, whose winners are automatically on the ballot in the general election. (To get on the ballot in the general election without winning a primary requires 25,000 signatures....
Jeff Coffin has made his name as the reeds whiz with Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, where his malleable approach perfectly suits the band’s wild range of rhythms and idioms. But for his own group’s sound, Coffin stakes out some prime New Orleans swampland, then uses sonic textures and effects to construct a virtual 21st-century Tipitina’s. His label, Compass, claims the Mu’tet record Bloom (2005) is a “fusion of Ornette Coleman, the Meters, and Medeski, Martin & Wood”–which would certainly be intriguing, but Coffin doesn’t fuse these elements so much as take them as starting points for individual tunes....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Having come out in support of Chief Illiniwek, I figured the least I could do, from a karmic perspective, was go out and see professional lacrosse. The expansion National Lacrosse League Shamrox began play this season at the Sears Centre out in Hoffman Estates, and what better night to make the trip than at the end of Saint Patrick’s Day?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether or not Obama’s local machine ties should be of concern is a good and interesting question,* but the man who has previously been too black/black-liberation Christian/Muslim/elitist to be president probably does not have to worry whether he’s too Chicago, at least in terms of the teeming masses of low-information voters. In fact, I think “too Chicago” might be a step up from all the lunatic things actual voters think that he might be....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A brutal Mexican drug cartel tries to muscle in on the booming pot business of two Laguna Beach dudes (Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson), whose partnership includes a laid-back menage-a-trois with a bronzed So-Cal beauty (Blake Lively); when the Americans refuse to cooperate, the Mexicans kidnap the woman and threaten to behead her. The movie marks Oliver Stone’s return to the hyperbolic drug thrillers of his early screenwriting career (Midnight Express, Scarface), and the dualistic protagonists—Kitsch, an Iraq War veteran, helps Johnson, a genial hippie, find his inner beast—are heavily reminiscent of Platoon (though the script was adapted from a novel by Don Winslow)....
Q I’m a straight man. From high school through college and after, I loved me some women. Then I met my present girl ten years ago. I fell head over heels for her. I still love her. But little by little, she’s become boring to me. Our sex life has cooled. Days run together with mundane activities like watching TV, going to the store, and hanging out with our kids....
Q Let’s say, theoretically, I’m a pedophile. You know, theoretically. If I were a pedophile. —Knows It’s Wrong Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My heart is going out to you, too, KIW. As I’ve written before, we should acknowledge the existence of good pedophiles, people like you, KIW, who are burdened with a sexual interest in children but who possess the moral sense to resist acting on that interest....
Last Thursday, with wounds still raw from a contentious budget vote the day before, Mayor Daley used the ribbon-cutting ceremony for an upscale indoor market in the West Loop to rebuke rogue aldermen and other critics of his tax increment financing program. In the case of the market, the City Council, at Daley’s urging, voted in 2006 to spend a total of $12 million in taxpayer money on construction of a new shopping area in the Ogilvie Transportation Center; $8 million of that sum went to the French Market....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I guess summer unofficially kicked off on Memorial Day, but as Chicagoans know the season really starts with the first big street festival, and this weekend there’s a doozy: the annual Do-Division Street Fest. Two stages of music Friday through Sunday bring us the great DJ Peanut Butter Wolf, Le Butcherettes, the return of Pinebender, Craig Finn, the Besnard Lakes, and much more....
Not long ago, I got a call from my old friend Gaylon, whose grandparents live on the far south side. Written in virtually incomprehensible legal jargon, the packet began: “Notice is hereby given, pursuant to Section 5/11-74.4-5(a) of the Illinois Tax Increment Allocation Redevelopment Act, as amended (65 ILCS 5/11-74.4-1 et seq.) (the ‘Act’), that a proposed redevelopment plan of the City of Chicago (the ‘City’) has been prepared for the proposed North Pullman TIF Redevelopment Project Area....
