Plus Mayor Daley wants the field and, as we all know, the mayor generally gets what he wants around here. The case, of course, is being held in the Daley Center, and as more than one lawyer has jokingly told me: “They don’t call it the Daley Center for nothing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, Cook County circuit judge Dorothy Kirie Kinnaird stunned us all this afternoon....
In each of the four films he’s directed, Lee Daniels has created moments unlike anything else I’ve seen in American narrative cinema. To list a few examples: There’s R&B singer Macy Gray in Shadowboxer (2005), uncomfortably wearing heels and a fancy dress a few sizes too small, trying to break plans with a rich mobster she knows wants her dead, comically slurring, “I’m busy this weekend. I’ll be down at the Snooty Fox—it’s ladies’ night!...
Kafka describes the plot of his unfinished 400-page novel, in which hapless land surveyor K. fails to find the government official he believes has engaged his services, as “marching in place.” In this 2002 off-Broadway hit, adapters David Fishelson and Aaron Leichter condense the book’s nonaction to 90 minutes and exaggerate its comedic paranoia. But not surprisingly they can’t really make the story march forward. Right Brain Project’s midwest premiere features Tony Ingram and Nathan Robbel’s charred, corroded set, which strands K....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Robert De Niro is a weary parole officer at a Michigan prison, Edward Norton is the jive-ass inmate trying to win a release, and Milla Jovovich is the jailbird’s kind-of-slutty, kind-of-nutty wife, who keeps coming on to the corrections worker after hours. So many talented people were involved in this modest drama—John Curran directed the biting We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), and Angus MacLachlan scripted the lovely Junebug (2005)—that I feel as if I should like it more....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » we the people?we the economywe the gas prices, the credit cardswe the designer labelswe the diamonds, the lipstick, the SUVwe the fast food drive-thru’s, the spray-on tanwe the felonywe the gentrification, the assimilationwe the impersonal, the enclosed, the exclusivewe the reckless, the selfish, the greedywe the powerful, the relentless we the peoplewe the apple piewe the buy-one-get-one-freewe the camping trip, the duck-feeders at the park, the bike-ridewe the fireworks, the picnics, the birthday partywe the celebratory, the snapshotWe the skyscrapers, the public transportation we the experiencewe the double-shift, the supporters, the whole-heartedwe the leaders, the givers, the inspirationwe the tradition, the laughter, the sweet, sweet musicwe the opportunity, the spontaneous, the fearless, the audaciousthe get-things-done,we the never-look-back....
Toward the end of Bobcat Goldthwait’s blacker-than-black comedy God Bless America, the potbellied, everyman hero, Frank (Joel Murray), meets up in a hotel room with a black market gun dealer toting two suitcases full of weapons. The dealer drops a series of racist cracks as he shows off his wares and finally, unveiling an AK-47, asks Frank, “Is that a honey or what?” A honey—suddenly the scene, in fact the entire movie, snapped into focus for me as I remembered a nearly identical rendezvous in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My grandfather’s decision to work as an independent taxi driver was also, I suspect, a show of respect for the Chicago cab companies he refused to work for. Anyone who knew him would attest that no one could have been his boss: he was too stubborn, argumentative, and skeptical of anyone else’s way of doing things. He had a habit of telling other people how to spend their money—which was great if you were looking for business advice, but aggravating if you weren’t....
Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Students protesting outside of Wells High School during the teachers’ strike in September Parents of Chicago Public Schools students passed petitions today outside 37 schools, calling for CPS to drastically reduce its reliance on standardized tests. The parents, members of a coalition called More Than a Score, also want CPS to fully disclose the cost and purpose of the 22 tests currently administered in the district. The Chicago Teachers Union, one of four organizations in the More Than a Score coalition, published a paper Monday decrying the “dramatic shift” toward standardized tests in the last 20 years, “led not by educators but the business sector” and “without evidence connecting it to real learning....
Mike Sula Tirolese pizza, Ciao Bella Pizza One of the first food stories I ever wrote was about a pair of Argentine buddies who made terrific gelato and not so terrific pizza in a run down Lawrence Avenue storefront. The Penguin is, sadly, long gone but Lawrence Avenue is still capable of cross-cultural surprises. Witness Albany Park’s Ciao Bella Pizza, a bare-bones strip-mall joint flanked by shuttered businesses, run by a pair of Egyptian cousins that specialize in wood-fired Neapolitan pizza....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Natacha Atlas Raised by an Arabic father and an English mother in a Moroccan neighborhood in the suburbs of Brussels, Natacha Atlas has spent her entire career exploring collisions of Western and Middle Eastern music. On her most recent album, Ana Hina, her singing is intimate, conversational, sometimes even hushed, and the restrained instrumental backdrops—compact string arrangements, tinkling piano, gently percolating Middle Eastern percussion, reeling Paris-cafe accordion, slaloming ney and clarinet—make it possible to hear a richness and variety of tone in her voice that was sometimes concealed in her earlier, dance-oriented work....
THE LOVE OF THE NIGHTINGALE | LIVEWIRE CHICAGO THEATRE WHEN Through 4/29: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM WHERE Side Project, 1439 W. Jarvis PRICE $12-$15 INFO 773-412-8089 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can see why this one gets left out of everything from children’s collections to Mary Zimmerman’s famed staging of Ovid’s magnum opus. But the story isn’t entirely marginal–Keats and T....
Joe Goode is happily, brazenly goofy. Yet there’s always a serious purpose to his works. Returning to Chicago after an absence of four years, his San Francisco-based company performs a piece he created in 2006 in honor of its 20th anniversary, Stay Together. Using the long-term relationship between an artist and his administrator, it looks at art, community, and long-term relationships in general. He also presents 1998’s Deeply There (Stories of a Neighborhood), about a small group of friends and neighbors at the deathbed of a man with AIDS....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The current widespread appreciation for African music—whether in the form of lovingly curated reissues or present-day bands, ranging from Tinariwen and Konono No. 1 to the Blk Jks and Vampire Weekend—is hardly an unprecedented phenomenon. Crazes for exotic music have been periodically sweeping the States for as long as there have been record companies. In the early 60s belly-dancing music had its turn, which gave an Armenian-American oud player named John Berberian the chance to make the leap from playing nightclubs to selling tens of thousands of records....
Between the opening of the revolutionary Avec in 2003 and the refreshing arrival of Jose Garces’s Mercat a la Planxa in late 2008, could there have been a more enervated, bush-whipped restaurant style around town than sorta-Spanish tapas and their mutant offspring? These were characterized by unhappy arranged marriages of incompatible cuisines or half-cocked conflations of the traditional and the Adria-esque. The inauthentic imitation of casual, progressive Iberian bar snacking ruled night and day, as tiny nibbles were forced into family-style eating arrangements....
One early Thursday morning in April, Dave Rand and Andrew Lutsey sat in their rented second-floor office in the old Testa Produce warehouse on the northern fringe of Pilsen waiting for a side and a half of beef and a whole hog from a farm in central Indiana. The delivery was late due to ceaseless overnight rains that rendered rush hour on the expressways a continuous logjam from the top of the city to the bottom....
Chi Huynh cooked across the street at Hai Yen for many years but this spring struck out on his own with his brother Van, their aim to provide a more upscale setting than most Argyle Street restaurants. Like its peers, Pho Xua offers a dizzying selection of dishes, but many of them are rare for the neighborhood (though some also appear at Hai Yen), and the freshness and quality of the ingredients seem several notches higher....
After Jacques Rivette’s 750-minute comic serial Out 1 (1971) was turned down by French state TV, Rivette spent most of a year editing the material into this scary 255-minute masterpiece–not so much a digest as a different film with its own style and rhythms. Spectre (1972) tells the same basic story about two Parisian theater groups preparing Aeschylus plays and two eccentric loners, a middle-class deaf-mute (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and a working-class flirt (Juliet Berto), who stumble upon evidence of a secret group that hopes to control Paris....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While we spend the week revisiting past glories on the Bleader, I want to look back on the most shameful thing that was not my fault (as opposed to the most shameful thing that was my fault—a different matter entirely, and once it’s identified I’ll be sure to atone) that I’ve endured this year. It was on the occasion of the Reader‘s inaugural Valentine’s Day issue, which a couple of coworkers and I were tasked (against our will) with putting together....
Hot Dog! Cinners4757 N. Talman | 773-654-1624 Location, location, location. This little organic hot dog and ice cream shop across from Welles Park may not seem like much, but with its kid-friendly menu of sausages and well-pedigreed sweets, summer traffic seems all but guaranteed. The dogs themselves come in pork, two different combos of chicken and turkey (one with red pepper and jalapeño, the other spinach and feta), and classic nitrite-free beef; there’s also a vegan version....
ELDER UTAH SMITH Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1906, Smith got the calling to preach in 1923, and within two years he was taking the good word to Pentecostal congregations all over the country. According to Abbott’s account, he had a keen sense of humor: in 1931 he “preached the devil’s funeral,” even lowering a casket into the ground. He was also believed to be able to perform spiritual healings—but he didn’t become a phenomenon till he started playing the electric guitar....
