the first profile Today, after three years of law practice and civic activism, Obama has decided to dive into electoral politics. He is running for the Illinois senate, he says, because he wants to help create jobs and a decent future for those embittered youth. But when he met with some veteran politicians to tell them of his plans, the only jobs he says they wanted to talk about were theirs and his....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A small clique of people, all friends, were basically the only ones at karaoke last night—they were really the only people in the bar. Faced with this crowd of strangers my friend considered his options—Judy Garland? Johnny Cash?—but eventually discarded them. Meanwhile the strangers were tag-teaming the open mike. One man sang, unfortunately, “Hallelujah,” the most gratuitously covered song in history....
According to Lisa Simonian, who’s in charge of marketing for the show, the 13-year-old One of a Kind Show is immune to the alleged retail malaise that plagued our nation’s retailers over Thanksgiving weekend. “It’s recession-proof,” she says. “The economy doesn’t impact us. People come to the show to feel good about buying original, handmade work direct from the artists and artisans.” Last year 55,000 shoppers and 600 sellers showed up....
The problem isn’t creating associations with music through commercials–movies have been doing this with popular music for a long time with relatively little outcry [“In Praise of Selling Out,” by Miles Raymer, June 22]. I’m sure most people can’t hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “The Sound of Silence” without them conjuring superficial images of Wayne’s World or The Graduate. And expecting advertisers to be condemned to using terrible music in their commercials for the principled reason that “good” music should be off-limits is pretty silly....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The low-budget comedy Gimme the Loot was one of my favorite movies to play at the Chicago International Film Festival this year. Like Welcome to Pine Hill, another recent New York indie feature, Adam Leon’s directorial debut exudes a casually inclusive vibe that I find hard to resist. (The lively audiences at the two festival screenings seemed to think so too....
Video-game electronica seems to fall in and out of fashion depending on what kind of kids are going to art school. This year it’s hot again, and I’ve never heard a band do it better than Crystal Castles. This Toronto boy-girl duo is glamorous and tragic, tender and filthy, like a glittery babe in the gutter–though the music’s loaded with eight-bit samples, it doesn’t so much as nod to the kitschy nerds working the same territory....
Back for its seventh year, the Do-Division Street Fest occupies the avenue in question between Ashland and Leavitt (as well as a couple side streets) from Fri 5/31 till Sun 6/2. Live music happens on two stages, one at Damen and the other at Leavitt; the East Stage was programmed by the Empty Bottle Presents, and the West Stage was booked by House Call Entertainment (the folks who run the Beat Kitchen and Subterranean)....
I generally like my iPods when they’re freshly loaded from scratch, which means I don’t have all those podcasts I won’t ever get around to listening to, all those promo records I’ve listened to once and haven’t remembered to delete, and all those safety-net albums that tend to accumulate in a “Steve Martin at the end of The Jerk” fashion. (“All I need is Either/Or. Either/Or and So Jealous and a couple of Cure records and a Cat Stevens greatest-hits collection and Figure 8....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I’d had my druthers, I would have seen Jacques Rivette’s masterpiece Out 1 for the third time this past weekend, at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It’s still one of my all-time favorites, offering far more pleasure, enlightenment, and sheer stimulation over its dozen and a half hours than any dozen routine commercial releases (which would cumulatively last twice as long, and most of which I wouldn’t dream of seeing if my job didn’t require it)....
Not miked and not missed—the old guard of Chicago journalism. Apoplectic and apocalyptic, they had their say about the sea change in media at February’s Chicago Journalism Town Hall. Last Saturday’s Chicago Media Future Conference at Columbia College was for the young Turks. EveryBlock cofounder Daniel X. O’Neil, speaking on the panel “Why the News Still Matters,” went this tweet one better. “I think there’s just a lot of real unnecessary negativism about journalism,” he told the 170 or so people in attendance....
KICK-ASS Directed by Matthew Vaughn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Having watched numerous children’s movies with my eight-year-old son, I’ve noticed that their stories often center on the pursuit of fame, inexplicably presented as a virtue unto itself. In such kid pics as Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Spy Next Door, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and the TV movie High School Musical, fame is elemental, waiting to be liberated, like fossil fuel in the cave of our collective consciousness, by some enterprising young go-getter....
James Corden and Emily Blunt as the Baker and his wife in Into the Woods Before I saw the new movie adaptation of Into the Woods I made the mistake of rewatching the American Playhouse take on the original Broadway production, which first aired on PBS in 1991. (The Chicago Public Library has a few copies in their collection, if you want to make the same mistake.) I consider that performance one of the best pieces of theater I’ve seen, live or otherwise, and by placing it at the front of my mind, I was basically setting myself up to be disappointed by any other interpretation of the musical....
This Saturday the third annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival presents 15 hours of performances spread across 13 south-side venues, including sets from many of Chicago’s finest jazz musicians. The festival begins at 11 AM with Ken Chaney’s Awakening at the DuSable Museum of African American History (740 E. 56th Place) and the U-High Jazz Band at the James W. Wagner Stage (1130 E. Midway). Notable acts include saxophonist Von Freeman (DuSable Museum, 2 PM), trumpeters Corey Wilkes and Maurice Brown (James W....
Have black folks left “blackness” behind? Local writer (and sometime Reader contributor) Ytasha L. Womack thinks so. In her new book, Post Black: How A New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity, she makes the case that the old ways of imagining African-Americans fail to encompass the dazzling diversity that now characterizes the community. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As she phrases it in the book’s introduction, “Simply put, things have changed....
Whose Peoria? Mike Sula replies: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the Gulf Oil Tragedy worsens, two things occur to me. First is the ineptitude of humans to control outcomes of their mechanical invasions upon Mother Earth. Second is the vulnerability of waters to this destructive folly. In a genuine lack of wisdom, the U.S. has once again decided to go beyond where it should go—this time by Salazar approving Cape Wind....
This week marks the end of Gene Siskel Film Center’s worthwhile series of 1970s and ’80s dramas from East Germany, including Solo Sunny, Jakob the Liar, Coming Out, and Gunther Reisch and Gunther Rucker’s The Fiancee (1980), a study in devotion that takes place almost entirely inside a women’s prison. The protagonist (Jutta Wachowiak in a memorable performance) has been sentenced to ten years—the first two in solitary confinement—for conspiring with her fiance against the Nazis....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s the first heading of the “brand story” behind Chuck’s Manufacturing, the new restaurant within the art deco Carbide & Carbon Building. According to the bio, Becker, orphaned at 25, built his father’s “small, but successful” company into “one of the world’s largest automobile part suppliers,” specializing in plastic parts that have made their way into “nearly all cars....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ziggy Kozlowski is a partner in Block-Korenbrot Public Relations, an LA-based firm that specializes in movie and TV awards campaigns and has shepherded such films as Howards End, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Capote, and Crash to Oscar wins. “Part of the problem,” he says, “is that lately some of the big Hollywood hits like The Dark Knight, which were also critically acclaimed, didn’t get nominated in the best-film category....
Some of us chide the Tea Party congressmen for their ignorance, real or feigned, in such realms as economics and science. But those of us who know more, maybe a lot more, still don’t know everything; and most of us are like the Tea Partiers in not wanting to know so much that we end up doubting. Doubt is crippling. Kass runs on page two, the flagship position in the Tribune‘s pundit armada....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The real Annie Oakley brought 55 libel suits against various newspapers, 54 of which were successful. The Hearst papers were responsible for putting this counterfactual gem into circulation in the first place, and they tried to fight Oakley’s lawsuit by hiring a private dick to dig up some compromising dirt on her. They failed. The Hearst papers were always at the cutting edge of “human interest” journalism....
