UPDATE “Tribune’s top exec poised to resign,” said the chicagotribune.com headline Wednesday, the day after the column below went to press, proposing a picture that’s hard to imagine. How does one assume a resigning pose? Is the model nude or fully dressed? At any rate, Randy Michaels is obviously gone as CEO of Tribune Company, though some niggling detail has to be dealt with first—probably including a severance package that would set any one of us up for life....
Favoring a greener environment is like favoring school reform: it’s a lot easier to say you’re for it than to bring it about. Del Valle also found time to discuss his positions with the Reader. Spokespersons for Emanuel and Chico said their candidates weren’t available, and Braun’s office didn’t respond to interview requests. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Fisk and Crawford coal-powered plants emit five million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, as well as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, into the Latino-immigrant neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Romany music from eastern Europe remains popular in the U.S., with regular tours from the likes of Boban Markovic, Mahala Rai Banda (who made their Chicago debut in September at the World Music Festival), and Esma Redzepova. And there’s a whole lot more we usually don’t have access to. Macedonian reedist Ferus Mustafov has been one of the best-loved and most influential musicians in the Balkans for more than two decades, but aside from releasing the terrific 1995 album King Ferus (Globestyle) he hasn’t gunned for mainstream or world-music audiences in any meaningful way....
LIBERAL FASCISM: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN LEFT FROM MUSSOLINI TO THE POLITICS OF MEANING Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday) Can fascism be nice? What about the secret police, the pogroms, the concentration camps? To Goldberg, none of that is intrinsic to fascist ideals; theories of racial purity, fanatical nationalism, and a militarized state were merely the particular form taken by fascism in one country, Germany, at one time. In Italy, on the other hand, Fascism—capitalized because it was coined there—was about nationalism but not race....
Q Thank you for your advocacy of monogamishy. (Monogamishness?) When I fell in love with my gloriously kinky and GGG wife several years ago, we were honest about our sexual desires—vast and wide-ranging—and we negotiated an arrangement that works for us. We encourage each other’s outside crushes, and we both just want to be present while one of us is banging that outside crush. Your column gave us the tools we needed to talk with other potentially kinky folks....
Folksongs of Illinois INFO 773-404-9494 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Halker defines folk pretty loosely, and the only restriction for a track’s inclusion was that it had to be written or performed by an Illinois native or recorded in the state. He combed through archives and asked scholars and music enthusiasts for suggestions and came up with a list of about 3,000 songs. He listened to those, whittled the list down to 1,000, and then listened some more....
Act One Cafe To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from Act One Cafe. First off, there’s the corny name—the restaurant is located in the former Morse Theatre, renamed the Mayne. Add to that an at-first-glance-typical contemporary American menu—chopped, wedge, and Caesar salads, locally farmed roast chicken, steak, and chops. But I was wowed by the fresh and flavorful food. Lumpia-like spring rolls were crisp, tightly wrapped cigars filled with jerk chicken and caramelized plaintains and served with sugarcane-garlic dipping sauce....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So what’s been going on at the Local Liquor Control Commission with the license and appeal process in those two months? McHugh isn’t entirely sure, because the process is anything but transparent. “It’s a quagmire at best,” he says. “And I’m standing in the quagmire, and I can’t tell you exactly how it works.” Soon after that, the president of the River North Residents Association, Brian Israel (who’d been out of town for the previous month), brokered a meeting between McHugh and members of the board at the nearby condo the Caravel–McHugh’s only opposition, as he found out....
Certain locales just naturally come to mind when you think of Ernest Hemingway. Oak Park, of course. Paris, where he started his writing career. Africa, where he hunted. Key West and Cuba. Idaho, where he died. Petoskey. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the late 1890s, the former lumber region around the bay was remaking itself as a tourist destination. Oak Park physician Clarence Hemingway and his artistic wife, Grace, were among those who vacationed “up north,” and they were so taken with the area that they bought land on what’s now called Walloon Lake and built a cottage they christened Windemere....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Catherine Breillat‘s The Last Mistress (now at Landmark’s Century Centre) wants to tell the story of the last romantic couple too. Or is it the first romantic couple? Since in terms of literal historical period we’re obviously nearer the beginning than the end—the age of capital R “Romanticism” and everything that implies, about prevailing cultural attitudes and standards of human behavior in the post-Napoleonic brave new world of 1830s France....
Q I’ve been married four years and have a beautiful baby boy with my husband. I enjoy sex a lot, even a bit of BDSM. My husband, on the other hand, isn’t “driven by sex,” as he likes to put it, and will try tying me up only if that’s what I “really want.” You’d think if he wasn’t driven by sex, the few times we do have it he’d last for a while, but he goes at best five minutes....
QMy friend is a gay-identified FTM. He’s hot, he’s cute, and from above the waist you’d never guess what he’s got down below. We love to kiss and cuddle, and from my end, his blow jobs are great. The problem is that I have no idea how to reciprocate. He isn’t into anal (why would he be, without a prostate?), there’s no cock for me to suck, and what he does have down below doesn’t interest either of us....
It’s no big news that electronic dance music is breaking through to the American mainstream, but the fact that Chicago’s biggest dance-music event of 2012 is held at Soldier Field underlines it several times over. The brand-new Spring Awakening Music Festival, which runs Sat 6/16 and Sun 6/17, joins the Electric Daisy Carnival and HARD fest in the burgeoning field of enormous EDM blowouts, its nearly 80 acts ranging from old-school house and techno pioneers such as Carl Cox, Derrick Carter, and Green Velvet to current dance-culture superheavyweights Skrillex (see Soundboard) and Afrojack....
Can any do-gooder documentary released this year claim to have done more good than The Social Network, David Fincher’s high-powered drama about the founding of Facebook? Its portrait of CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a conniving little shit who elbowed his best friend out of the business was so scathing that, shortly before the release date, Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to the school system of Newark, New Jersey. And now that the movie has won rave reviews, played for ten weeks, and emerged as a surefire Oscar contender, Zuckerberg has joined the Giving Pledge, the philanthropic campaign launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and promised to donate more than half his fortune to charity....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fresh off Chuck Inglish’s Twitter: the new Cool Kids mix tape. The title, Tacklebox, is apparently a reference to their previous mix tape, Gone Fishing, but from the first few tracks (I’m still on my first spin through it) it seems like a significantly more focused and centered effort, with production that maintains the duo’s dedication to minimalist boom but expands their sonics in ways that suggest they’ve made the transition from retro to next-generation (sci-fi keyboards, finely chopped guitar licks, unidentifiable clicks and rumbles in the beat)....
British choreographer Wayne McGregor has long been known for combining technology with dance. But he goes soft with Infra—sort of. Created in 2008 for London’s Royal Ballet (where McGregor is resident choreographer) and receiving its U.S. premiere here, as part of the Joffrey‘s “Winter Fire” program, this piece for 12 has a techie feel thanks to Julian Opie’s giant LED images of walking figures and Max Richter’s composition for strings, piano, and short-wave radio....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Preckwinkle is nothing if not practical, and before she decided to launch a campaign for Cook County Board president she went and sounded out the mayor. Preckwinkle said Daley told her he hadn’t yet decided to back anyone, so she’s in. She said she’s got the backing of several City Council colleagues, received encouragement from U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, and reached out to committeemen and several other potential candidates, including circuit court clerk Dorothy Brown and assessor Jim Houlihan....
In a bizarre combination of events, Swissotel Chicago and Shedd Aquarium have teamed up to offer both a petting zoo and do-it-yourself cookie station in the hotel lobby on Saturday. The “Animal Encounters” portion, from 11 AM to noon, features aquatic animals from the aquarium’s “Lizards and the Komodo King” exhibit; the cookie decorating, which takes place from 10 AM to 1 PM, allows kids to decorate and eat fish-shaped cookies....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are track teases and then there’s “Deficit,” the first nugget from Russian Circles’ upcoming fifth album, Memorial (out 10/29 via Sargent House), and today’s 12 O’Clock Track. The local instrumental post-rock trio were on their game with the 2011 triumph, Empros, and if this track is any indication, it’s upping the ante. Heavy from the get-go—with guitarist Mike Sullivan hanging walls of atmospheric guitar noise just behind a heavy grooving rhythm—”Deficit” changes course two minutes in, weaving around a snare roll before blowing out a minute later with as hardcore a breakdown as I’ve heard from the band....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As we wrote last week: In March 2008, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the city received packets from ten firms interested in leasing the meters for 75 years. The packets outlined the companies’ financial standing and proposals for managing the system. City officials initially said they’d screen the packets and determine who could continue the bidding process in June....
