When there was money left over after the bills were paid, mom bought extra sugar, butter, and flour. She made the tea cakes in a big cast-iron pan that would almost take over the whole stove. She put a roasting-pan lid over them. We would come home from school and I would smell that she had made tea cakes, with either lemon, vanilla, or orange. I remember competing with my siblings for my mother’s tea cakes....
How does the tiny, always fringy, currently nomadic Curious Theatre Branch manage to snag broadcast celebrity Ira Glass for its benefit shows? Curious founder Beau O’Reilly says they go back to the days when the Curious folk were playing Club Lower Links in their rock band manifestation, Maestro Subgum and the Whole. Glass would hang out to hear them, and he eventually did a piece on the band for NPR that never aired....
Aidy Bryant, Tim Robinson, and Cecily Strong, aka Knuckleheads Tim Robinson, Cecily Strong, and Aidy Bryant were ripped untimely from Second City’s womb last fall, and spirited off to be amusing for SNL. The departure was so swift and secretive, they say, that they didn’t get to make their goodbyes to the people and places that loomed large in their Chicago lives. So that was the first thing they did on taking the stage Thursday, for the opening of a three-night stand at Up Comedy Club....
What Did It Reveal? Everybody Is Not a Reporter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is a step in the wrong direction, as most of the bloggers I have seen are sycophants who have a political axe to grind, have little to no professional ethics, insert opinion into their “news,” and consistently miss the mark when it comes to reporting with some modicum of good taste....
Humboldt Park’s diverse neighborhood seemed a perfect place to call home for Luan Barros and Kelly Parcell. “It’s a comfortable neighborhood to live in, especially being from a different country,” says Barros, a Brazilian photographer who first came to the US in 2008. Soon after his arrival, he met LaGrange, IL native Kelly Parcell, owner of greeting card company Nerd Press and an interdisciplinary artist who has assisted fiber artist Nick Cave....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Most of Daywatch’s links still will point to the Tribune,” Meyerson’s boss, innovations editor Bill Adee, explained in a note to the Trib editorial staff in early July, “but we think we can increase its value to the audience by providing one-stop ‘News for Chicagoans.’” He went on: “I long have wanted to experiment with aggregating news. That means linking off to other sites....
The best things about Chicago music | Leor Galil Much of what I loved about Chicago’s music scene in 2014 can’t be summed up with a list of LPs (or Datpiff downloads or Soundcloud pages). So I picked five things that say the most about my year and why it was great. Chicago’s Bandcamp game Screw Spotify. When it comes to streaming music, I’m a Bandcamp fan. Surfing the “Chicago” tag this past year led me to the lo-fi magic of Hot Bagels and the unearthly soundtrack (by Ben Babbitt of Pillars & Tongues) for the third act of local indie game Kentucky Route Zero....
The Inquirer was my first job out of college. I did political reporting, municipal stuff. I covered 9/11. The pilot of the second plane, Victor Saracini, lived in Lower Makefield, one of the communities I covered. Kayce Ataiyero, 35, is the original (and likely only) daily newspaper reporter turned minor-league basketball general manager. Prior to her tenure with the Chicago Steam, she spent time at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the News & Observer in Raleigh, and the Chicago Tribune, where she covered the infamous R....
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya Think of the movie business as your fat uncle after Thanksgiving dinner: full of turkey, stuffing, gravy, and Canadian Club—all he wants to do is lie down under the piano for a while and sleep it off. So here we are the weekend after Thanksgiving with exactly two new studio releases: The Pyramid, a horror flick that didn’t screen for the press, and Wild, an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, starring Reese Witherspoon and directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This morning the city announced the highlights of the summer music programs in Millennium Park, and there are plenty of good-looking concerts among them. But the biggest news is what wasn’t announced. Music Without Borders, which began in 2006 and was the first of the high-profile concert series at the Pritzker Pavilion, isn’t happening this year, a city spokesperson confirms....
John McHugh Roger Ebert The Sun-Times reported that writer/film critic/television personality/mensch Roger Ebert died earlier today after battling cancer for over a decade. He was 70 years old. Over the next couple weeks, numerous people will write about the influence Ebert had on their lives (and expect some from the Reader as well). We’ve done our fair share of writing about Ebert, whether through the prism of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s film reviews or otherwise, such as a 2011 column by media critic Michael Miner that looked at the memoir Life Itself....
Nobody comes from nowhere. Everybody’s got their inspirations, their debts, delights, and talismans. Everybody owes somebody something. We asked five of our favorite Chicago novelists to write homages to the books and authors that have done something for them, and here are the results. Luis Alberto Urrea—whose Queen of America, a sequel to his The Hummingbird’s Daughter, comes out next December—picked the wild early Thomas McGuane. Joe Meno is best known as the author of The Great Perhaps but also penned Star Witness, a play currently being staged by the House Theatre of Chicago; he went back to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to help him get a handle on war....
Andy Dean/Shutterstock Crossing Iowa is storyteller Jack Zimmerman’s account of a midlife bicycle trip that fell short of its manic goal but provided him with enough wry material for a new collection of tales, including my favorite—the one about how he came face-to-face with the dumbest man in the state. Zimmerman draws on his life as a literal jack-of-all-trades, and has told his Chicago-to-the-bone stories on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, but they’ve never sounded better than they do when they’re teamed with the mellow music of his son, jazz saxophonist and composer Andy Zimmerman....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was also this: For most of her career pre-Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote to impress men. She wrote for the men’s magazines. Her stories, and also her first novel, were about women trying to make their way in world of men. Two of her first three books had the world “men” or “man” in the title, for God’s sake....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The jury convicted everybody, and the shocker was Mark Kipnis, Hollinger International’s in-house lawyer in Chicago. Kipnis had the best lawyer in the trial, Ron Safer, he wasn’t cut in on any piece of those notorious noncompete payments that Radler and Black made millions from, and so far as the press could see, his only crime was acting like a lawyer....
It’s no Halloween, of course, but Christmas always brings forth a respectable crop of live shows. Well, maybe not entirely respectable. For every wondrous visit from the ghost of Charles Dickens, there’s an unholy late-night thing about Santa and what really goes on with those elves. Here’s an assortment of new cases in point. For more—and there will be much, much more—check our listings now and over the next few weeks....
John McLaughlin Every several days I manage to spend a few hours at the Newberry Library organizing some old files of mine they now have, and the last time I was there I came across a column I’d written in 1996. I’d forgotten the column, and I’d forgotten the acclaimed book the column focused on, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, by James Fallows. And I’d forgotten that the menace to journalism costing Fallows hours of sleep once was public enemy number one of all high-minded media critics....
QI’m a 28-year-old gay man living in a major east-coast city. I recently connected with a guy on a vanilla dating website, and we are quickly developing a real interest in each other. After talking online for a bit, we exchanged numbers. Our first conversation was through text messages for the better part of six hours. The next night we talked over the phone for an hour or two. And the third consecutive night was our first date....
On July 15, 1914—almost exactly a year before the Eastland disaster—the Silver Spray ran aground on Morgan Shoal, just a few hundred feet off Hyde Park’s 49th Street beach. The 109-foot passenger steamer was on its way to pick up 200 University of Chicago students and take them to Gary, Indiana, to tour the steel mills; according to an article that ran the next day in the Chicago Examiner, the cook was making a stew at the time and the seven-man crew refused to abandon the listing ship....
Christopher Ottinger Dream Machine Anyone who has spent time around small children has likely observed the moment when a child goes toddling up to a reflective surface and presses himself against it, standing hand to hand, nose to nose, with self. Adults tend to undercut the profundity of these moments by cooing things along the lines of “Who’s that? Who IS that? Who is that handsome boy in the mirror?...
