Gregoryjoziak/Wikimedia Commons Waka Flocka Flame: Taller than you’d expect I have the hangover that I was asking for. Just as our esteemed editor did recently I set out last night with the intention of feeling terrible today, not for the sake of a testing out a hangover cure, but just because I had spent the entire week being shockingly responsible—and it’s not a true SXSW experience if you don’t wake up wanting to die at least once....
Field Mic fieldmic.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago-based monolith Pitchfork has a profound influence on the gravitational field of the indie-rock universe, not to mention its own festival. But what about the little guys, who don’t pay attention to release cycles and aren’t driving the zeitgeist—the folks who don’t share the blogosphere’s obsession with being the first to cover the next new thing?...
Counting down to our Year in Review issue, we present our picks in a variety of genres, wrapping up tomorrow with the year’s worst movies. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Friend J. Hoberman once described Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Camera Buff as the Rosetta Stone of eastern European cinema; by the same token, Yilmaz Güney’s 1975 masterpiece (the highlight of Doc Films’s revelatory director retro in February) could be described as the Rosetta Stone of third-world cinema....
Aimee Levitt Bread pudding We hadn’t actually wanted the bread pudding. What we really, really wanted was to get the hell out of M Vie. The jazz combo had started playing again. It was loud. My dining companion was telling me a story. I had moved around the table to be closer to her so I could hear. We were sitting less than a foot from each other. There were still times I had to resort to lip-reading....
Radio Macbeth SITI Company at Court Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s so much, big and little, that’s questionable about this touring production, created and performed by Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, codirected by Bogart and Darron L. West, and hosted here by Court Theatre. If, for instance, the troupe is rehearsing a radio play—and sometimes they seem to be only at the table-reading phase—then what do they need with a fully equipped theater?...
Brahms dedicated his German Requiem to his late mentor Schumann, his late mother, and the whole of humanity. Departing from the traditional Latin Catholic mass, he selected texts from Luther’s translation of the Bible, producing a nonliturgical requiem: instead of a prayer for souls facing the Last Judgment, this is a meditation on death meant to console the living. The chorus is the current that flows through the seven movements, suspended ethereally above the orchestra or cutting through it majestically....
“You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find it,” Revel Room bartender Robbie Guevara said, shaking his head. Challenged by Nick Ostapczuk (Bangers & Lace) to make a drink with Cheez Whiz, he’d scoured the city before finally locating some of the processed cheese spread (not to be confused with Easy Cheese, the spray-on stuff) at one particular Dominick’s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Things didn’t get much easier from there....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With that in mind, Louvin’s current label, Tompkins Square Records, is a fitting home for him; late last year it released a phenomenal three-CD box set devoted entirely to human death and suffering. People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938 is a survey of early American folk styles–country, old-timey, blues, gospel, Cajun–that consists entirely of tunes chronicling acts of violence and destruction....
SICKO sss For better and for worse, Moore’s Sicko scores for similar reasons. It spends more than two hours attempting to preach to the unconverted that (1) this country’s health care system is a disgrace, especially when it comes to medical insurance, and that (2) it could easily be much better. There are fewer jokes this time around, and Moore makes a point of not even appearing on-screen for a good 40 minutes, putting more emphasis on his arguments and less on his comic persona....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow at 2:45 PM, the Gene Siskel Film Center will host the U.S. premiere of Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan). It’s the most impressive new movie I’ve seen so far this year, and it’s sure to look extraordinary on a big screen. Like L’Humanité (1999) and Hadewijch (2009)—Dumont’s best films prior to this one—Hors Satan hints at religious allegory while adopting a cold, hard perspective that could be described as atheistic....
Blame it on the hammertoe? After a season that saw Sybris‘s writing and recording hindered by new parenthood and foot surgery, drummer Eric Mahle has split from the group for personal reasons. Mahle told Gossip Wolf: “Angela and I have plans on collaborating in the future, and Sybris may or may not go on with a new drummer. I’m concentrating on my new band Sunken Ships and getting my drum fix with Husker Dudes....
In a follow-up interview with the Tribune, the mayor went on and on about his valiant efforts to battle the bureaucracy to give arts to the children because he loves the arts almost as much as he loves the children. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or as he put it, “Now we’re facing big budget challenges, but we’re not allowing the arts education to become a casualty....
In his evening-length Nina Materialize Sacrifice–Simple Version, 31-year-old Jo Kanamori offers a bleak vision relieved by glimpses of hope. Born in Japan and trained in Europe by Maurice Bejart, Kanamori founded Noism in Niigata, Japan, in 2004. His stark and spiky choreography produces unforgettable images: the first scene shows men in dark suits brusquely manipulating doll-like women whose stiff bodies, in nude-colored leotards, seem so incapable of volitional movement that it comes as a shock when they later move on their own....
Used to be coal yards were like taverns—practically every neighborhood in the city had them. But today Paul Schoening is the last person in Chicago who retails the fuel, and he only has two customers: D’Amato’s Bakery and Coalfire Pizza. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Schoening runs the 115-year-old Gruene Coal Company, smack in the middle of Englewood, with the help of his older brother, Ed, and a friendly, doddering rottweiler named Niko....
A few months ago, browsing a shelf of cookbooks at an antique store, I came across some early-40s booklets illustrated with the sort of unintentionally garish food photography that gives pre-U.S. of Arugula cookery a bad name. 250 Ways to Prepare Meat had me at hello, with recipes for reindeer pot roast, stewed squirrels, and roast opossum—but what really piqued my interest was that it was published by an outfit with a Loop address called the Culinary Arts Institute....
Before it even began, last Sunday’s regular-season finale against the Green Bay Packers was a dangerous game for the Bears, packed with risks and pitfalls. As it played out, aside from a cataclysmic injury to Brian Urlacher or Rex Grossman (which some uneasy fans might regard as a positive at this point), almost every calamity that could have befallen the Bears did. Yet Bears fans can stop pulling their hair out and tearing at their Grossman jerseys....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The paradox of the gallery for me has always been that it’s a fixed physical space filled with shifting emotional content. The way I understand and respond to the space is directly related not only to the art it holds, but also to the people within it. That said, I’ve always preferred the closing of a show to an opening....
Don’t call it an inn, say the proprietors: Longman & Eagle is “one inclusive entity/experience.” Empty Bottle pooh-bahs Bruce Finkleman and Peter Toalson, designer Cody Hudson, and woodworker Robert McAdams plan to open the six second-floor “sleeping rooms” of their Logan Square restaurant and tavern by December 15. Prices range from budget offerings at $75 per night to a 351-square-foot room with an “oversize party shower” for rates starting at $225; all are equipped with organic soy foam mattresses and accoutrements like Apple TV media centers....
The Disco Revival When LCD Soundsystem honcho James Murphy and drummer Pat Mahoney dropped their excellent entry in the Fabriclive DJ mix series late last year, it didn’t make much of a splash. Within a few months, though, it had become clear that their mix—mostly a strain of vintage underground disco much darker, more dangerous sounding, and more explicitly gay and black than anything the Village People ever did—had catalyzed a sea change in the hipster quadrant of clubland....
Last September the Hideout held its 15th annual block party, and the same month the Onion‘s A.V. Club hosted its very first music festival. This year they’re combining forces and taking to the parking lot outside the Hideout for one gigantic celebration that features two days of music from Chicago and abroad. Music starts at 5:30 PM on Fri 9/14 and at noon on Sat 9/15, and tickets sold out weeks ago....
