Loose Dudes The punks in Loose Dudes are heirs to a proud brainlessness that goes all the way back to the Ramones, the original aggressive troglodytes in a scene overrun with art-school twerps. My roommate, Gossip Wolf scribe J.R. Nelson, recently returned to our place after a Loose Dudes gig with a fierce newfound love for the group, their Permanent Sex Vacation cassette, and one of the most perfectly ugly T-shirts I have ever seen....
The Reader’s Choice: Cane and Ebel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This red rye ale from Warrenville microbrewery Two Brothers (owned by brothers Jim and Jason Ebel) is spicy and complex, with a citrusy aroma and a bitter finish. The Thai palm sugar in the mahogany-colored brew doesn’t add any noticeable sweetness but probably helps balance out the strong Simcoe and Summit hops—and the hops in turn hold the rye and malt flavors in check without completely overwhelming them....
Thu 12/12: Drake at the United Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Toronto singer/rapper superstar Drake comes to the United Center after his tour was postponed this fall. “Defenders of ‘real’ hip-hop have been up in arms about Drake ever since his breakout 2009 mixtape, So Far Gone, with which he first found substantial success with brazen pop hooks and a deeply unhard image—and thereby became one of a long line of artists who’ve ruined rap music forever,” says Miles Raymer....
Barnaby’s Northbrook | $$ 960 Skokie Northbrook, IL 847-498-3900barnabysofnorthbrook.com Chaihanna | $ 19 E. Dundee Buffalo Grove, IL 847-215-5044 Find our favorite 12 restaurants up north View this region in a larger map Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chaihanna, often spelled choyhona, means “teahouse,” and in Uzbekistan the teahouse is the center of social interaction. Ideally in a shaded outdoor setting near a stream, it’s a place where folks—men, for the most part—while away the hours, drinking tea and snacking at leisure....
Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel Steve Hodel (Dutton) This went on for six months, with every twist covered in breathless detail by the city’s five competing newspapers. Finally, in late June, police found the man they needed, or rather the boy: William Heirens, a 17-year-old University of Chicago student with a bad habit of committing petty burglaries. They held and grilled him for nearly a week before allowing him contact with the defense attorneys his parents had hired....
Maine-based sound artist JASON LESCALLEET makes music from things that don’t work like they’re supposed to, using wrinkled, twisted tape, old reel-to-reel recorders, and other audio equipment scavenged from thrift stores. “I enjoy the sound of decay,” he told the Wire last fall. His most recent recording, last year’s The Pilgrim (Glistening Examples), infuses what might seem like a cold experimental aesthetic with a poignant dose of emotion. The album–an LP plus a CD–is a tribute to his father, who died of cancer in the fall of 2005....
“I’ve always been a kind of dirt guy,” JRJP artistic director Billy Siegenfeld says; his new piece, God of Dirt, is about “honoring what’s beneath you.” Siegenfeld discovered Goran Bregovic’s contemporary Gypsy folk songs in his search for nonjazz, nonblues music that was rhythmically propulsive and eventually chose five selections for this 20-minute work celebrating the earth. Conceiving of his dancers as a community clearing away a space, he’s created grasping hand gestures layered over a base of weighted movement; the choreography is in his trademark syncopated style but responds to a rhythmic voice that’s new for him....
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTYTracy LettsTheatre Communications Group, $13.95 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As it happens, though, that’s not the case. His anatomization of a profoundly—and yet not all that exceptionally—dysfunctional Oklahoma family is almost as compelling on the page as it is onstage. In a way, it’s more compelling: disengaged from theatrical strategies, his language is isolated in its spare grace, and his characters can be seen clear through to their psychic skeletons....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the discs I was most looking forward to hearing was Ronnie Milsap’s gospel-and-hymns collection Then Sings My Soul. Turns out I shouldn’t have been so excited, because instead of the rootsy, down-home hillbilly soul I had in mind, the six songs on the advance sampler sound like Ronnie Milsap backed by a karaoke tape. Bummer. More fascinating is the truthy-sounding wikifact that the “I vi IV V” chord progression that “Stand by Me” uses–the so-called “50s progression” that underpins songs as varied as “Duke of Earl,” “Every Breath You Take,” and “2 Become 1”–is known in Finnish as “Aku Ankka kierto,” or the “Donald Duck progression....
Two years ago, when Vocalo was new, I got an earful from WBEZ journalists who despised everything about their station’s new Web-based baby—the incoherent audio and online products, certainly, but also the time, attention, and money that Chicago Public Radio was lavishing on it. To CEO Torey Malatia, Vocalo was the cutting-edge hybrid that would reinvent public radio. To many WBEZ reporters and editors, it was a lost opportunity. They “wanted to seize the day,” I would write, “responding to the crumbling of Chicago’s newspapers by spending the money it would take to turn itself into the city’s preeminent news source....
Harun Mohammed in Asad All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. While you might not know the name Brian Buckley, you’re probably familiar with his work. Dubbed the “30-Second Auteur” by the New York Times, Buckley has directed dozens of notable commercials, many of which have aired during the Super Bowl....
Ryne Sandberg was the Cubs’ Joe DiMaggio. He was elegant and precise in everything he did, from his batting stance, which could have been copied from a Little League primer, to his efficient rounding of the bases on a triple to his fleet patrol of the field. And, like DiMaggio, for all his greatness he had an uneasy relationship with fame. Sandberg retired prematurely at 34 while going through a divorce, and although he returned to put a nice little coda on his career, finishing in 1997 with more homers than any second baseman in history, when he quit again he seemed gone for good....
I’m a 28-year-old straight woman who’s been dating a 24-year-old straight male for two months. Recently, I gave him oral sex while he was seated naked on my couch. The next day, as I went to sit down on it, I noticed a brown stain on the cushion that looked highly suspicious. I’ve come to the conclusion that it was, in fact, poo. The stain had a streakish quality and was located where his butt-crack region was placed during the encounter....
Nussbaum subverted the loophole, threw the trope aside. In her notes on how the play should be produced, she described Janet 2 as “the self Janet has invented to help tell her story—to make it ‘accessible,’ in a way.” By letting Janet talk to Janet—to translate her own thoughts, feelings, and frustrations—Nussbaum could address the audience directly, as a disabled person. There was no filter. In her writing and in conversation, Nussbaum conveys a sort of equanimity tempered by pessimism, to pretty humorous effect....
Two years ago Dawn Reiss left a good reporting job at a Florida newspaper to take on Chicago. She had no work waiting for her here and knew almost no one. Unless some golden opportunity fell into her lap, she’d have to chase her dream as a freelancer. Reservations can be made until April 20, but some media shops have already made their intentions known. The Tribune used to buy two tables; last year it bought one and this year it’s buying one....
On February 12, after two years of planning and about $50 million raised, Mayor Daley and his Olympic committee turned in their official bid for the 2016 games. And what exactly does it reveal? Well, not much—except that the mayor and his planners still haven’t come clean about what residents actually stand to gain and lose from this risky venture. Well, by my count we’re already on the hook for at least a few hundred million....
The pig was supposed to drop with one bullet, but as Jess Piskor aimed the .22 down on the top of its skull it must have moved slightly, because when the shot rang out the animal squealed, turned, and ran off. Berens and Piskor had raised this pig for the shop, and instead of herding it into a trailer and hauling it off to a slaughterhouse where the animal would be assured a quick death—but would have to endure hours of stressful travel and confinement—the pig was killed on the land where it spent its whole life....
A few years ago a book said vaccines contained mercury and this caused many children to be autistic. But a recent editorial said that mercury is no longer used in vaccines, and besides it was safe all along anyway. But if it was safe all along, why’d they take it out? Why’d they put it in in the first place? —Darren Provine, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike most of Lahiri’s previous work, though, The Lowland mostly concentrates on the immigrants themselves, rather than their children, in this case, Subhash and Gauri, who arrive in Rhode Island in the early 1970s. Though in the end, they will live longer in America than they ever did in India, the most crucial incident in their lives is already behind them, in the lowland of the title, an empty lot behind the house where Subhash and his brother Udayan grew up....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s because Chicago Parking Meters, the private company that will be running the system for the next 75 years, has undertaken some aggressive customer service initiatives. While parking rates will continue to climb, the company is replacing meters, which only take quarters, with pay boxes that accept credit cards. And scores of company employees will be dispatched to city streets to help people feed them if they can’t figure out how to do it on their own....
