Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the Sox tied the Tigers at two on a wild pitch in the sixth inning, I couldn’t take trying to follow the game by computer anymore and headed for the dive bar across the street to watch it. I’m glad I did: I got to see the Tigers bullpen implode, loading the bases for second baseman Alexei Ramirez, whom Ozzie Guillen likes to call the Cuban Missile....
THE THIRD COAST: SAILORS, STRIPPERS, FISHERMEN, FOLKSINGERS, LONG-HAIRED OJIBWAY PAINTERS, AND GOD-SAVE-THE-QUEEN MONARCHISTS OF THE GREAT LAKES McClelland’s affection for the lakes and their peoples comes through in portraits of characters like an Ojibway painter cheerfully playing Native-in-residence at Ontario’s Pukaskwa National Park, or the graying lefties at an antiwar concert in Duluth. “The Upper Midwestern left isn’t angry,” he writes. “It is earnest, wholesome, nonconfrontational, and a little hurt that the U....
Last fall Court Theatre gave us An Iliad and its nameless Poet—a lone singer, stowed away in some abandoned, urban hole-in-the-ground, who, miserable, weary, but compulsively articulate, kept us mesmerized while he poured out the epic of Achilles’s rage. The show closed weeks ago, but go to Court now and you might think the Poet has returned. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it’s him, all right....
thursday11 cMAYHEM A fair number of people outside the metal scene now consider black metal an art form, which is great, but bands like Mayhem can’t have had that in mind when they started—they just wanted to sound as fucking evil as possible, and they really, really do. Mayhem’s 1994 masterpiece De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is a murky maelstrom of blurry-fast drums, gnashing guitars, and the hideous vocals of Attila Csihar, who forgoes the usual slate-gray shrieking in favor of howls, croaks, gurgles, and moans that are even more frightening for being more human—it sounds a lot like that recording floating around the Internet that’s supposed to be of damned souls in hell, picked up by microphones in a deep-drilling rig run by Russian geologists....
Summer is complicated. The three-plus months that fall between Memorial and Labor Day are often less a reason to rejoice and more an incredible scheduling nightmare, as every last grill-out, every last music festival, every last minute of sunshine has to, has to, be crammed into an already fat agenda. And though populating an hour-by-hour Google calendar—in which some semblance of a life must be lived around work obligations and the arrivals and departures of guests—is all well and good, at some point you’ve got to get the hell out of town....
Last January, Metropolitan Brewing’s Doug Hurst was getting ready to dump about 28 barrels’ worth of improperly fermented Dynamo Copper Lager down the drain. “The carbonation level was too low and it was a little too thin in the body,” says Hurst, who runs the fledgling Ravenswood brewery with his wife, Tracy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Austria, where Robert was born, and in central Europe in general, beer-based spirits aren’t unusual, and age-old distilling traditions that use all sorts of grains and fruits have never been interrupted by such an inconvenience as Prohibition....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune’s profits and expenses for this February aren’t available on the company’s web site, but the most recent quarterly report is (PDF), which reflects a 23% profit in Q4 2006. “Well, it’s never enough, of course. This is Wall Street we’re talking about. I think the expectation is that you can improve your margins over time. And what happens is each company is compared to its peer group....
The name is Italian for “crazy food,” but I can’t say there’s anything inherently kooky about what’s being served at Cibo Matto, the third and most anticipated of the new restaurants at the Wit Hotel. But compared to State and Lake, its relatively safe and boring downstairs neighbor, it is pretty remarkable—especially considering both are operated by the 16-unit empire Concentrics Restaurants. In fact, Cibo Matto could pass as Spiaggia’s more playful, easygoing younger sibling....
Azucar Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every dish on the tapas menu at Azucar sounded good, so between the four of us we ordered nearly all 20 or so of them, along with a bottle of wine from the reasonably priced all-Spanish list at this new Logan Square spot. Opting to skip basics like grilled garlic shrimp and goat cheese baked in tomato sauce, we started with an arugula and baby spinach salad with fennel, orange, and cherry tomato and two wedges of manchego served with almonds and fig jelly....
Jim Moorhead launched Renew in the right town. When his magazine starts to grow he’ll want to add writers and editors. And there’s no shortage in Chicago of first-rate, experienced journalists in recovery. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who doesn’t have a drunk or substance abuser somewhere in his life? The market is all of us. Alison True, the former editor of the Reader, knows Moorhead through the Near North Montessori School, where her husband teaches....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gotta love the bargain bin. During a recent deep dig through one chock full of five-dollar LPs I happened across These Are Powers‘ All Aboard Future, released by Dead Oceans in 2009. The album was one of the Brooklyn band’s final releases before it split in 2011, and it kicks off with the jagged, experimental rock/electro track, “Easy Answers....
Our big year-in-review issue hits the street on Thursday, December 25. I know you can’t wait, and neither can I, so every weekday until then I’ll be writing about one of my favorite films to premiere in Chicago in 2014. Number ten on my list is E.L. Katz’s Cheap Thrills. Cheap Thrills isn’t a midnight movie, strictly speaking—when it played at Music Box in April, why, you could catch a weekend show right after lunch....
Every day at 4 PM this independent outpost of the once-mighty pizza chain puts out a deep, complimentary bowl of pimiento cheese. Owner Frank Zielinski got the recipe, like many others he uses, from The Antoinette Pope School Cook Book, penned by the legendary Chicago cooking teacher and host of the 50s-era Creative Cookery Television Show. It’s a pretty hazy recipe, calling, unhelpfully, for pimiento cheese—so the creamy, almost fluid, peach-colored mixture Zielinski makes each morning is still a bit of a mystery....
The Reader’s Choice: RUI: Reading Under the Influence Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Wrigleyville-based series repeats as champ, withstanding a mighty challenge from the Windy City Story Slam, which follows a similar format (held in a bar, congenial hosts, audience participation). The drill: invited guests, often local writers who’ve recently published books, read short works on a particular theme, and also a few lines by (usually) better known authors....
Chicago is a major center for artsy twentysomethings reinventing underground club culture by recombining 90s signifiers (club kids, riot grrrl, hyper-Photoshopped pop stars) in ways informed by social-media platforms (especially Tumblr). Zain Curtis, aka Teen Witch, has contributed as much or more than anyone in town, thanks largely to a long-running night at Berlin called CULT that until January provided this Internet-based tribe a physical home. (He recently launched its successor, Total Therapy, also at Berlin....
“How many restaurants still have their own matchboxes?” was the host’s boast as I edged my way toward the exit at BLT American Brasserie. I didn’t have an answer for him, but by then I suspected that was the best thing going for this sprawling, overdecorated glorified Applebee’s of a restaurant from New York-brand chef Laurent Tourondel, at one time the man behind BLT Steak, BLT Fish, BLT Prime, BLT Burger, and BLT Market—none of which he has any connection to anymore, thanks to a convoluted lawsuit with former partners that’s allowed him to use the initials but none of the dishes he created....
ANTHONY BRAXTON THE COMPLETE ARISTA RECORDINGS OF ANTHONY BRAXTON (MOSAIC) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the early 70s there was still some overlap between progressive jazz and progressive rock, and jazz had a significantly larger popular audience than it does today—it wasn’t outlandish for a big label to expect to make money on a jazz reedist. And as trombonist and music scholar Mike Heffley writes in the box set’s extensive liner notes, Braxton “was once the prime candidate for the crossover marketing and promotion offered by a major label....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the “traveling extravaganza” that film pasticheur cum homagist Guy Maddin has managed to concoct (11-piece live orchestra, an alleged “castrato,” a trio of Foley artists goosing up the sound—door rappings, foghorns, et cetera) as Sensurround accompaniment to his latest quasi-silent coup de theatre, Brand Upon the Brain! (playing through May 31 at the Music Box, though the live-action garnish was limited to last weekend), he’s also designated a “special guest narrator” to comment on the action and insert whatever voice effects seem necessary or desirable ....
In the fall of 2011, for reasons I will not expand on here (except maybe to say I needed to find out what I didn’t want), I, a lifelong Chicagoan, moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. And though it lies a mere 200 miles northeast, the same Great Lake lapping at its shores, western Michigan might as well have been another country, for all it had in common with anything I had ever known....
If farmers are the rock stars of the sustainable food movement, does that make last weekend’s FamilyFarmed Expo its Pitchfork? Hosted by FamilyFarmed.org, an organization devoted to connecting local food producers with local distributors and consumers, the expo ran Thursday through Saturday at the UIC Forum and was lousy with not just farmers but chefs, grocers, community gardeners, beekeepers, chicken enthusiasts, activists, food bloggers, and policy geeks of all persuasions. One local speaker, whose panel was up against both a cooking demo by Rick Bayless and another panel featuring Paul Kahan, conceded defeat: “I’ll be lucky if I can get my family to come....
