Oprah Winfrey loves the turkey burgers at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago restaurant in Palm Beach and thinks everyone should “experience” them. So last week Lo, a blogger whose pseudonym is an acronym that stands for Living Oprah, spent an evening sauteing Granny Smith apples, fresh parsley, and celery and blending the mixture with $28 worth of organic turkey meat. “Usually our dinners take about 30 minutes to make,” she says. This one took three hours....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you have no interest in examining legal disputes, stop reading now. I think they can be fascinating, and I think the Jewish News account by managing editor Pauline Dubkin Yearwood does a good job of threading its way through this one, the grabber headline notwithstanding. The central facts are these: Bloch went to federal court in 2006 seeking damages from the Shoreline Towers Condominium Association for the way it treated her mezuzah, and the Seventh Circuit just tossed out her suit....
Nothing better demonstrates Pitchfork’s cultural reach and music-industry clout better than the booking of R&B superstar R. Kelly as this year’s Sunday headliner. His appearance at the festival is a win for all parties involved: Pitchfork continues to expand its authority beyond its old indie-rock stomping ground (and despite the efforts of WBEZ critic Jim DeRogatis, it doesn’t appear hurt by the accusations that still dog the singer), Kelly gets up close and personal with an audience he has yet to conquer (many of whom are too young to remember or care about his scandals), and the crowd can bump and grind to Kells at a fraction of the usual three-figure price for a decent ticket at one of his shows....
Lindsay Garbutt, editorial assistant for Poetry magazine, gets her fix at: Public Works A second-floor Wicker Park gallery a few doors from Big Star, Public Works houses eye-catching exhibitions of contemporary art and design. Recent shows include “Pulled: A Catalog of Screen Printing” and “I Made This for You”—work by the multi-aliased Matthew Hoffman. When I stopped in for Hoffman’s talk at the gallery everyone sat rapt on the floor while Hoffman explained the evolution of his “What Wood You Say” project, outed his various pseudonyms, and showed photographs of his international “You Are Beautiful” installations....
The occasion of a new Tony Hu restaurant opening doesn’t always engender the kind of immediate clamorous response it deserves. Last year, for example, the opening of the bizarrely wonderful, Mao Tse-tung themed Lao Hunan was largely ignored by the media for weeks. That doesn’t seem to be case with his upcoming River North venture or Lao Ma La, the place he just opened in the old Lure Izakaya space (the seventh Lao restaurant in Hu’s empire)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, Jenny McCarthy’s been promoted—a move that’s sure to make Jim Belushi jealous. (We’re waiting for the Sneed take on this.) They’re the two former celebrities that the Sun-Times is betting the house on, but they’re pretty much weak sauce. Bad eggs, all in the same basket. Whatever, anyway: Belushi’s most recent foray into late-career reinvention was reported in the Splash section of the Sun-Times last Sunday....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York City is smack-dab in the middle of a complete Howard Hawks retrospective that includes every existing work by the master director. Each film—including such hard-to-find movies as Fig Leaves (1927), A Girl in Every Port (1928), and Fazil (1928)—screens in either 35mm or 16mm, making this an extraspecial event. While Chicagoans aren’t exactly starved for Hawks films—his best-known stuff appears frequently in local repertory houses; most recently, the Logan screened his noir classic The Big Sleep—the chance to see his life’s work is enticing....
George Bernard Shaw grouped this 1892 effort among his “unpleasant plays”–i.e., those that “force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.” It succeeds so well that you may feel the urge to bathe after seeing it. Strenuously, and with Lysol. It’s so worth it, though. The unpleasantness starts pleasantly enough when young Harry meets headstrong, spoiled, seductive Blanche. They’re well on their way to an understanding when Harry discovers the unsavory source of Blanche’s wealth....
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Hubbard Street 2 cultivate their budding choreographers with the first-ever “Danc(e)volve: New Works Festival”—two weekends of nine premieres by company members. The fest is more tightly curated than “Inside/Out,” the ten-year-old company showcase, and seemed such a “big opportunity” to HS2 member Johnny McMillan that instead of entering a refined version of his 2011 “Inside/Out” piece, he created a brand-new sextet. McMillan describes a magpie process of collecting images, music, and movement to use in the piece, Path and Observations; you might see traces of Beyonce and Nancy Sinatra moves....
The idea that music is a universal language is beyond cliche, but behind every cliche is truth, and the Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood provides a particularly fascinating case in point. Back in the early 60s Lebanese merchants began importing the music-laden films of Bollywood, India’s sublimely prolific film industry, into the country. Although Nigerians couldn’t understand the Hindi lyrics, the elaborate song-and-dance numbers and easy-to-follow plots proved addictive anyway....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t spend much time keeping up on club music these days, but I perked up when I saw that New York-born, Rio de Janeiro-based DJ Maga Bo has a new album, Quilombo do Futuro (Post World Industries), due May 22. I first heard him in 2008 when he performed at Chicago’s World Music Festival, and at the time I remarked on the scarcity of sounds from his adopted homeland on his album Archipelagos: “Though he’s from Rio de Janeiro, little on the disc is recognizably Brazilian; using a laptop and a microphone, he’s woven the contributions of singers and MCs from Morocco, South Africa, Portugal, Tanzania, and Senegal, among other places, into a thunderous programmed-and-sampled mix of hip-hop, dancehall, drum ‘n’ bass, and various traditional rhythms....
This is from Lee Abrams, the Tribune Company’s new innovation officer and the man who might save the company if his ideas ever catch up to his rhetoric: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One week in. Some general thoughts observations and comments. You’ll probably either violently agree, disagree or be completely confused. The idea behind this thing is to get some thinking on the table…and see where it takes us…...
“Jesus is a trick on niggers,” says antihero Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. The title character of Thomas Bradshaw’s hilarious, discomfiting new satire, Mary, says exactly the same thing about the Emancipation Proclamation. Mary is a black, middle-aged domestic servant, and, as she sees it, “Black folks went from one form of slavery to another. They went from being slaves to sharecroppers, couldn’t vote, then the Klan came along with their foolish violence....
Some say graduate programs turn out gimmicky, school-clever playwrights whose main skill is knowing how to be just the right amount of quirky. Some may have a point. The recent recipient of an MFA, Itamar Moses has written a play that’s ostentatiously gimmicky, assertively academic, and chock-full of amusing quirk. It’s also lovely, wise, tender, strong, and the best play I’ve seen–or can imagine–by a young playwright. Centered on the intrigues of seven organists vying for a post at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche in 1722, Bach at Leipzig combines Larry Gelbart’s vaudeville instincts with Tom Stoppard’s metatheatrical intricacies....
Ellen Bunch grew up around music, but a lot of it was the kind of music most people flee from. Her father, a professor of music, moved the family repeatedly to follow teaching gigs in Minnesota, Texas, and Chicago (at Roosevelt University). Though he played mostly low brass like trombone and tuba, he did much of his composing at home on the piano. “He does avant-garde stuff, so he kind of beats the piano,” says Bunch....
No Coast Collective 1500 W. 17th Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Run by a loose roster of some half-a-dozen local artists (currently including Aay Preston-Myint, Alex Valentine, Andrea Fritsch, Dan Dunbar, Reba Rakstad, and Young Joon Kwak), the microshop/multi-arts space offers instant access to the ideas, images, and sounds bubbling up from the Pilsen underground and beyond. In the consignment shop (summer hours: Saturday noon-7 and Sunday noon-6), you can pick up demos and CD-Rs of shortlived bedroom projects, unruly noise acts, and whatever out-of-towners just blew minds last week at a nearby house party, as well as affordable local and international artworks, including video, prints, posters, handmade jewelry, and altered and printed clothing....
Q Storm myspace.com/qoristorm Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This local MC’s MySpace page is a parade of LOLZ—for starters, it was recently updated to note that “Probation is OFFICIAL OVER.” Previous bios detailed how some nine years earlier he was in the same room as Kanye; his location is listed as being “SOMEWHERE INSIDE YA GIRL.” But the real reason to hit it is to hear his one song, up since late 2009....
I realize we are six days into the Internet transformation into round-the-clock Yeezus coverage, but I promise this will be the last Yeezus-related thing I post here, at least for the rest of the week. (Unless something really interesting and Yeezus-y happens between now and then.) Gianni Lee and Mike Blud are a couple of DJs who have a pretty compelling side hustle as sample trainspotters. Whenever a big rap record comes out, it’s usually only a matter of a few days before the pair have assembled a compilation of the original source material that it samples....
April 22 is Earth Day, an international effort founded in 1970 by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson and coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network (earthday.net). It’s also the birthday of Julius Sterling Morton, founder of Arbor Day, celebrated this year on April 27. The city has expanded its annual festivities to what’s called Earth Month (April 17 through May 20), the highlight of which is Green Festival, a sprawling weekend convention of lectures, vendors, and activities....
On their first three albums, this English quartet made a virtue of creative sprawl, but as impressed as I was by their experiments with texture and rhythm on 2005’s Axes, I’m glad they’ve taken a more focused approach on the new No Shouts, No Calls (Too Pure). On Axes they sometimes sounded like they’d bitten off more than they could chew; here each member sticks to what she does best, and it gives the trance-inducing pop tunes a new directness and clarity....
