Intro | Saturday | Sunday 4:30 PM El-P Around the turn of the century, the man once known as Jaime Meline was part of a wave of indie MCs and producers that changed the focus of the hip-hop underground from Native Tongues-style backpacker rap to something much darker. His most recent full-length, 2007’s I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, is a claustrophobically dense, dystopian soundscape with even denser lyrics, touching on paranoia, phobias, and panic attacks....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October the first major release by the best punk band of the 90s, Bikini Kill’s self-titled debut EP for Kill Rock Stars, turns 20. So it’s as good a time as any for the long-defunct group to announce that it’s launching its own label and reissuing its complete back catalog. Bikini Kill Records will begin selling physical albums in the fall, beginning with the Bikini Kill EP, but as of yesterday the band’s entire Kill Rock Stars discography, including their nearly flawless swan song, Reject All American, is available through iTunes, eMusic, and the Bikini Kill Bandcamp page....
the city budgets and tax packages for 2008 and 2009, which relied on untested revenue streams and layoffs of front-line city workers; Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » zoning approval to let the private Children’s Museum move into Grant Park; and the repeal of the foie gras ban. (Some readers have questioned our logic for including this last one. Our argument is that the way it was done–by circumventing normal council proceedure–set a new low for the way the council works, or doesn’t, and may have set yet another precedent for mayoral domination of the legislative branch....
No offense to my colleagues at the Reader, but I think the happiest I’ve ever been at a job was when I worked as a direct-care provider at a day center for developmentally disabled adults. In fact, few episodes of my life have been as gratifying as teaching socialization skills to an autistic man with the intellectual capacity of a five-year-old or helping some of the charges with Down syndrome recognize new printed words....
I typically find your work [Hot Type] insightful and sometimes wise, and I respect your experience as a former reporter and current media observer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am annoyed, though, with the lead item in this week’s column [December 1], in which you take two pundits to the woodshed. Yes, they deserve it, and you make good points, and the column is well written....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d been familiar for some time with the veteran French director Philippe Garrel (who started making movies as a teenager in the mid-60s), but only since I checked out A Burning Hot Summer at Facets the other night has my guarded admiration given way to over-the-moon pleasure. I concur with Drew Hunt’s assessment in this week’s issue that Garrel is a master, though I’d add that his is a forbidding sort of mastery, in which everything within the shot—lighting, shadow, sound, actors’ faces—carries some deliberate, personal meaning....
You can go to shows for years and never see a Klingon play guitar. Other niche bands might pay tribute to Middle Earth or Mass Effect, often dressing as characters onstage. Trekkie group Il Troubadore (who call themselves “Indianapolis’s 24th-century Klingon opera ensemble”) perform in full-face alien makeup, and Tolkien-inspired Finnish heavy-metal band Battlelore (currently on hiatus) wear chain mail and elven cloaks to sing about the Lord of the Rings....
On January 3 a 17-year-old Chicago producer calling himself Metallic Ghosts played a concert from his bedroom in Old Town. Also on the bill for this online show were Veracom, a producer from Dallas; Luxury Elite from Kentucky; Infinity Frequencies, who’s from somewhere in southern California; Transmuteo, aka New Orleans multimedia artist Jonathan Dean; Coolmemoryz, a Floridian who pretends to be from Japan; and a DJ set by PrismCorp of Portland, Oregon....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations…....
Alan Wyman was a handyman with an apparent knack for getting to know men who lived conventional lives and women who didn’t. He lived in an apartment building in the 4300 block of North Western, and achieved sudden notoriety in October 2006, when a story about what went on there splashed across an inside page of the Chicago Sun-Times. The writer, Stefano Esposito, began on a breathless note: “The middle-aged woman is blindfolded and handcuffed....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Illinois Institute of Art students Aris Sergakis and Carmen McGhee were frustrated at the “cliches of the catwalk” in the Chicago fashion scene. “The kind of fashion shows we have here are caricatures, an idea of what fashion is supposed to be—exaggerated poses, bad photography,” says Sergakis. Seeking to bring a stripped-down, “sincere approach” to promoting student talent, they’re putting on their own fashion event and runway show, Unearthed, which will feature work by 15 student designers, refashioned vintage garments, and an art gallery with pieces by local artists....
Anytime Baltimore’s Roomrunner drops a track, Nirvana’s name rears its head; it happens so frequently it might lead you to believe Kurt Cobain rose from the dead to front the sludge-punk outfit. You just might be convinced that’s the case listening to the group’s new “Bait Car,” which is today’s 12 O’Clock Track. As much as I prefer to not draw comparisons to others when describing a band, I must admit that the Nirvana tag fits—and most rock musicians would kill to create the kind of raw, hooky track that sounds so distinctly similar to one of the most beloved acts in pop-music history....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a cybercafe in Toulouse where I’ve spent some idle time after a three-day conference on director’s cuts at the Toulouse Cinematheque ended, I’ve had a chance to check out Cinefile, a new Web site devoted to alternative film events and resources in Chicago that cofounder Darnell Witt recently e-mailed me about. “Our goal,” he wrote, “is to supplement resources like the Reader, connecting Chicago cinephiles to venues and screenings with limited exposure....
Heather Robinson has two sons—a 13-year-old and a three-year-old—who are implicated, in a way, in the South Side Community Art Center’s new show, “Maleness to Manhood.” “I’m here with two roles,” she tells me. One is as the center’s executive director. The other: “I’m here as a mother who wants my sons to be able to grow up. They have nice stuff—you know what I mean, they’re cool—but I fear for their lives....
D’Candela 4053 N. Kedzie 773-478-0819 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five years ago Luis Garcia opened the first Peruvian rotisserie chicken joint in town, and though it’s not the only one anymore—in fact, he’s facing competition from at least half a dozen South American pollerias these days—it’s still the best. Garcia’s chicken is particularly plump and juicy, having been brined and then marinated overnight in about 15 different ingredients, including garlic, cumin, oregano, black pepper, vinegar, and beer....
If you know what happened at the corner of 18th and Calumet 200 years ago, it’s an amazing thing just to touch the ground there. This dollop of land, bordered by new brick townhomes, a massive glass-and-steel condo building, and a brick wall, was the site of the Fort Dearborn massacre. On the morning of August 15, 1812, with the nation at war with Britain and its Native American allies, 95 people–mostly soldiers but also settlers, including women and children–left the fort at what is now Michigan and Wacker and began marching to Fort Wayne....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a one-week run of Nina Paley’s rhapsodic animated feature Sita Sings the Blues, which also screens twice in Evanston as part of the new Talking Pictures Festival. Like two other instant classics, Michel Ocelot’s Azur & Asmar and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud’s Persepolis, Sita revitalizes 2-D animation by drawing on the heavily ornamental artwork of the East....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What Vocalo plans to do is develop, slowly, as a quasi-online community. A number of the Internet’s biggest success stories, including such citizen-journalism sites as Talking Points Memo and Firedoglake, started modestly as blogs and evolved to the point where they were doing actual journalism. The former started as the Web side project of an established if not especially prominent political journalist named Josh Marshall and has since taken on employees and spearheaded investigations into the U....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most people know DJ Jazzy Jeff from the lightweight pop hip-hop beats he put down behind Will Smith back when Smith was still the Fresh Prince–and for providing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air‘s best moments with his cameos as the always-hustling Jazz. DJs and trainspotters, on the other hand, know Jeff has a more serious side. By popularizing the game-changing “transformer” scratch technique he helped lay the foundation for the technically intense turntablist movement, and for the past decade he’s been dropping surprisingly subtle soul/hip-hop hybrid mixes....
Two miles off Oak Street Beach, in the Carter H. Harrison Water Intake Crib, the phone rings. The chef looks up from his notebook, glances at the caller ID, and turns instead to a glass bong half filled with a corked ’82 Petrus. He fires it up and takes a long pull on the tube. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » D’Angelo, the 24-year-old son of a New York Stock Exchange trader, embarked on his meteoric culinary career seven years ago, after dropping out of his Upper East Side private school....
