Presented by the Welles Park Parents Association, this two-day festival of baseball-themed features runs Friday and Saturday, April 13 and 14, at the Portage. Tickets for each double feature are $10; a festival pass, good for all screenings, is $25. For more information call 773-504-6363. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Field of Dreams Well-made treacle (1989), adapted by writer-director Phil Alden Robinson from W....
Although mysteries were what made Sharon Fiffer fall in love with reading as a child, she never planned to write them—even after she grew up to be a writer. She’d already written a book on grassroots activism with her husband, Steve, and edited three collections of literary memoirs, also with Steve, when she started a two-week residency at Ragdale, the artists’ retreat in Lake Forest, in 1995. She was hoping to start on a collection of short stories set in her hometown of Kankakee and based on people who frequented the EZ Way Inn, the neighborhood tavern her parents owned for 30 years....
“This is the core struggle of my human existence right now,” Andrew Donohue, editor of the nonprofit website Voice of San Diego, says of journalism’s digital age. Donohue told me his site had been having a lot of success with quick-hit rolling investigations. “But all of a sudden we realized we’re not really having the impact we wanted to be having. So we’ve really taken the foot off the gas over the last month or so and put out a couple of big-project pieces....
Killer image: having failed to best Trojan hero Hector in a fair fight, Achilles–Greek demigod, battlefield diva–has him ambushed at his bath. The sight of a loincloth-clad Hector lifted on spears recalls everything from the Laocoon to the Crucifixion–and indicates the best reason for seeing this production of the Bard’s disjointed Trojan War story: director Barbara Gaines’s bravura visual gestures. Her staging can get way overzealous in its attempts to (a) camouflage Shakespeare’s lack of narrative focus, (b) establish contemporary parallels (one character seems to have AIDS), and perhaps also (c) out-lurid Robert Falls’s King Lear....
Allium Chef Kevin Hickey offers a four-course prix fixe through the weekend; it’s $130 with a glass of Dom Perignon. $95.120 E. Delaware, 312-799-4900, alliumchicago.com. See the rest of our (almost) romance-free ode to Valentine’s Day. Cafe des Architectes Chef Greg Biggers offers a five-course menu throughout the weekend, featuring an amuse bouche of Perigord truffle custard with caviar and a main course of poached lobster or beef tenderloin. $79.20 E....
On February 28, when Mayor Emanuel’s school closing show stopped by the Armitage Baptist Church in Logan Square, dozens of parents, teachers, principals, and students turned out to beg officials to “save our schools.” But, c’mon, Mayor Emanuel—there’s got to be a calmer, more logical way to do this than threatening to close a quarter of the elementary schools in town and sending thousands of people into a tizzy. Meanwhile, officials from the United Neighborhood Organization, one of the largest charter operators in Chicago, quietly work the back rooms of the General Assembly to get legislators to give them roughly $35 million to build new schools....
After scripting two relatively mainstream comedies, The School of Rock and Nacho Libre, Mike White makes his debut as writer-director with a story that harks back to his creepy Chuck & Buck (2000). Like the emotionally retarded Buck, the main character here is sweet and innocent but also disturbed, a giving, middle-aged secretary (strikingly played by Molly Shannon) whose grief over the accidental poisoning of her beloved beagle curdles into an increasingly belligerent defense of animal rights....
HELVETICA sss PRICE $9, $7 students Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That popularization of typography is what makes the British documentary Helvetica so fascinating, and not just to publishing nerds. Filmmaker Gary Hustwit takes as his starting point the 50th anniversary of the title typeface, which was created in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Miedinger and has since become ubiquitous. (If you doubt me, look around your nearest CTA station....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Chef!” I spun around and saw my boss, Peter, talking to a prominent chef, one I hadn’t seen at Green City Market in quite a while. “I don’t usually see you at this market,” Peter said to him. “Well, yeah. I sort of try not to come here because I spend the whole time talking to people.” Ugh. Tell me about it....
Bill Savage is a senior lecturer in English at Northwestern University, a bartender, and brother of Dan. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1980 the area around St. Ignatius College Prep wasn’t yet gentrified. Taylor Street hadn’t recovered from the construction of UIC; to the west was the Chicago Housing Authority’s ABLA public housing project. Tensions between the largely Italian-American population east of Racine, the African-Americans in the projects, and the mostly white students at Ignatius were palpable....
Mike Sula Caldillo de carne seca For all the wealth and variety of regional Mexican food in Chicago there are relatively few restaurants specializing in the cuisine of the northern state of Durango. One notable example is the Northlake rosticeria Pollo Vagabundo, with its extensive salsa bar and giant, made-to-order flour tortillas. A lesser-known but still worthy example is Blue Island’s Taqueria Durango. And a little bit closer to home there’s a standard being set at Gage Park’s La Placita de Durango....
Todd Cole Bleached Update at 2:30 PM: White Lung has canceled its show tonight at the Empty Bottle. The other bands on the bill are still playing. Headliner first, the bill is now Magic Milk, Meat Wave, and Polish Gifts. The weekend doesn’t officially begin tomorrow, but looking through the next few days of music listings I’d suggest getting a jump on making plans now, because there are a ton of good shows happening over the next few days....
Performing Arts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bohemian Theatre Company Under the guidance of cofounders Stephen Genovese and Thomas Samorian, BoHo specializes in pared-down stagings of dramas by writers ranging from Shakespeare to Brecht to David Henry Hwang, as well as intimate rethinkings of musicals like Jekyll & Hyde. The company’s fifth-anniversary benefit, More Than Skin Deep, takes place February 16 at the Heartland Studio, 7016 N....
Bianca Betancourt Students work on a pottery project at ElevArte in Pilsen The steps leading up to Dvorak Park’s community center on Cullerton Street are chalked with large-scale images of sugar skulls, or calaveras in Spanish. It’s in Pilsen, after all, and although the neighborhood’s changed a lot during the past several years, it’s still a Mexican neighborhood at its heart. “People don’t want to be inconvenienced with knowing they contributed [to gentrification],” said Thelma Uranga, ElevArte’s mentorship coordinator and current teaching artist....
You can fight city hall, but when city hall is in bed with a $9 billion real estate developer, forget it. This video documentary by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley (Horns and Halos) chronicles the seven-year struggle between the people of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and the New York executives of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, which manipulated eminent domain law to seize 22 acres of the neighborhood for a giant development to be anchored by a sports arena....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a preview I wrote back in September for a live gig by alto saxophonist Greg Ward and his group Fitted Shards, I praised his skill as a reedist and improviser but criticized the quartet’s debut album, South Side Stories (19/8), as too fussy and fusiony. The Chicago native moved to New York more than a year ago, but he’s maintained a regular presence here—Fitted Shards is a Chicago-based group, with bassist Jeff Greene, drummer Quin Kirchner, and keyboardist Rob Clearfield, and a few weeks ago Ward gave an excellent performance with Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly at Pritzker Pavilion....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday local MC Vic Mensa sent me on a wild goose chase. Sort of. When the former Kids These Days member and cofounder of rap collective Save Money retweeted a fan photo of a few CD-Rs of Mensa’s brand-new debut mixtape, Innanetape, placed upright next to rows of books at the library, I took it upon myself to close my laptop and take a trip to the Harold Washington Library to investigate....
INSIDIOUS Aesthetically, Insidious operates at the level of a decent high school video project. The story transpires mostly in uncomplicated close-ups and medium shots; nothing apart from the most basic visual information (faces, relevant props) registers in the frame or takes hold in your imagination. The sound design, so important to establishing tone in a horror movie, is even less inspired: every potentially scary moment is embellished with an over-amplified shock chord or sound effect that pounds the content into you like a blunt object....
I’ve eaten at three different restaurants in as many years in the snug Lincoln Square storefront where gardener, forager, pierogista, and former underground chef Iliana Regan has now planted her flag. And I used to buy comics there, before the Serbian grill that served a “Balkan Bacon Explosion” took over. Then there was the ambitious but ill-fated fine dining spot from a pair of culinary school teachers. And now there’s Regan’s Elizabeth Restaurant....
Gracie Hagen Sex and Sustenance I was introduced to the work of Chicago photographer Gracie Hagen yesterday when I saw “No Judgements Here,” her series of images depicting various sexual fetishes. After first seeing the photographs, I found myself wondering why the image of a grown man in a diaper felt so life affirming, or why the sight of a woman who appears to have intentionally pissed herself gave me faith in the greater good....
