Its comprehensive discussion of endnotes, em dashes, indexes, and the like spans 956 pages, but there are some issues the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style just doesn’t get into. That’s where its chicagomanualofstyle.org comes in: each month the staff posts a new batch of Q and A’s addressing readers’ questions on style and usage. For instance: A. As a style guide for writers, CMOS must resist the temptation to weigh in on an issue of pronunciation....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friday is March of the Chefs, a four-course dinner organized by Slow Food Chicago and hosted by John Bubala of Timo. It’s one of many such dinners happening across the land showcasing local, traditional ingredients. Proceeds go toward Slow Food Nation, a four day conference in San Francisco, planned for Spring 2008, to “promote and reinvigorate America’s diverse food traditions....
I normally don’t travel thereabouts so sorry for being a little late to the party on this one, but have you seen the industrial-chic Michigan Avenue storefront for UK clothing line AllSaints Spitalfields? It is, I believe, Mag Mile’s first steampunk palace. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Opened last summer, the Chicago outpost (700 N. Michigan) is fronted by an awesomely ostentatious three-story brick-and-“steel girder” facade in which hundreds of old-timey sewing machines sit on display, as if they had anything to do with the supposedly handcrafted sweaters and dresses draped precariously atop the sales associates....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I voted against the sale of this public asset because it was a bad deal for Chicago. On Monday, we received word from the Mayor’s Office that a deal was to be signed with Morgan Stanley. While I did receive the draft ordinance, no financial analysis was forthcoming, so my staff and I put together our own financial analysis to determine if the $1....
First, a few definitions, courtesy of the “carny lingo” list at goodmagic.com. To “turn the tip” is to entice a crowd of onlookers into a sideshow. A “simp heister” is a Ferris wheel, the “simp” being the fool who consents to being heisted, or hoisted, into the air. “Flukum” is any mysterious liquid. And the “put ‘n’ take” is a rigged game. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clearly, the pleasures are both linguistic and visual in “Turnin’ the Tip: Simp Heisters, Flukum, and the Put ‘n’ Take”—a show of letterpress, relief, and screen prints by Cannonball Press’s Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston....
Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section, first performed in 1981, is the quintessential 80s dance. Its tiny costumes shimmer, its optimism overwhelms. It’s even set to music by David Byrne. With its tricks and sly gestures it suggests a fundamental egotism: look at me! But ultimately it works best when its energy comes across as impersonal, its feats seemingly the outgrowth of uncontainable joy. Three of the Ailey company’s six programs here include its version–which has never been performed in Chicago before–and the performers are most certainly up to its physical demands....
Michael Colligan Michael Colligan earned his reputation in Chicago as a clarinetist, both in ad hoc improvising combos and in regular working groups. In the late 80s and early 90s he contributed to the art-damaged postcabaret mayhem of Quintron’s old band Math, and in the late 90s he joined the free-jazziest lineup of Weasel Walter’s revolving-door brutal-prog outfit the Flying Luttenbachers. But lately he hasn’t been gigging out much, most often turning up in Fred Lonberg-Holm’s Lightbox Orchestra—and when he does play, he plays dry ice....
The Reader’s Choice: Mado Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I asked my hard-core wine-aficionado friends what their favorite places to BYO were, their responses tended toward white-tablecloth joints with wine programs, where they could bring their small-production boutique wines or off-list stunners and happily pay steep corkage fees for the privilege of schmoozing with the sommelier. But for those of us who appreciate the joys of wine and food without worshipping at the feet of Robert Parker, the primary draw of a BYO is the opportunity to enhance an experience with wine in a budget-friendly way....
In the blistering Visions of Light, artistic director Atalee Judy further explores chamber dance-theater opera. This new hour-long solo show is both a meditation on the life and death of Joan of Arc and on Judy’s father, a schizophrenic hospitalized several times before he died, when she was 12. At the age of six she believed that he “heard angel’s voices, could walk on water, and could speak directly to God....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past few years country music legend Charlie Louvin, who turns 82 next month, has been on a bona fide recording kick thanks largely to Josh Rosenthal, the brains behind the excellent Tompkins Square label. Since 2007 the imprint has put out four records by Louvin–the man who, along with his brother Ira, brought close-harmony singing into country’s mainstream....
In recent weeks the Chicago division of the Drug Enforcement Administration has announced the busts of marijuana growers, cocaine traffickers, and a Mexican cartel leader. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Riley went to Bradley University before going to the University of Illinois for grad school, and he’s cheered on teams all over the country as his 25-year career has taken him to posts in Missouri, Texas, and Virginia....
Challenged by Vie bartender Mike Page with canned tuna (“Sorry Charlie!!” Page joked), Ronnie Higgins of Bangers & Lace and Bar DeVille looked to the tropics for inspiration, adapting a mule (a cocktail made with ginger beer) for the occasion and using mango to complement the salty “tuna juice.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Higgins has challenged Manny Sofios of Gilt Bar with natto, fermented soybeans, a choice previously encountered by Brian Enyart, then chef at Topolobampo, in an installment of Key Ingredient....
It would not be “a short or easy struggle,” Johnson went on. “No single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More accurately, the richest nation on earth can afford not to fight such a war—for it never has, not even in the 60s....
“Behind every great fortune,” Honore de Balzac is supposed to have said but didn’t (what he actually said was nowhere near as pithy), “is a great crime.” In Simpatico, Sam Shepard posits a corollary: that sometimes the great crime amounts to nothing more than a sleazy scam. Shepard has dealt with track culture before, sort of. His 1974 Geography of a Horse Dreamer is a low-down variation on D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” about a young man who’s held prisoner by mobsters because he can predict the outcome of races....
It’s easy to forget that Hellcab is a holiday show. The plot doesn’t hinge on an angelic visitation or a nutcracker come to life or a reindeer with bioluminescent properties. There really isn’t any plot at all, when you come down to it. Just a premise: a long, hard day in the life of a cabbie. A guy known only as the “driver” spends a single, seemingly endless shift bouncing from one end of Chicago to the other, picking up fares....
Don’t look for Chicago Public Radio’s radical new programming, which is sounding more and more like YouTalk, this month. April was once the target date for the launch of its experimental project on WBEW, 89.5 FM, but that was last year. The new target date is sometime around Memorial Day. Even then, unless you live in northwest Indiana or the far south side of Chicago, don’t bother twiddling your dial yet....
Kamil Krzaczynski/AP Photos No one is running against Harry Osterman in the 48th Ward. With Thanksgiving coming up, let’s give thanks for the good things in life—like the February 24 aldermanic elections. Well, technically you do get to vote. You just don’t get a choice in who you vote for, as the filing deadline passed on Monday, and no one filed to run against your incumbents. Alderman Reilly didn’t have a challenger in the last election either, so presumably people in the 42nd are so grateful they’ve bequeathed him the office for life....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve gotten stuck whenever I’ve tried to tell my friends about Barry Doupé’s The Colors That Combine to Make White Are Important, which screens tomorrow at 3:30 PM at the Onion City Film Festival. A deliberately artificial-looking computer-animated feature set mainly in a Japanese office and filled with hilarious non sequiturs (“I made miniature versions of giant sandwiches; they are the same size as regular sandwiches”), it sometimes suggests an Adult Swim program in its warped sensibility....
The kind folks behind the seemingly foolproof gimmick that is Meatloaf Bakery really want you to have a successful meat loaf experience. After all, meat loaf is an infinitely variable and deeply personal foodstuff, a paragon of comfort and familiarity. Any reasonably competent home cook can make it at a fraction of what the loaves, “cupcakes,” and “loafies” (meat loaf bites in pastry shells) cost here. But as simple as it seems, a lot can go wrong....
On August 25, Mayor Daley officially kicked off the campaign to get his 2010 budget passed with a hearing at the South Shore Cultural Center. The mayor and his top aides hold a few of these hearings every year about this time, but this one was unusual for attracting hordes of reporters waiting to hear Daley say the city had “screwed up” the implementation of the parking meter privatization deal—language included in a draft of his remarks leaked the day before to the Sun-Times....
