We’ve heard often that guns don’t kill people—people with guns kill people. But think about Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Columbine. None would have happened without each shooter’s access to a gun (or, often, guns). That seems as good a reason as any for more restrictive gun-control laws, if not an outright ban. Thank goodness we have Dan Baum to guide us through this morass. Baum is a journalist with impeccable blue-state credentials....
Sort of a cross between Grease and stage-four cancer, Bill Plympton’s latest animated grotesquerie (2005) takes place at a 50s high school where the girls wear gigantic bouffants and the boys’ hairdos reach for the sky like rock formations in Monument Valley. A nerdy new kid runs afoul of the school’s leather-clad biker bully (voiced by Dermot Mulroney), his vain prom-queen girlfriend (Sarah Silverman), and the school’s draconian social politics, but Plympton happily lets the plot slide whenever he gets an idea too gross or grippingly surreal to pass up....
Half Acre has brewed its chocolate milk stout, Chocolate Camaro, since 2011. It’s a once-a-year beer, available in winter or early spring, but till now it’s been tap only. “This is the first time we’ve put the CoCo Camaro, as it’s also affectionately called, in bomber bottles,” says Half Acre founder Gabriel Magliaro. “We were hoping for at least a cease-and-desist letter from Chevy, but nothing.” Magliaro has the following to say about the recipe for this tasty stout: “Camaro is defined by cacao nibs and by its chocolate and roast malts, but given its silkiness from lactose and balance from the Fuggle hop....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Sula profiles Sheeba, one of the Chicago area’s few Yemeni restaurants. Brothers Anees and Ismael “Smiley” Aljahmi, natives of Brooklyn, where their father runs a Yemeni place, opened in southwest-suburban Bridgeview back in November. Many Yemeni dishes feature a condiment called hulba, a fenugreek froth that gives the traditional meat, fish, and vegetable stews texture and buoyancy. Disks of naanlike flatbread are freshly baked on the interior wall of a tanoor, a clay oven that is also used to cook fish....
ROYKSOPP FEATURING KARIN DREIJER ANDERSSON BAT FOR LASHES (Glassnote) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Natasha Khan separates herself from the pack on Bat for Lashes’ second album, the imminent Two Suns, ditching the British folk and girl-group big beat for luxuriant but minimal dance music cum polychromatic witch tunes. The album is built on plush electronics and abundant reverb, its spartan arrangements employing a wide variety of heavily processed sounds—is that a guitar, or is it a cheap keyboard set to “French horn”?...
Thomas James Jagodowski tries not to worry his parents. So when the mystery symptoms he’d been experiencing for months—the dizziness, the loss of coordination, the confusion, the constant sense of rocking back and forth—got especially bad one evening in the summer of 2000, he didn’t call them. A fixture of Chicago’s comedy community, Jagodowski has plenty of close friends, but he didn’t call any of them; everyone he could think of was performing in a show somewhere....
Michael Gebert Black truffle explosion, from the Next Trio menu From its opening in spring 2011 through the end of its third season in late 2013, Next was the wunderkind of Chicago restaurants, selling out all its seats well in advance, whipping out a radically different menu theme every four months, and pioneering a new model for how you get into hot restaurants. It replaced the old methods—i.e. knowing a guy or palming a $20 to the maitre d’—with a sternly technological, you’re-in-or-you’re-out ticket system....
A richly textured drama that works on many levels, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 play depicts a marvelous transformation based on a true story. Convicts sent in 1788 to Australia are required to perform a comedy by George Farquhar as a civilizing exercise–which becomes an opportunity for a second chance. Far from the first folly on the “fatal shore,” their crude revival pays tribute to the power of life to imitate art. Though Stephen F....
Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Rahm Emanuel: The authority on contracts. After reading the Tribune‘s postelection editorial in which they expressed their orgasmic joy over Bruce Rauner’s gubernatorial victory—I believe they said the earth moved—I made one of my great declarations. You’re welcome, Tribsters. But what’s interested me most at the moment is Mayor Emanuel’s response. So how would the mayor react to the Tribune‘s stories? Would he thunder against this outrageous assault on the public purse?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The poor single moms interviewed “have mainstream, even conservative ideas of what marriage should be, and they don’t want to get married if they don’t trust that the men will be faithful, help provide for their children, not be abusive, etc. … The women also have mainstream, conservative ideas about the value and importance of children–so much so that they often think of abortion as irresponsible....
The fight over a proposed new development in Pullman on the far south side has so far been focused on whether it should include a new Walmart, and the development’s main cheerleader in the City Council, Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Beale, has defended the inclusion of the controversial retailer by saying it’s his only choice—several other big-box firms have turned him down. He’s made it sound like he was on a mad dash to find a prom date, and all the pretty girls were already taken....
Taco Leg impersonates Indiana Jones It’s a slow news day for music, which isn’t surprising since this is the slowest time of year for music news. There’s stuff being reported on, since the machine has to keep grinding away even when there’s the slimmest amount of raw material for it to chew on, but none of it’s any good. Two up-and-coming female rappers in New York City, Azealia Banks and Angel Haze, are beefing over a tweet that Banks wrote about how rappers who weren’t born in the city (Haze, for instance) can’t claim it, which is stupid....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Look, Atlas Shrugged wasn’t that bad. I read it twice. I enjoyed its protagonists Dagny Taggart and whatshisname, Hank Rearden, doing battle against the leeches and the moochers and so forth. Atlas Shrugged is entertaining in the way that certain films—Legally Blonde, say—are entertaining, in that they provide humanlike characters in a plot that maintains at least a remote connection to reality: a following of the first name-last name convention, for instance, or the fact that both texts (LOL) are set in the United States, an extant country in North America....
Pittsburgh is called the city of bridges. They’re everywhere, spanning the three rivers in steel. It’s easy to see how this place gave birth to someone like Andy Warhol, someone obsessed with the power of reinvention. Just cross the water and you’re somewhere new. In that way, it’s a fitting place for Brandon Baltzley, transient chef and all-around enfant terrible who left Chicago two years ago after a spectacular fall from grace....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As debate ensues, I’d like everyone to keep in mind the fact that we’re all in favor of affordable housing in the city of Chicago,” said 36th Ward alderman William J.P. Banks, the zoning committee chairman, at the beginning of the meeting. “But we also should be mindful of the fact that we have [a development] industry to protect, and we have an economy to protect....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three decades after Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock recorded some of their most exploratory electric work in the early 70s, contemporary musicians are still untangling its mysteries. Satelliti—a duo from Bolzano, Italy—are certainly dealing with those keyboard-stoked implications on their recent album Transister (Cuckundoo), transplanting the often abrasive, spaced-out tones into hard-hitting rhythms abstracted from techno. Keyboardist Marco Dalle Luche—playing electric piano and an array of synthesizers—and drummer Andrea Polato enticingly combine atmospheric textures, insistent and hypnotizing ostinato bass lines, and winding improvisations with shape-shifting grooves you can nod your head to....
As the Bush era drags on, I seem to be developing an irrational hatred of summer blockbusters, those gas-guzzling, road-hogging, radio-blasting Hummers of the entertainment business. The fact that they get worse and worse and still make tons of money doesn’t say much for the national character. New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently conjured up an image of Americans flocking to the movies this summer to escape their woes, as if we were all dust bowl farmers hoping to banish the Great Depression from our thoughts with flickering images of Clark Gable and Mickey Mouse....
Mike Sula Milt’s braised short ribs I admit I underestimated the market for kosher barbecue in East Lakeview, but there I was Monday night at Milt’s Barbecue for the Perplexed, wheedling for a few seats in a slickly designed restaurant packed to overflowing with yarmulke-sporting frummers and frumas, all going to town on burgers, fries, chili, and salads. Lakeview? OK, it isn’t Skokie, or even Rogers Park, but it’s been home to a significant Jewish population since the 30s, and it’s still home to three temples, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, respectively....
Music fans know Brian Chippendale as a guy who’s created an astonishing, hyperactive racket from behind a paint-splattered drum kit for almost 20 years now. Comics fans know him as a guy who crowds pages with anxiety-inducing panels in the series Maggots and Puke Force. From either angle, the dude is a complete weirdo genius. His drumming relies more on intensity and nonstop snare clatter than technical skill or precision—he’s compared his playing to his drawing style, where he fills up every possible bit of paper with busy, in-your-face ink....
In “101 One-liners; Falling Flat,” Jennifer Mills wonders if the limits of humor can’t be adjusted just a little lower. What about an art show that both examines and enacts an exceedingly dumb premise? You may not care to define what she’s doing here, though, as you chuckle your way through this witty, highly enjoyable collection, which offers exactly what its title promises: a children’s treasury of terrible jokes. There are not one but several piles of plastic dog shit....
