Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of my favorite things about Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel (currently playing at Facets in a return engagement) is how it evokes the early French New Wave films without overtly emulating them. Yes, it’s shot in grainy black-and-white, it features plenty of cheap-but-ambitious tracking shots, and it changes tone as drastically as Shoot the Piano Player or A Woman Is a Woman....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week I was shooting the shit with Logan Hardware’s store manager, John Ciba, about the year’s rash of excellent releases from locals (Disappears, Bare Mutants, Pelican, etc), when he brought to my attention one that had slipped by me. Earlier this month the four-piece Blasted Diplomats dropped their first vinyl release, a self-titled album via BLVD Records. Playing straight-up hole-in-the-wall rock with a tinge of 90s nostalgia (minus the gratuitous angst), the Diplomats have been working the middle of bills for years, sweating it out and stomping through sets filled with melodic guitar hooks and good vibes....
Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor Prior to moving to Chicago I lived in the Boston area for about five years, where I had the distinct pleasure of taking trips down to NYC via the Fung Wah Bus Transportation line, which the feds shut down earlier this week. Riding a Fung Wah bus felt like a rite of passage—the company offered the kind of inexpensive transit experience every cash-strapped college student looking to save a little money eagerly sought, and it could get you to New York faster than most other forms of mass transit....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If it weren’t for Facets Multimedia’s Werner Schroeter series, Twenty Days Without War (1977) and My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982-5), which screen twice this week in the Siskel Center’s Aleksei Guerman retrospective, would be the most challenging movies in town. Both deal extensively with Soviet history while barely addressing Soviet politics directly; the films plunge the spectator into the past and demand that he fend for himself....
Few secrets are left unexplored in Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel‘s new graphic memoir about her frayed relationship with her mother, Helen. Bechdel’s first memoir, Fun Home, focused on the suicide of her closeted father, Bruce; Helen was little more than a disengaged figure in that book, heavily burdened by her husband’s secret. Are You My Mother? puts her center stage—while at the same time giving us Bechdel herself stripped bare and truly fearless....
As the son of a dancer and an actor, Swedish choreographer Mats Ek comes by his deft theatrical touch honestly. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago artistic director Glenn Edgerton has long coveted Ek’s work, he says, for its “warmth and emotion.” Now Edgerton has snagged the 2009 Casi-Casa (“Almost Home”) for HSDC’s winter concert. Alternately cozy, angry, and amusing, this 40-minute dance for 11 recalls the domesticity of Ek’s Place, which Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna performed in Chicago three years ago....
The Reader’s Choice: Tampopo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A great Japanese restaurant—owned by Koreans. Daniel Choe named his place after Juzo Itami’s “noodle western,” whose eponymous heroine is named for the Japanese word for dandelion. Like that woman’s ramen shop, Choe’s restaurant is bright and earnest. Unlike her, he offers more than just three kinds of noodles—he’s got 14 types of ramen, udon, and soba, plus donburi, bento boxes, sushi, and nearly two pages of traditional Japanese appetizers and entrees....
“I shouldn’t eat this,” Iliana Regan says, frowning at the tiny green ramp fruits in her hand. “If it’s poisonous at this stage I could be in trouble.” The young plants are usually eaten in the spring; as ramps mature they flower, fruit, and then go to seed. She decides against tasting them, but takes some with her so she can try pickling them later. A couple days after that conversation, Regan sends me a text message: “Yes woods = god....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cooper-Moore is best known as a wild and woolly post-Cecil Taylor pianist, but he’s also carved out a niche on “primitive” instruments, tapping into the primordial source of blues-based traditions and knocking it on its ass. That’s his focus on Digital Primitives, the eponymous debut by his trio with Israeli reedist Assif Tsahar (who released the record on his Hopscotch imprint) and former Chicagoan Chad Taylor....
Playwright Randall Colburn grew up in an “apolitical, areligious” home. But in 2002, when he fell in love with a preacher’s daughter as a freshman at Central Michigan University, he also began an affair with Christian fundamentalism—speaking in tongues and all. “I was going through all these different identities, and then I found this spiritual identity that was mixed with this relationship that was so potent and huge and unlike anything I’d ever had before,” says Colburn, 28....
“Let’s ask the chefs at new restaurants to pick their favorite new restaurants,” we said. “With the caveat that they can’t pick their own. Wouldn’t that be interesting?” Rob and Alison Leavitt, Mado Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s so hard to choose where you’re going to spend your money these days—we know that if we go to Lula or Avec our money is going to be well spent....
The same week the New York Times erroneously identified him as the chef-owner of Owen & Engine (he is neither), Martial Noguier, formerly of Cafe des Architectes and One SixtyBlue, opened his new restaurant—the less than felicitously named Bistronomic (840 N. Wabash, 312-944-8400)—in the Gold Coast space that used to house Eve. He and owners John Ward and Matt Fisher have redecorated, replacing Eve’s pale, silvery tones with dark woods and deep reds....
I never thought much about GANG GANG DANCE before last month, when this much-hyped NYC art-rock combo released the CD-DVD set Retina Riddim (Social Registry). A band with live visuals that tries to sell them on disc usually just comes off as self-indulgent (now everyone in flyover country can dig the Super-8 footage our groovy friends shot for our stage show!), but Retina Riddim actually clarifies and codifies the Gang Gang Dance aesthetic–for the first time I can appreciate the group’s experimental-postpunk-tribal-improv ethos, which owes more than a little to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The European Union Film Festival, the city’s best film fest for several years running, begins in three weeks. The Gene Siskel Film Center announced the schedule yesterday (it’s already online), and it’s another commendable program: if I can find the time, I hope to see about two dozen of the 65 titles they have lined up. As usual, the program strikes a balance between crowd-pleasers and more challenging work, with local premieres from some of the most important living filmmakers....
The Lagoon Chicagoan Lilli Carré’s debut graphic novel The Lagoon isn’t genre fiction—it’s an art comic. But Carré is interested in gothic fantasy, to a degree unusual among alternative comics creators not named Dame Darcy. The Lagoon is an elliptical love letter to the genre and to its place in the lives of many adolescent girls. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The frontispiece captures both Carré’s affection for goth and her distance from it....
Peter Margasak,Reader staff writer Various artists, Five Days Married & Other Laments: Song and Dance From Northern Greece, 1928-1958 (Angry Mom) This compilation by collector and historian Christopher King focuses on rural music from Greece’s mountainous Epirus region, near Albania on its northwestern border. These songs are far removed from the profane grit and drive of rembetika, and unsurprisingly they’re influenced by Albanian traditions, including its polyphonic vocal music. They reflect upon doomed romance and the hardships of a shepherd’s life, but because the violin and clarinet are ebullient in their sorrow, they’re anything but depressing....
Timothy Carey in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie “The print’s about 20 percent faded,” estimated Chicago Cinema Society‘s Neil Calderone when I saw him in the Patio Theater lobby before last night’s screening of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I can’t verify or challenge that figure, but the archival print (struck during the film’s initial 1976 run, Calderone proudly informed me) was indeed flawed. The warmer colors seemed to have melted together slightly, creating a subtle orange-brown wash over the images....
The Sun arrived at our house as a Christmas present some ten years ago and we’ve been getting it ever since. I still don’t know what to make of it. It has a tone unlike the tone of any other magazine I’ve read. I think of the Sun as the sad magazine. “I lay in the dark crying and singing, singing and crying.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you might surmise, the Sun and its 75,000 readers aren’t casual acquaintances....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The concept of offering theatergoers their money back raises interesting questions. If an audience member likes a play but thinks the production sucked (“It was much better on Broadway”), does he get back the entire ticket price or just a portion? Would audience members want their money back if they thought the cash would come out of the pocket of some struggling actor or playwright, rather than from the coffers of a well-endowed philanthropic organization?...
One arctic Sunday morning last month, the unmistakable aroma of juniper and lemon perfumed the normally musty air behind a heavy steel door in an industrial space on the west side. There “Roger,” a young guy who makes his living with his hands, was committing a time-honored and storied felony. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I got into this just because I like the science of all that stuff,” he says....
