Posts

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s always a bummer to see a crucial member of a great band move on. This weekend, local fuzz-rockers Radar Eyes will say farewell to drummer and founding member Shelley Zawadzki. The split comes on good terms—Zawadzki is a brand-new mom, and it turns out that juggling parenting and punk rock isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Zawadzki and singer/guitarists Anthony Cozzi and Nathan Lueking formed Radar Eyes in late 2007, and their melodic blend of shoegaze, psych, and garage immediately caught the city’s attention, with their first official full-length eventually coming out on HoZac Records in early 2012....

Delightful Pastries There are a lot of Polish bakers in Chicago, but Dobra Bielinski believes she’s one of the few doing things the right way. “No offense to other bakeries, but they skimp on ingredients,” she says. “I bought a cheesecake from one place and my dog refused to eat it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bielinski, 35, moved to Chicago from Poland with her family when she was 15....

thursday13 Thursday13 The BreedersNebula, The Entrance BandSkygreen Leopards Saturday15 Harvey DangerLuceroNobunnyCharles RumbackSilk Flowers Sunday16 Lucero Monday17 Otto, Nomo Tuesday18 Dr. Manhattan NEBULA, THE ENTRANCE BAND Heavy Psych (Tee Pee) is NEBULA‘s first proper release since 2006’s Apollo and the first without founding drummer Ruben Romano, who’s been with singer-guitarist Eddie Glass since their Fu Manchu days—he’s been replaced by Rob Oswald, formerly of Karma to Burn and Mondo Generator. (At least they’ve stopped playing musical chairs with bassists—Tom Davies has been aboard since ’04....

Friday7 ChaperoneWeezer Saturday8 Samuel Blaser & Bobby AveyPieta BrownVulgar BoatmenWeezer Sunday9 Agogic Monday10 Distractions Wednesday12 GenerationalsHouses WEEZER Future pop historians may discover that Weezer’s late-career Horrible Period, defined by egregious Dr. Luke-isms and brutally inane lyrics, was just Rivers Cuomo pulling a perverse prank on fans who expected him to carry on as a power-pop auteur and not become the creepy, older, male Avril Lavigne. (His line about “messing with the journalists”—from the awful “Memories,” on Weezer’s awful Epitaph debut, Hurley—could be a clue....

Just as the Lincoln Park soccer field wars seemed to be waning, a fight has erupted on a second front. But this battle doesn’t pit residents against the Park District—this time it’s one group of park users against another, with the Park District fanning the flames. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This April Latin was about halfway through building the field—whose price tag had risen to $2 million—when Protect Our Parks, a group of north siders, went to court and halted construction on the grounds that the Park District had not sought approval from the Chicago Plan Commission, as the law requires for any project on lakefront parkland....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not just the juicy and impossible Chodorow complaint. Now Philadelphia Inquirer restaurant critic Craig LaBan has actually been sued by the owner of Chops, a steakhouse in Bala Cynwyd, PA, over a three-sentence review. I was hoping the review’s brevity meant this was a “tonstant weader fwowed up” kind of situation, but it turns out the review is just a squib in the sidebar at the end of a much longer review....

We got to pondering the origins of the pork belly slider. My dinner companion was thinking about the many different culinary styles represented on the menu at American Junkie, all, at this late hour, enlisted in the service of the upscale gastropub. Whence the pork belly slider? I suspect historians will someday find evidence of it in archival newspaper dining sections, on lists of Hottest Summer Dishes 2009. Perhaps it’s native to the spendy sports bar, and here we were, eating it in its natural habitat....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I remembered finding Poison familiar in its general subject matter (a 14-year-old girl’s first encounters with sex and death), but precise in its handling of character and place. It was, in short, a solid debut, demonstrating a firm grasp of film form and paying homage (perhaps a bit too obviously) to some cinematic role models. Its greatest weakness, like so many first films, was a fear of taking risks, but this is understandable....

There’s no better blend of old-timey tradition and cool innovation than Odds N Friends, a cartoony, playful, brilliantly strange variety show staged at the Hungry Brain on the first Monday of each month. Skits, ventriloquism, video projection, and puppetry are all part of the mix. The shows often have a unifying theme such as “medical hoaxes” or “hunting,” but the creators of Odds N Friends (the team behind everythingisterrible.com plus puppeteer Davey K) aren’t ones for conventional storytelling....

The Reader’s Choice: Robbie Fulks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute to say Robbie Fulks is the best country artist in Chicago—what bothers me is that the title seems so inadequate. I could also easily nominate him as the city’s best rock act—his 1998 album Let’s Kill Saturday Night is an overlooked rock masterpiece. It’s been almost four years since Fulks released a studio album, but late last month he started selling a massive downloadable trove of MP3s on his Web site: 50 brand-new songs, most of them originals, collectively called 50-Vc....

Avec615 W. Randolph | 312-377-2002 F 7.6 | S 7.7 | A 6.9 | $$$ (13 reports) American Contemporary/Regional, Small Plates, Bar/Lounge | Breakfast: seven days; Lunch: Monday-Friday; Dinner: seven days | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 2, Thursday till midnight, Monday-Wednesday till 11 Cru Cafe & Wine Bar25 E. Delaware | 312-337-4001 For a wine bar—not to mention a wine bar specializing, for God’s sake, in cheese and chocolate—Eno is blessedly free of frills....

The 26th Chicago International Children’s Film Festival kicks off Thursday, October 22, at 6 PM with a gala reception and screening at Northwestern University’s Thorne Auditorium (375 E. Chicago); tickets are $60 for adults, $25 for children. It continues with screenings every Saturday and Sunday through November 1 at Facets Cinematheque (1517 W. Fullerton) and Bank of America Cinema (4901 W. Irving Park); tickets for these programs are $9, $6 for children....

In the spring of 2011, the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago took a bold step. Bucking historical precedent and a national trend, the esteemed professors and their teaching colleagues voted to unionize. “Stand up, sit down, Chicago is a union town” was the refrain. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The backdrop for this is the transformation American higher education has undergone over the last couple of decades....

Comedy demands a fixed perspective. If you can’t figure out where a joke is coming from, you’re not going to get it, no matter how good a sense of humor you have. All the great pioneers of American movie comedy operated from deeply held personal beliefs: the humanism of Charlie Chaplin, the modernism of Buster Keaton, the anarchy of the Marx Brothers, and the misanthropy of W.C. Fields were like natural springs that never ran dry, creating a context that followed them from film to film....

Blue Havana Chicago 3240 N. Clark 773-242-8262 bluehavanachicago.com @BlueHavanaCigar Old Town School Music Store Various locations 773-751-3398 www.oldtownschool.org/musicstore @oldtownschool Runner-Up Chicago Music Exchange Urban Pooch Canine Life Center 4501 N. Ravenswood 773-942-6445 urbanpooch.com @URBANPOOCH Runner-Up Urban Pooch Training and Fitness Center Jackie Luxem, @properties The Goldstein Group www.atproperties.com/agents/5509/jackie-luxem Runner-Up Jennifer Johnson, @properties Women & Children First 5233 N. Clark 773-769-9299 www.womenandchildrenfirst.com @wcfbook Runner-Up The Book Cellar Stile.Foto.Cibo stilefotocibo.com Runner-Up SWGRUS...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Patricia Wells signs her book, cowritten with her husband, Walter, We’ve Always Had Paris . . . and Provence: A Scrapbook of Our Life in France, Thursday from 4-5 PM at a free wine and cheese reception at the Book Cellar. She’ll then move on to Kendall College, where she and her husband will read at the American Institute of Wine & Food‘s four-course benefit dinner from 6 to 9 PM....

“Undoubtedly, Hello Kitty—as product, as logo, as design—is artistic expression.” Christine Yano makes that assertion in Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific, her new anthropological study of all things Hello Kitty, but it seems open to question. It’s true that Hello Kitty—the mouthless Japanese icon of kawaii (“cute,” more or less)—is an image, an artistic creation. But she’s not a product of cartoons or comic books, like Mickey Mouse or Snoopy....

Philip Montoro,Reader music editor Fanfare Ciocarlia at Summerdance The Roma know how to fucking party. The members of this indefatigable Romanian brass band warmed up their mouthpieces preshow with cigarettes in their free hands and ended their thrillingly rambunctious set down on the dance floor, playing shoulder-­to-shoulder with the sweaty, delirious crowd. So much dancing! And from those of us who didn’t know the traditional steps, so much lunatic jumping around!...

This debut show is not the one that Set a Spell Productions and Maryaska Productions planned. When they abruptly lost the rights to a script they’d worked on for almost a year, the five performers created this series of bittersweet scenes about young Chicago actors “not quite making it.” These autobiographical bits dealing with scheduling snafus, greedy agents, waiting on boors, and predatory directors could easily have succumbed to navel-gazing and in-jokes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A series of “mysterious underground booms” has startled residents of the small Wisconsin town of Clintonville a few times this week—once on Sunday, once on Monday, and once again early this morning. There is no explanation; the AP reports that, to no avail, “city officials have checked and rechecked methane levels at the local landfill, monitored water, sewer and gas lines, contacted the military about any exercises in the area, reviewed mining explosive permits and inspected the Pigeon River dam next to city hall....