What Else Is New Dawali Mediterranean Kitchen4911 N. Kedzie | 773-267-4200 For a long time I didn’t have the heart to file a report on this odd, dark, and claustrophobic little Ecuadoran-Japanese hybrid. It had the stink of death about it in its first perpetually empty couple of months, and I saw no reason to piss in the karmic waters about a place I was sure wouldn’t be around much longer....
Troll 2 Directed by Claudio Fragasso There’s also an element of empty spectacle at work here. The movies singled out for attention aren’t really the worst of the worst—those movies are so affectless they fade from memory immediately—but the movies that are bad in the most spectacular manner. Can it be a complete coincidence that The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the first bad movie to find an adoring cult audience, came out three months after Jaws, the movie that established the template for the mindless summer blockbuster?...
Mark Chrisler’s heady mix of history, myth, and hallucination gives this year’s New Play festival at Prop Thtr its raison d’etre. Three trios of despairing characters from different historical periods face existential crises. Roman soldiers Longinus, Quintus, and Cabral are killing time while Christ dies (offstage); 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, his assistant Johannes Kepler, and Tycho’s clairvoyant dwarf servant ponder Tycho’s legacy as he faces imminent death; and present-day nobodies Nicholas, Michael, and Ianthe are caught in a potentially dangerous love triangle....
Given Lookingglass Theatre Company’s twin penchants for adapting myths and performing aerial acrobatics, I’m surprised the troupe took this long to get around to Icarus and his fatal flight. But I’m glad they waited: a younger, brasher Lookingglass might not have been able to encompass the sad, wise, deeply moving interpretation offered here by writer-director David Catlin. The title notwithstanding, Catlin’s version actually centers on Icarus’s father, the legendary architect and inventor Daedalus....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the recent Chicago-area bands who’ve found success while their members were still of high school age, the ones that spring to mind have mostly had fairly retro sounds (Redwalls, Smith Westerns), but Les Rhinocéros—an instrumental group from Washington, D.C., who make their Chicago debut on Wednesday at Township—are a whole other can of worms. Last year they released their self-titled debut on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and in style as well as skill level it sure doesn’t sound like the kind of stuff I’d expect from high schoolers (they’ve graduated since recording it in December 2009)....
Our picks for:Thursday and Friday • Saturday • Sunday • The aftershows Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past few years most of the Jazz Fest’s marquee names have played on Saturday and Sunday—that is, the remaining Grant Park days—and that’s the case in 2012 as well. But the music on Thursday and Friday, hosted by the Cultural Center, Roosevelt University, and Millennium Park, is nothing to sneeze at—Friday at the Pritzker Pavilion, octogenarian drummer Roy Haynes leads a band that would be a major attraction on any stage and any day of the week....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the more striking aspects of Blue Is the Warmest Color, which I caught up with only recently, is that for the movie’s second half, lead actress Adèle Exarchopoulos is playing a character notably older than herself. Exarchopoulos, who’s still in her teens and looks it, is called upon to play at such adult experiences as cohabitation and starting a career....
Leor Galil Mister Lies South by Southwest—the renowned conference-slash-festival behemoth dedicated to music, film, and interactive technology that takes over Austin (and the Internet) every March—started late last week, but the music portion is just getting into full swing. I’ll be covering the festival along with Miles Raymer, dropping blog posts through the fest’s end on Saturday night (and then some), and today I hit the ground to get my first taste of SXSW and Austin....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I usually have way too many new things to listen to or assignments that require me to dig deep into the work of a specific artist to spend much time listening to the radio. But if I had more, I’d have my dial (or more accurately, my browser) permanently set to WFMU, the brilliant freeform station in northern New Jersey....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you haven’t made it to River East to see Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (a movie I can’t stop writing about), you don’t have much time left: it ends its run tomorrow afternoon. On the bright side, Hui’s directed about two dozen other features, and quite a few are available for rental. The other day I found that Facets Multimedia had a VHS copy of her Zodiac Killers, a 1991 feature cowritten by Nien-Jen Wu, a major figure of the Taiwanese New Wave who also wrote for Edward Yang (That Day, On the Beach) and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (A City of Sadness, The Puppet Master)....
Back in 2007, when Mayor Daley was unveiling his Olympic plans, he promised the games would bring a swimming pool to the west side. The Olympic committee’s plans for the west side have always been a work in progress. Originally the mayor proposed building the aquatic center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but the plans were changed to appease west-side alderman Ed Smith. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Lately has been a period of reoccurring ideas and terms. Right before my birthday last winter I was told by my personal astrologer (I call him that because he loves talking about star alignment and such and I know jack shit about it but really he is no astrologer although you could call him and he would be happy to drop some knowledge if you like) that I was entering a period in my life that is referred to by people who love reading horoscopes and basing things on star formations as Saturn’s Return....
Unlike the wimps here in Chicago, who take whatever beating the mayor offers and ask for more, the residents of Lake County don’t mess around. They don’t want Daley and his Olympics team paving over their forest preserve and they weren’t afraid to say so. They created an organization (Voters for Preservation) and a Web site, besieged the International Olympic Committee with letters and e-mail of opposition, and, perhaps most significant, put up candidates to run against Lake County Forest Preserve board members who had voted for the Equestrian Center....
If you believe the problem with WBEZ is that experts talking and you lapping up their wisdom is the wrong way to program a radio station, the good news is that the WBEZ’s managers agree with you. The news that’s not so good is that this epiphany is driven by falling revenues. “The traditional WBEZ format is that lots of highly educated people talked about their specialties. That’s over. That was my understanding of the meeting....
A couple years ago Matt Kimmel and Daniel Smith launched a wildly ambitious experimental-music festival called Neon Marshmallow, cramming more than 90 acts onto two stages at the Viaduct Theatre in just three days. They returned with a scaled-down but more focused version at the Empty Bottle last summer (and a New York festival in October), and Kimmel says they’re working on a third Chicago installment. More important, Kimmel has continued to book interesting underground music year-round....
Joe’s on Broadway 3563 N. Broadway 773-528-1054 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next time you’re in Boys Town hoping to grab a beer without having to be screened for fabulousness, slum it on over to Joe’s. You’ll find no methed-out musclemen or liquored-up twinks here—just unglamourous neighborhood regulars, dumpy sports fans, and crumpled career alcoholics, none of whom can be bothered to check out your junk....
crude written and directed by Joe Berlinger Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chevron has argued that it’s being targeted because it has deep pockets, yet as Crude makes clear, those deep pockets are ultimately its best defense. Conferring with Kohn in Philadelphia, Donziger admits that the plaintiffs are $100,000 in the red and points out—for the cameras, obviously, since Kohn would understand this already—that “part of Texaco’s strategy is to bankrupt us....
“Welcome to the city of collective bargaining” is how American Association of University Professors president Cary Nelson opened his remarks at an AAUP meeting at the Crowne Plaza Chicago Metro last Saturday. The response from the audience was celebratory: the University of Illinois at Chicago faculty had made history the day before by handing the Labor Relations Board enough signed authorization cards to establish a union there. UIC is the first large public research university in the state to unionize its faculty, and the first of its size and stature in the country to do so in the last decade....
Metropolis Coffee Company 3123 N. Broadway Marketing coffee this way is new, says Connie Blumhardt, publisher of the trade magazine Roast. Until recently she’d never heard anyone explicitly sell coffee as seasonal. (She knows both local roasters well: Roast named Intelligentsia its 2007 large roaster of the year and gave Metropolis the award in the microroaster category.) “Historically the way coffee’s been sold has been more like cereal,” says Doug Zell, Intelligentsia’s founder....
I caught Oprah this morning, yeah, I know, but Price Is Right wasn’t on yet and the remote was somewhere not in the general vicinity of the stove and I was busy with breakfast. Plus I had music playing really loud, the computer on, and was also trying to answer some messages on my phone so there was a lot of action happening in the kitchen. I didn’t notice the news was over and Oprah had started so as I finished with my multi-tasking I walked over to flip the channel when all of a sudden she got all serious....
