Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Saturday night Ronny’s hosts a killer bill with two of the less hyped acts on Drag City Records. While I’d never say that the label has become more commercial during its august history, it’s definitely broadened its scope—and there aren’t many other imprints that release such a wide range of music while privileging no one type over another....
A couple weeks ago, as word broke that Detroit was declaring bankruptcy, I took a drive through Englewood. Detroit’s implosion didn’t just happen—there were a lot of contributing factors. Like global economics and the decline of the auto industry. Or white flight. Or bad planning. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The current freight yard runs from 47th to 55th, roughly between Wallace and Eggleston....
QSo I was innocently browsing the personal ads on Craigslist and saw one from a dude who was looking to try “saline balls” for the first time. Having no idea what this was, I googled it. Even worse, I google-imaged it. I pride myself on being unshockable, but I was completely and utterly mortified at what I saw. With that said, my copious Internet searching failed to yield the answers to the basic/most important questions regarding saline balls: (1) What is the procedure/process for salining one’s balls?...
QI’m a 28-year-old gay man living in a major east-coast city. I recently connected with a guy on a vanilla dating website, and we are quickly developing a real interest in each other. After talking online for a bit, we exchanged numbers. Our first conversation was through text messages for the better part of six hours. The next night we talked over the phone for an hour or two. And the third consecutive night was our first date....
When I was a kid, the public library in my hometown of Minneapolis had a real Egyptian mummy, a 2,000-year-old woman. Displayed in a glass case, partially unwrapped, she was small (about my ten-year-old size), shriveled, and dark brown. A card said her elaborately decorated coffin revealed that she was Lady Teshat; she’d died as a teenager and, as part of the mummification process, her brains had been pulled out through her nose....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the problems I’ve run into while trying to celebrate Halloween this year, besides finding a costume (my ideas make Matt Carmichael’s lame costume look pretty decent), is picking a good song to capture the, uh, spirit. “Monster Mash” is too cliche. John Carpenter‘s theme from Halloween? Too obvious. A Misfits number is a little too easy. But a Rob Crow spin on a Misfits tune?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in 2007, when New York label DFA was releasing some of its strongest material, it dropped the self-titled LP of a band called Shocking Pinks. With their lo-fi treatment of slurred, romantic noise-rock, the group sounded like early My Bloody Valentine merged with the Clean—minus either band’s penchant for maximum distortion via either engulfing levels of feedback (the former) or cheap recording techniques (the latter)....
The Lake County Forest Preserve must be magicians if they can put all that cement and steel into a 90-acre field that is now home to many wild creatures and not disturb the wildlife. The most prominent are the threatened sandhill cranes. In 2004 the IDNR [Illinois Department of Natural Resources] recommended they shut down a model airplane field that was harassing the cranes in their primary feeding ground, the west cornfield....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to discover the Republicans were running the Illinois senate once again, except that no one could get into the chamber so they had to meet out on the lawn. When political reform gets preached in Illinois, the message is that other places have mastered democracy with dignity, so why not here? The problem with that is that democracy is constantly disgracing itself....
“I’ll remember the food this time,” said the friend I brought to the Southern, who’d accompanied me when I reviewed this Wicker Park restaurant’s previous incarnation, Chaise Lounge. Swanky Chaise was questionably upscale: the well-dressed young things drawn to the scene on the upper deck or the spacious patio for cocktails seemed unlikely to drop $30 on forgettable entrees. The Southern’s slightly refined Dixie-inspired fare in a casual bar setting is a much better platform for chef Cary Taylor’s talents....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was surprised to see that the liner notes for the recent solo album by Metric singer Emily Haines—who plays tonight at the Lakeshore—were written by the great British songwriter and singer Robert Wyatt, a one-time member of Soft Machine and a solo artist of rare sensitivity, intelligence, and beauty. Even though I wasn’t particularly impressed by the record, who was I to doubt Wyatt’s endorsement?...
For 25 years, Emily Stein has earned her daily bread teaching dance—currently at the rate of a dozen ballet classes a week. That’s not uncommon, but no other choreographer I know has crafted her experience into a thoughtful, moving, fun evening-length show. In the promenade-style Secret Experiments in Ballet #2, 14 dancers take over one of Chicago’s preeminent studio and classroom buildings. At each performance, the audience (limited to about 40 people)will be divided in two for the first three sections—set in a dressing room, hallway, and lounge—then reunited for the last three, performed in the spacious studios....
September sunday 9/14 Jamie Kaler aThrough 9/18, Zanies, 1548 N. Wells, 312-337-4027 or chicago.zanies.com, $25. monday 9/22 Christian Finnegan aThrough 9/27, Lakeshore Theater, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-472-3492 or lakeshoretheater.com, $15. wednesday 10/1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pablo Francisco Remember that actor in the Police Academy movies who did all the sound effects? That wasn’t Pablo Francisco (it was Michael Winslow, who was recently in a GEICO commercial), but Francisco’s voice talent is that good....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 1. We still don’t have access to the original version of John Cassavetes’ Shadows after critic Ray Carney tracked down the only existing print and showed a video of it twice at the Rotterdam Film Festival in early 2004. I was lucky enough to see it at the time, and even though I regard it more as a fascinating and historically important curiosity than as a lost masterpiece, I agree with Carney, and disagree with Cassavetes’ widow, Gena Rowlands, that it should be available to the general public....
With each passing day it becomes more apparent to me that there are two public school systems in Chicago: the imaginary one in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s press releases and pronouncements and the other one that’s, you know, real. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s a lot more complicated, as real worlds tend to be. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are neighborhood schools in poor neighborhoods, which are different from neighborhood schools in gentrifying neighborhoods, which are different from magnet schools that enroll kids from all over the city....
Anteprima Owner Marty Fosse ran the front of the house at Spiaggia at one time, and while Anteprima is a far cry from that rarefied temple of la cucina Italiana, his neighborhood place has many virtues. A long list of antipasti leads the menu, which changes frequently, a few of them very inexpensive and a few rather special, like soft veal meatballs in a sweet saffron-tomato sauce. My table’s orders of orecchiette with lamb sausage and bitter greens arrived merely warm and a little gummy, but an order of spaghetti with fava beans was damn near perfect....
The world of Chicago writer Joe Meno is strange and often enchanting. Best known for his short stories and novels, Meno has written a play, Star Witness, that’s getting a likable first production from the House Theatre of Chicago (which also staged his The Boy Detective Fails in 2006). But neither Meno nor director Sean Graney has figured out how to unleash all the fascinating weirdness the script has to offer....
Too Much Drama J.R. Jones replies: Yes, there are plenty of issues with transperancy of spending and in the approval process. The JRB and CDC are a joke. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, TIFs actually make development more equitable. Yes, more equitable. Why? This is because the improvements that they pay for COME FROM THE AREA BEING taxed! So increased tax increment used to finance downtown improvements comes from ....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One day after Columbia College presents three short films by Columbia photography professor Peter Thompson, the campus plays host to a program of works by Doug Ischar, a multimedia artist and a professor of photography at UIC. The program, presented by Chicago Filmmakers, takes place ThursdayFriday at 7:30 PM at 623 S. Wabash. It features four of Ischar’s recent works, culminating with the premiere of his latest, Tristes Tarzan....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Out of print for several years, Richard Lester’s grand-scale comedy How I Won the War (1967) is available on DVD again courtesy of the MGM Archive Collection (Facets has had it for rent for a couple of weeks). War may be remembered mainly for John Lennon’s involvement—the movie provided him with the circle-frame glasses that became central to his image—despite the fact that he plays only a supporting character....
