I stumbled upon local MC ShowYouSuck a couple years ago, when Netherfriends main man Shawn Rosenblatt released an EP of songs using samples of Harry Nilsson titled simply Netherfriends Does Nilsson. Show appears on the final track, “Full of It Remix,” and two things struck me immediately: the dude’s playful, rubbery flow, which has a bit of a southern twang on the tune, and his references to Fugazi and Minor Threat....
Pasticceria Natalina 5406 N. Clark 773-989-0662 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When most Italian immigrants were settling along Grand Avenue or Taylor Street, Zarzour’s maternal grandparents left Palermo for Palos Heights, where her grandfather took a job as a hospital lab technician. Like many newcomers, they wanted their children to assimilate, but their isolation kept the family’s food traditions alive. “I think I got to learn more intricate recipes because they weren’t close to the delis and bakeries,” says Zarzour....
It was the fourth week of school—day 21, to be exact—when the kindergarten students of a veteran teacher I’ll call Donna Reed finally completed round one of their standardized tests. Perversely, the testing craze hits hardest on the kindergarten kids. There are four standardized tests two or three times a year. Apparently, it’s part of the larger education-reform goal of improving schools by making children hate them at an early age....
It was recently decided for me that, in order to address the increasingly turgid swamp of flesh that surrounds my bones, I would spend a two-week period abstaining from whiskey, ice cream, pasta, and most anything else that makes eating and drinking enjoyable. I’ve done this before. By the time you hit 14 days it doesn’t feel like such a big deal. But man, when you’re struggling through the first week you feel like you’re ten years younger—and living on a desert island....
A hundred years ago, Charlie Chaplin was the biggest film comedian in the United States. Drawing on the pantomime he’d mastered in the British music halls, the 25-year-old expatriate had pioneered a new style of slapstick comedy in American silent films, more leisurely and character based than the frantic action of the Keystone Cops, and moviegoers were enthralled. As Peter Ackroyd recounts in his new biography Chaplin: A Brief Life, Chaplin’s fame spread around the world in 1915, his character the Tramp becoming a beloved figure to some 300 million people....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA WITH LEIF OVE ANDSNES In the absence of Riccardo Muti, who fainted and fell from the podium during a rehearsal two weeks ago, fracturing multiple bones in his face and jaw, the CSO has scrambled for replacement conductors. The good news is that the ebullient Gianandrea Noseda takes the reins for this program, though with an unfortunate change away from the unique music of Edgard Varese. Most important, pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will still play Brahms’s glorious Piano Concerto no....
It’s a summer night in Oz Park and Michael Zernow, whom everyone here knows as “Frosti,” is undressed for action. Wearing nothing but black shorts, yellow sneakers, and a black skullcap, he stands on a two-inch-wide plank and prepares to run a precarious route on, over, and around the play lot equipment he’s using as an obstacle course. Frosti, 21, communicates regularly with his parkour pals over online forums, but just about every Wednesday evening the locals gather in Oz Park, near Lincoln and Halsted, which has all kinds of uneven ledges, benches, and wooden railings that suit their purposes....
When Saint Augustine wrote “I did not yet love, and I loved to love; I sought what I might love, in love with loving,” he was talking about his on-again-off-again relationship with the Almighty, and the occasional lapse into more earthly desires. Still, with not too big a stretch of the imagination, the phrase could also apply to a group of sexually awakening preps away at boarding school, the subject of Pamela Erens’s excellent second novel, The Virgins....
Joe Swanberg and Kate Lyn Sheil in Silver Bullets On Thursday at 7 PM, Doc Films continues its local filmmakers series with a “Joe and Kris Swanberg double feature,” with Joe’s Silver Bullets (2011) and Kris’s Empire Builder (2012) screening back-to-back. The pairing makes perfect sense: Bullets is something of a directorial self-portrait and Empire—directed by his wife and featuring him in the role of “the Husband”—offers another reflection. (Also neither movie has yet to receive a run at any Chicago theater....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I got to attend Block’s presentation of The Home and the World last night, which screened from a 35-millimeter print recently struck by the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center. The color photography looked extraordinary. Ray’s films are typically praised as great human dramas, but they also have a vivid, even sensual feel for texture. Compare the imposing alleyways of The Adversary with the inviting foliage of Days and Nights in the Forest with the opulent fantasy sequences of The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, which resemble block prints come to life....
Like any good-size music festival, Pitchfork doesn’t so much end each night as it does fracture into a vast number of postfestival events at venues throughout the city. Some are officially sanctioned, such as the Chromatics concert on Sat 7/14 at Lincoln Hall, which includes DJ sets by Vampire Weekend bassist Chris Baio and some Pitchfork staffers. Others are only loosely associated, and some position themselves as alternatives to the main event—most notably the fourth annual Bitchpork festival, whose noisy, anarchic programming ought to appeal to anyone who considers Pitchfork’s darlings too mannered....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Tuesday, German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk begin an eight-day residency at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, performing an album in its entirety each night, starting with 1974’s Autobahn and ending with 2003’s Tour de France. Tickets for individual shows were modestly priced at $25, but managed to sell out within seconds—and predictably, scalped tickets currently range from unreasonably expensive ($100-$200) to offensively expensive (over a grand)....
“The Film Prize Nobody Wants for a Subject Nobody Will Talk About” read the ad that Terra Nova Films placed in this year’s Chicago International Film Festival program book. Terra Nova is a 26-year-old Chicago-based distributor and producer of film and video that deals with the subject of aging. Development director Ed Menaker says the ad for its annual Silver Images Generations Award was “supposed to be a joke,” a wink at cultural denial of aging....
In nearly every current aldermanic race the incumbents and challengers are accusing each other of being soft on crime. James Cappleman, who’s running against Helen Shiller in the 46th Ward, wrote in a recent newsletter that Shiller “regards the persistent street crime, gang-related murders and international drug trafficking as facts of urban life that residents should simply get used to, or, in her words, ‘move to Lincoln Park.’” The moderator asked both candidates how they would work to ease tensions among the ethnic and racial groups in the ward....
This weekend the heart of Wicker Park will become a hotbed of vendors, nonprofits, and bands working toward a common goal: to promote an environmentally friendly lifestyle. The Green Music Fest runs Sat 6/23 and Sun 6/24 from noon to 10 PM on Damen between North and Schiller, with two stages of music—the North Stage (booked by House Call Entertainment) and the South Stage (booked by Big Creek Productions). Music starts at 12:30 PM on Saturday and 2:30 PM on Sunday....
The Holmes Brothers kick off their latest, State of Grace (Alligator), with a slyly camouflaged nod to their roots. “Smiling Face Hiding a Weeping Heart,” despite its rock-tinged arrangement, invokes Al Green: the meandering melody, the deceptively boxy funk cadence, the smoldering tension between carnal and spiritual. But Green, torn between his calling and his desires, often sounded wracked with anguish; the Holmes Brothers, no less bold in mixing the sacred and the secular, imbue everything they touch with fearless enthusiasm, from the lascivious “Gasoline Drawers” to the haunting dirge “I’ve Just Seen the Rock of Ages....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two deaths from the Chicago culinary community were announced, to general shock, over the weekend. The most shocking was the sudden death of bartender Jason Cevallos, who had just moved to Hong Kong for a job; the cause was said to be typhoid fever, caused by salmonella infection. Cevallos, who was about 35, was a veteran of the Aviary and the Office, part of the team that won a James Beard award this year for Outstanding Bar Program....
“Jane Fonda makes a triumphant return to the screen in this heartfelt and funny comedy,” reads a marketing blurb for Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, which opens this weekend at Landmark’s Century Centre. Hey, wait a minute—didn’t Fonda already make a triumphant return to the screen with Monster-in-Law (2005), followed by another triumphant return to the screen with Georgia Rule (2007)? How long do you have to be gone to make a triumphant return to the screen, and how triumphant can your return be when all three movies are duds?...
Leor Galil Kendrick Lamar Friday I made my first big rookie mistake while attending SXSW, which isn’t bad considering that by then I’d been running around Austin for two whole days: I showed up early at an out-of-the-way unofficial daylong party organized by music site Tiny Mix Tapes and experimental label Northern Spy. For some reason I got it in my head that it started at noon, but considering it was at an underground space—specifically a warehouse that used to be a sex-toy factory—I really should’ve known better....
Some ideas that sound boring may turn out to be genius. In 2011, choreographer Marie Chouinard decided to translate the poet-artist Henri Michaux’s Mouvements, a little book of vaguely figurative ink drawings, into dance—”word for word,” as Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s website puts it. The electrifying 35-minute result, Henri Michaux: Mouvements, is one-half of the Montreal troupe’s upcoming program. Rough, spiky, staccato dancing—accompanied by open mouths, occasional head banging, and Louis Dufort’s percussive score—liberates all the innate drama of Michaux’s tidy, sensitive little marks....
