As Stalin supposedly said, one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic. Reports of layoffs at Sun-Times Media have been coming fast and furious, yet I haven’t received a single anguished missive about the company’s recent decision to shut down the entire chain of 11 Sun weeklies in the western suburbs. The one mention of it was a passing detail in an e-mail to me about suburban sports coverage....
David Twohy is on something of a roll. His last film, the psychological thriller A Perfect Getaway, arrived to little fanfare in 2009 but was one of the better recent examples of the genre and easily his most accomplished work to date. For his follow-up, Twohy logs another chapter in his Riddick franchise, a sci-fi saga that began with Pitch Black (2000), continued with The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), and returns once more with Riddick....
QThis question comes from a point of real frustration. I’m a 26-year-old straight guy. Due to my being overweight, awkward, and generally unable to attract women I’m actually interested in, I’ve only been sexually intimate with prostitutes and women of low caliber. I have never been able to sustain an erection during intercourse. I have climaxed during oral sex or hand jobs, but I’m not physically accustomed to getting off with anything but my own hand....
I know, I know—I should have already weighed in on the gazillion-dollar tax break Christmas present the state gave the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last month. After which Mayor Emanuel sent out a press release hailing the tax break as “reform.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So . . . the state that’s already tens of billions of dollars in debt now has to find new and creative ways to make up for the hundreds of millions of tax dollars it won’t be getting from CME....
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Directed by Werner Herzog | Written by William Finkelstein Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know plenty of people who like Bad Lieutenant, but I don’t know many who take it at face value. Keitel’s cop—referred to only as “the lieutenant”—is a fallen Catholic assigned to investigate the brutal rape of a nun inside a church. As shot by Ferrara, the attack is a confused cocktail of prurience and spiritual outrage....
Old Town Strawdog Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Deb Mell believes that one person can make a difference,” her campaign Web site proclaims. “Growing up in a family dedicated to serving others, Deb has witnessed firsthand the positive impact one person can make.” Family values and the power of the individual are two cornerstones of our culture, but they don’t always go hand in hand....
As a token of his appreciation for the voters of Chicago—or at least the growing segment that favors an elected school board—Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his allies on the City Council recently offered an early Christmas gift: a big, fat middle finger to the face. That’s not to be confused with B-3, which is what the mayor affectionately nicknamed schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the woman he brought in from Detroit to be the genial face on his cuts and closings....
KID SISTER ULTRAVIOLET (DOWNTOWN) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kid Sister (MySpace) just released her long-delayed debut, Ultraviolet (on Downtown, a corporate indie distributed by Universal and Atlantic), and throughout the album she engages this idiom but also undermines it—she puts it on and takes it off like a costume. Like Lily Allen’s recent It’s Not Me, It’s You, it’s an album that’s in part about her newfound fame and fabulousness, but Kid Sister hasn’t bought in all the way....
Local noise-rock band Den started with a fight. In summer 2010 vocalist Adam Harris, drummer Ian Piirtola, and bassist Ray Keenan played in a spastic hardcore four-piece called Neurons with guitarist Cole Mason. Creative differences between Mason and the rest of the group had started to bleed over into interpersonal tension, and on July 31, while they were driving to play a DIY show on the north side, something finally snapped....
For a century and a half there weren’t any wild cougars in Illinois, but the cougar shot to death by police in Roscoe Village last month was the third one discovered here in the last decade. The first, a four-to-six-year-old male, was hit by a train in Randolph County in 2000. The second was found by a bow hunter in the fall of 2004 not far from the Quad Cities. Within hours of the Roscoe Village incident, police were investigating another possible sighting near the Skokie Lagoons....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the past 25 years, I have taught hundreds of medical students the four classic steps in the physical examination: inspect, palpate, percuss, and auscultate. Their eyes sparkle. This is the way they imagined themselves: semioticians at the bedside, reading the signs to find the varmint in the patient’s body. Alas, a shock awaits the students when they finally arrive on the wards in the third year of medical school, their pockets laden with reflex hammers, tuning forks, ophthalmoscopes, otoscopes, penlights, and stethoscopes, only to discover that the ebb and flow of the modern hospital centers on MRIs, CAT scans, echocardiograms, angiograms, and myriad lab tests....
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS & 2 DAYS WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CRISTIAN MUNGIUWITH ANAMARIA MARINCA, LAURA VASILIU, VLAD IVANOV, AND ALEX POTOCEAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The shot lasts longer than you expect, and that sort of patience is just one way the director expresses his trust in the audience. There’s no music telling you what to feel; there’s almost no camera movement telling you where to look....
By Lynn Becker As the great hotels and apartment blocks deteriorated in the 1950s, however, apartments were subdivided, maintenance was deferred, and rents were lowered. Uptown became a refuge for the city’s dispossessed–the poor and elderly, the immigrants, and the mentally ill. Today those residents and gentrifying newcomers share an uneasy cohabitation. Moving down Broadway, Wilson Avenue is like an economic equator: the poor gravitate to the south, the upwardly mobile to the north....
The BikeSpike Arriving at the spot where you know you locked your bike and discovering it’s not there anymore is one of the worst feelings in the world. It’s happened to me twice in the past two years, and as evidenced by all the entries in the Chicago Stolen Bike Registry, to thousands of other Chicagoans as well. Most thefts aren’t really preventable; angle grinders can get through even the best U-locks in just a few minutes (apparently even if you catch someone in the process of stealing your bike there may not be much you can do)....
Tigerlilie Salon 4755 N. Lincoln 773-506-7870 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve ever sighed over old photos featuring flappers with lacquered marcel waves or a black-and-white movie featuring a straight-talking heroine in a complicated rolled do, you’ve probably also lamented the rise of wash-and-wear hair. But the days of the wash-and-set live again at Tigerlilie Salon, where owners Antje Kastner and Angelica Rivera practice their top-notch vintage hair-wrangling skills on burlesque performers, actors for film and stage, and regular folks looking for something special....
September Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story A musical bio about pop music pioneer Buddy Holly. aPreviews through 9/18, Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, $40-$50. Opens 9/19, 8 PM. Through 11/2: Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 PM and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place, 175 E....
Q I was recently advised to begin reading your column by my therapist. I am a 21-year-old male and a senior at an Ivy League school. Despite my academic success, I’ve battled a lot of stuff in the past few years: anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and porn addiction. It’s quite a load of shit to try to wade through, but I honestly feel I’m getting better. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
When Graham Parker declares “I discovered America” on the opening track of his barn-burning new album, he does so with the fervor of a newly minted citizen who knows his adopted land better, and loves it more fiercely, than a lot of the natives. Clearly the 56-year-old English expat has been rejuvenated by his time on the anything-but-complacent Bloodshot roster: Don’t Tell Columbus is a little masterpiece of snarling intensity and wry reflection, and Parker’s singing displays a wide Dylan-esque streak that grounds his disappointed romanticism firmly in the pop-pundit tradition....
Kevin Warwick, Reader associate editor Protomartyr, “Ypsilanti” What’s not to love about Detroit’s Protomartyr? Nihilistic to their core—their 2012 debut is titled No Passion All Technique—they’re fronted by Joe Casey, a slurring character who dresses like a middle-aged, out-of-work accountant, hand in pocket like he’s barely scrounging for a nickel to tip the shoe-shine kid. “Ypsilanti” is a true punk single, with Casey bouncing his slovenly Mark E. Smith-style vocals along with the chorus’s pulsing beat and the casually driving guitar....
The last time a Park District advisory council weighed in on the Olympics, it didn’t come down on the side Mayor Daley wanted. That was back in July, when the Jackson Park Advisory Council passed a resolution against the city’s proposal to build a temporary 20,000-seat field hockey arena in the south lakefront park, part of its bid for the 2016 Olympics. The Park District is essentially an extension of City Hall....
