Superior Donuts Steppenwolf Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good advice: don’t worry about writing another masterpiece, just write something. And it looks like Letts took it. Coming down off the exertion of creating a three-hour, O’Neillian knock-down-drag-out like August: Osage County—knowing he’d added a major piece of work to his credits, even if the Pulitzer committee hadn’t yet found out at that point—he just started writing something....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The vibraphone remains a staple in jazz music, yet within the genre it’s ultimately not a particularly popular instrument. Chicago, for instance, can only boast a handful of serious full-time players—Jason Adasiewicz, Justin Thomas, and Jim Cooper are the ones that spring to mind, and Cooper hasn’t lived in town since the late 90s. Plenty of percussionists include the instrument within their arsenal, but it’s only a part, not the main battery; Adasiewicz and Thomas are part of a relatively recent wave of new voices on the instrument that also includes Chris Dingman, Matt Moran, Warren Wolf, and James Westfall....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story of Minnie Riperton’s life is all kinds of frustrating. Although she possessed one of the most shockingly beautiful voices in the history of pop music—a tender and supple thing that somehow spanned a physically impressive five-octave range—there were only a few years where she was alive and the world at large cared much at all. The Chicago-based psych-pop-rock-soul outfit Rotary Connection that she fronted early in her career wasn’t the commercial A-bomb that Marshall Chess presumably was hoping for when he put it together, and her 1970 solo debut, Come to My Garden, was, upon its release, a straight-up flop....
Martyl Langsdorf’s original Doomsday Clock design. The Doomsday Clock, I might as well admit, scared the shit out of me when I first heard about it. That was in 1988 when I was twelve and it had just been announced that the clock had been pushed back to six minutes to midnight, midnight being humanity’s ultimate annihilation. Ironically, six minutes to midnight was an improvement—in 1984, the clock had been set at a perilous three minutes to midnight—but still, the idea that the amount of time left till the destruction of the world was something that could be calculated was absolutely terrifying....
Q I was recently told that I’m being puritanical and self-righteous because I can’t get over the fact that my partner spends a good deal of time seeking out pictures of very young girls to masturbate to. Nothing illegal, he says, but still . . . Your partner is chock full o’ shit, HSITIMBACM, as my own experiences with porn demonstrate. I’ve been consuming gay porn for 20-plus years now, and I have yet to “escalate” to YouTube videos of ten-year-old boys doing whatever it is ten-year-old boys do in the videos they upload to YouTube....
Q I’ve been married for 16 years and have three children. My marriage isn’t the best, nor is the sex. I’ve strayed many times, and it’s always been with women—I love women and I love having sex with women. However, for years I have had a fantasy about being with a transsexual. I recently paid to be with a T-girl escort. She was flipping gorgeous. She had a dick, sure, but she was the hottest fucking girl I have ever seen—absolutely gorgeous....
DUBLIN CAROL Steppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The focus of the play is John Plunkett, a middle-aged undertaker’s assistant in present-day Dublin. It’s Christmas Eve, and John has just presided over a funeral. Since his employer is sick in the hospital, John has had to take charge of the business—not an easy thing for a guy who has problems handling responsibility—so he’s hired his boss’s 20-year-old nephew, Mark (Stephen Louis Grush), to lend a hand graveside....
Commenting on the recent 50 Cent/Cam’ron beef, hip-hop historian Ethan Brown points out a few pieces of information that lend credence to the long-running “50 is a snitch” campaign, which has begun picking up a little more heat in the wake of the new feud. Brown seemed to have put some heavy lifting into the research for his book, Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler, and he probably knows more about the comingling of the music industry and the crack trade—and the real life story of Curtis Jackson—than anyone not actually involved in it, so I consider him a trustworthy source of info....
Libby Fischer Hellmann didn’t come to Chicago to write mysteries. When she wheeled her Corvair Monza off the Skyway, headed north, and hit Lake Shore Drive for the first time 30 years ago, the D.C. native had spent eight years in broadcast journalism on the east coast, including a stint with PBS’s McNeil/Lehrer Report. Burnout had led her to quit her last broadcast job, as a night desk editor with NBC News, and she’d come here to work for public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller....
Check out our photos and video recap of the festival after its third and final day. See our previews and photo/video recaps of bands playing on: Friday · Saturday · Afterparties Lollapalooza main » Palma Violets1:00-1:45Bud Light Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Angel Haze2:00-3:00Perry’s Their swampy metal beginnings notwithstanding, Baroness continue moving further into psych-influenced hard rock—evidenced by the stoner edge and proggy, delay-treated guitar of 2009’s Blue Record and last year’s supremely melodic Yellow & Green (and by this Lollapalooza slot)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week in San Francisco, I made four separate trips to the Blue Bottle Coffee Company trying to get a pot of mud made in the Mint Plaza cafe’s $20,000 coffee maker. For various reasons the dedicated barista that operates the siphon bar wasn’t around on my first three attempts, but I finally managed to get one a mere half hour before I was due to leave for the airport....
“What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry uplike a raisin in the sun? Lord knows our current economic crisis festers and stinks, so conditions on the ground are ripe for a revival—and the indispensable Amy Morton has directed a thoroughly engaging one for Steppenwolf. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Her Teach, the would-be cat burglar who can’t keep track of his own hat, is played with flawless elan by Tracy Letts, the most significant playwright to come out of Chicago since Mamet....
For our cover story on Robert Ryan, see J.R. Jones’s The Actor’s Letter: A reminiscence from film noir icon Robert Ryan, newly unearthed by his daughter, sheds light on his Chicago childhood – and his family’s connection to a tragic chapter in the city’s history. Ryan’s autobiographical letter is here. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crossfire (1948) Under contract to RKO, Ryan was usually cast as a young, heroic figure, but that changed with his chilling performance as Montgomery, the bullying, racist army sergeant in this socially conscious murder mystery by Edward Dmytryk....
Sonic Youth | DAYDREAM NATION (DELUXE EDITION) (GEFFEN) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this week, for the third time in 19 years, Daydream Nation was reissued, and the new version is a “deluxe” double-disc set with a whole disc of bonus tracks. Sonic Youth are admittedly an archivist band and the album is undeniably a classic, but what’s going to sell this reissue isn’t the remastering job or even the stuff from the vaults....
Intro | Friday | Sunday 1:45 PM The Dutchess & the Duke Last year’s She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke (Hardly Art) has become pretty much required listening for garage rockers on their “feelings of emotion” days, and with good reason. Over a sparse, folky backdrop—acoustic guitar, touches of percussion, occasional twangy, Brian Jones-y electric leads—Jesse Lortz and Kimberly Morrison sing memorable melodies in sweet, sad harmony, frequently sounding like a poppier, less antagonistic Dylan....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, founded in 2007, has never pretended to be comprehensive either geographically or stylistically (the majority of the performers play variations on postbop, which is “mainstream” to most ears), but it’s always presented what might be the best single-day opportunity to brush up Chicago’s jazz scene. The free multivenue event is consistently loaded with talent, but this year, under the hand of new director Kate Dumbleton, it’s even better....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Omnivorous Mike Sula profiles chef Brian Jupiter, a New Orleans native who at the new Noble Square barstaurant Frontier is smoking whole pigs, lambs, goats, and wild boars and featuring game dishes such as pulled boar sandwiches and elk shepherd’s pie (there’s a recipe for that here). The rustic western-themed sports bar—presided over by a stuffed black bear—also offers oysters, burgers made with Slagel Farms chuck custom-ground down the street at Rob Levitt’s Butcher & Larder, and whole grilled redfish inspired by Cochon, a restaurant in the Warehouse District of Jupiter’s hometown....
A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My sister and I were attacked when we were teenagers. A guy stopped his car and jumped out and started hitting her. I picked up a tree branch, and I ran over and hit him as hard as I could. She was screaming, and she ran to the house we were in front of....
“Have sports teams brought down America’s schools?” a post on the New Yorker blog asked Friday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I agree that our infatuation with high school sports is getting out of hand. Our little gladiators now are expected to develop themselves year-round—to lift weights in the offseason and play on travel squads through the summer. This can crowd out other extracurriculars: It can make it hard for an athlete to play an instrument, or give acting a try, or volunteer....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m going to begin a series of end-of-season “I told you so” posts by recalling how almost every writer and sports-talk radio host in town kept insisting this spring that the Cubs couldn’t win with Alfonso Soriano as leadoff man. (Give you one guess who I’m making the poster boy for that knee-jerk attitude.) You don’t hear that talk much anymore, do you?...
