David Teplica has Helen Brach’s sink. Apparently, one of the many things the candy heiress left behind when she disappeared in 1977 was an American art deco fixture in precisely the right style, vintage, and shade of white to go with the milky glass walls in one of the bathrooms at Teplica’s 98-year-old north-side mansion. He tried to get by with French deco porcelain at first, but the color was wrong....
What does “lo-fi” mean these days? There have been crappy-sounding recordings for as long as recording technology has existed, but “lo-fi” usually implies an aesthetic decision distinct from limitations of gear or skill. Dylan’s so-called basement tapes—a series of casual, ramshackle home recordings he made with the Band in 1967, widely bootlegged before a tidied-up selection saw formal release in ’75—are probably pop music’s first canonical example of lo-fi by design....
The flood of theatrical documentaries about the war on terror—Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Why We Fight (2005), The Ground Truth (2006), No End in Sight (2007), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Standard Operating Procedure (2008)—has slowed to a trickle since President Obama took office, which makes this uncompromising exposé from reporter Jeremy Scahill even more important. Best known for his book about Blackwater, Scahill turns his attention here to the little-known Joint Special Operations Command, which answers directly to the president and, the film asserts, is licensed to kill anyone, anytime....
Dr. Bruce Kraig: Well, we do have a definition in the book, which is, food served on the street! But it’s also food served in markets, so if you go to, say, Mexico, where there are many markets, inside are fondas, and we regard those as street food also, because it’s basically food on the go. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also, we thought street food should be food trucks, everything from the fancy ones you see now to ‘roach coaches’ that you see at factories all over the place....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “So Obama’s rate was 30 basis points better than the average. However, the amount of the loan and the nature of the property are not the only factors that determine a mortgage rate. Another major consideration is the creditworthiness of the borrower. According to current rate quotes from myFICO.com, a borrower with very good credit can expect a mortgage rate about 30 basis points better than someone with pretty good credit, and a borrower with excellent credit can expect about a 50 basis point discount....
Many of Chicago’s best galleries are run by artists out of small, converted domestic spaces. A few of these, like the Suburban and 65Grand, have been going strong for years, but most operate for only a season or two, until the money runs out or somebody moves away. Julius Caesar, which hung its first show in March 2008, deserves to make it into the first category. The gallery displays work in all kinds of media by artists at various points in their careers, using a variety of collaborative and curatorial approaches—although the anarchic art of the 1960s seems to be something of a touchstone....
Paul John Higgins Doughnut Vault has some new competition It’s easy to glaze over at talk of doughnuts being the new bacon, the new cupcake, the new hype-driven fill-in-the-blank whatever. Especially if you don’t much like doughnuts, glazed or otherwise. So when I heard about Firecakes Donuts, a new shop in River North, I rolled my eyes and went back to wishing I could start the day with a bagel from Reno....
The Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig began as 16 musicians from a merchant concert society organized in 1743, but its roots go back to Telemann and Bach. It also collaborated with Mozart and premiered major works by the likes of Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. Mendelssohn led the Gewandhaus in the first performance of Schumann’s First Symphony, and 166 years later the orchestra is bringing it to Symphony Center. This limited yet invigorating work is free of the emotional turbulence found in much of Schumann’s piano music, and it can sweep the listener away....
AP Photo/Seth Perlman Governor Quinn delivering his State of the Budget address to the General Assembly earlier this month For nine months, Governor Pat Quinn has been ducking Rob Wildeboer, criminal and legal affairs reporter for WBEZ. Wildeboer has reported relentlessly on a subject too often avoided: the quality of life and the rehabilitation programs—or lack of them—in Illinois’s overcrowded prisons. The governor’s press office has denied his requests to talk with Quinn....
We are in the middle of the Arizona desert, sometime near the end of the 19th century. A cavalry patrol is heading out to capture—and if necessary, kill—an Apache tribe that’s left the reservation and launched a raid on white settlements, stealing horses, murdering men, and raping women. Heading the patrol is an idealistic young lieutenant (Bruce Davison), the son of an east-coast pastor, who believes “it’s a lack of Christian feeling towards the Indians that’s the cause of our problems with them....
Kara Walker is known for her room-sized panoramas depicting scenes of racism, violence, and gender and power struggles. The panoramas are populated by life-size silhouettes, drawn by hand and cut out of black paper, that often portray stereotypical characters of the antebellum south. “The silhouette says a lot with very little information,” Walker has written, “but that’s also what the stereotype does.” By simultaneously flattening and exaggerating her characters, she highlights the reductive ways they’ve been perceived throughout history....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a great load of mystique surrounding improvisation. The long-form version in particular has its legends and its saints, its temples, commandments, and arcana based on the magic of spontaneous creation. Sometimes you’ve got to wonder whether that’s all just spin to keep the pews filled and the workshops running, the way it is in any religion. But then somebody goes and delivers a miracle....
A vintage train platform, tastefully given the Disney treatment. All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. John Kahrs, a veteran animator for Pixar, makes his directorial debut with this 2-D animation for the Walt Disney Studios, which evokes old-school Disney storytelling while exhibiting the lifelike detail that distinguishes Pixar’s output....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also terra incognita for at least one viewer, since I’m hardly familiar with this period ethnicity at all. Like an archaeological dig in a forgotten corner of the planet, where even the lowliest potsherd becomes a vehicle for transcendence, the rapt “illumination” of the gods, exploring cross-cultural mind-sets and ad hoc vizualizations that may never see the light of day again....
Barbecue Season Along with Lem’s and the Rib Joint, Barbara Ann’s forms one corner of an inverted triangle of south-side barbecue that the rest of the city would do well to study. Ribs and tips are quite good, but Barbara Ann’s turns out particularly excellent hot links. Fat and spiced with hints of sage and hot pepper, they have a coarse grind that proves an unmistakably direct relationship to pork, something not actually all that common in your garden-variety sausage....
Curious Theatre Branch presents two shows laden with delights. Jenny Magnus’s Room is an economical, impressionistic one-woman musical loosely organized around the themes of loss, middle age, and the nature of performance. Whimsical but grounded in genuine emotion, it features musically and lyrically innovative songs she wrote between 1985 and 2007, here given imaginative recorded accompaniment. In the sometimes inspired monologue Truck on a Roll, Beau O’Reilly brilliantly plays his own brilliant character, Truck Bloom, a broken-down, occasionally homeless alcoholic ex-pugilist straight out of Nelson Algren....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he was 19 he deserted his army post to chase a girl and ended up doing hard time (though he played for the prison soccer team and sang for the prison orchestra). Upon his release in 1964 he began singing professionally, and his career was marked by exploitation and excess–fly-by-night labels routinely took advantage of him, and his ostentatious spending sprees didn’t help matters either....
On March 10 the City Council approved a $15.4 million plan to turn the former Morris B. Sachs building—an iconic flatiron structure at the six-way intersection of Milwaukee, Diversey, and Kimball, currently owned by the city—into affordable housing for artists. The Hairpin Lofts, a project of Northbrook-based Brinshore Development and its nonprofit partner, the Lester and Rosalie Anixter Center, will get plenty of government funding: a $7 million contribution from the Fullerton/Milwaukee tax increment financing district, a $4 million “write down” the city’s taking on the building (which it purchased with TIF money), and $1....
On Sunday I was one of 20 bloated and increasingly desperate judges sequestered in an empty ballroom at the The Drake for Cochon 555, trying to evaluate over thirty five separate pork preparations–terrines, patés, ribs, rillettes, headcheese, carnitas, soups, doughnuts, sausages, porchettas, testa–arriving on tiny paper plates faster than we could finish them. Organized by Atlanta’s Taste Network, this was the seventh of ten traveling events that pit five local chefs against each other, each given a heritage pig and directed to make the most of it....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next week Milestone Film & Video will release a special DVD edition of On the Bowery (1957), Lionel Rogosin’s landmark film about skid row in Manhattan; check out our long review of the film and the documentary The Perfect Team, which chronicles the film’s innovative and demanding production. We’ve also got a recommended review of Rampart, a modern LAPD drama by Oren Moverman, and new capsules for Declaration of War, a French drama about the parents of a cancer-stricken boy; In Darkness, a true story of the Holocaust in Poland, directed by Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden); London River, a racial drama set in the wake of the 2005 terror bombings in the UK, directed by Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory, Outside the Law); Safe House, a Denzel Washington thriller in the Tony Scott vein; The Story of Lover’s Rock, a documentary about the eponymous British reggae label; This Means War, a comedy about dueling CIA agents by Charlie’s Angels director McG; and The Vow, a romance with Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams....
