Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are moments when Norway-born, Sweden-based singer Ane Brun seems a bit too in love with the swoops, dips, and warbles she can execute with her lovely voice, but at her best she’s got great pop instincts. Her latest album, It All Starts With One, has been out in Europe since the fall and will finally arrive in the States on May 1....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Believe it or not, cool shit comes out of Indianapolis. I know, it sounds crazy. I wasn’t ready to accept it either. I’ve played in the city twice on tour with absolutely the lowest expectations you could imagine, and was greeted with a small but energetic underground scene. One of Indianapolis’s standouts is Learner Dancer, a spacey psych band that blends flowery 60s tones with the mellowed-out-Sabbath vibe of contemporary psych giants Dead Meadow....
Bill James is back with a new spring baseball annual, The Bill James Gold Mine 2008. It’s not as exhaustive as his old Baseball Abstracts. Instead, the idea is to gather together interesting “nuggets” of information from his $3-a-month Bill James Online subscription Web site. James presents contradictory information on Alfonso Soriano, the Cubs’ leadoff man. James disses Soriano, and rightfully so, as a “30/30/30 man”: 30 homers, 30 steals, and 30 walks a season....
The low-budget feature Top of the Heap was released in 1972 by Fanfare Films, a distributor that specialized in exploitation movies like Born Losers and Execution Squad. Christopher St. John, the film’s writer, director, producer, and star, had played a supporting role in Shaft and acted in some soft-core porn films marketed primarily to black audiences. Given the histories of its distributor and auteur, American spectators likely assumed that Heap would be a run-of-the-mill blaxploitation flick—though, to be fair, a brief synopsis would seem to promise this too....
Welcome to the Chi, Mr. Superintendent. As I understand it, you’re everything mayor-elect Emanuel wants in a schools CEO—tough, brash, and eager to beat the crap out of teachers. Rock on! You see, in Chicago we’ve got this thing called the tax incrementing financing program, which diverts at least $250 million a year from the schools and turns it over to the mayor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it comes to being the big man at the school board, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want—closing schools, firing teachers, rewriting curriculum, doling out contracts to your favorite charters—so long as you don’t touch the TIFs....
The first thing you’re likely to notice when you do a web search for the Kitchen Chicago is its nominal similarity to Kitchen Chicago, the shared-use kitchen that incubated so many of our small food businesses over the last nine years. That’s the sort of tone-deaf oversight we’ve become accustomed to from out-of-town restaurateurs who parachute in without really understanding the local food scene. I suspect this primo real estate accounts for the price points—which don’t appear particularly elevated at first glance, until you get a sense of the rather light portioning on some dishes....
Dill Pickle Food Co-op 3039 W. Fullerton 773-252-2667 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s the best because it’s the only—its predecessor, the Hyde Park Co-op Market, went out of business in 2008. Four and a half years in the making, Dill Pickle finally opened its doors last December, and I must disclose that as member #183, I’m directly invested. I’ve even lured in a member or three while staffing the co-op’s tent at the Logan Square Farmers’ Market....
The odds aren’t great that you know the name “Lil Kemo.” If you don’t follow Chance the Rapper on Twitter, if you don’t keep up with the newest music video from south-side director DGainz or the latest dance clip from Wala Cam, if you don’t frequent mixtape site Datpiff or Chicago rap blog Fake Shore Drive, if you don’t spend much time on the west or south sides—in that case you’ve probably never heard of him....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before there were blogs, there was the Community Media Watch’s Newstips, which used to arrive in my (physical) mailbox on (physical) bright orange paper. Now they’re available to anyone who knows to visit their site, which is a good use of time if you like keeping way ahead of the MSM. This week we learn that the head of the Washington Park Advisory Committee, Cecelia Butler, is supporting its use in the Chicago 2016 Olympics — provided that there’s an ironclad “community benefits agreement” attached....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I haven’t watched much TV in the last decade. Around age 20 I became a habitual moviegoer, and after that I started losing interest in images designed for a small screen. (I continued to watch movies at home, however inferior the experience.) I understand that I’ve missed out on a golden age of U.S. television—and, thanks to DVD box sets, Netflix, and Hulu, I can catch up with the best programs whenever I want....
Challenged with Madras curry powder by Micah Melton of the Aviary, Graham Elliot Bistro bartender Dave Michalowski initially thought of doing a tiki-style cocktail. That changed once he got a whiff of the spice blend in full flower. His “awakening moment”? It smelled like maple syrup. The name of the drink comes from the last line of the sonnet “Prayer,” written by the 17th-century metaphysical poet George Herbert, a compatriot of John Donne....
Ross McElwee is a poet of memory and, on a larger scale, history: his classic documentary Sherman’s March (1986) began as a chronicle of the Union general’s devastating campaign through the Confederate south but eventually grew into a comic confessional about McElwee’s romantic misadventures as he was making the film. Photographic Memory operates on a similar trajectory, though in this case McElwee is old enough for both past and present to be drawn from his own life experience....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A Conversation wiith Rocco Landesman,” hosted by the MacArthur Foundation, featured an introduction by the city’s cultural affairs queen bee, Lois Weisberg, but offered little more than the same line we’ve been hearing for a decade or more from organizations like Arts Alliance Illinois: art is good for the economy. Spiffy in an ice cream suit and shiny aqua tie, Landesman broke the ice by confessing that as a University of Wisconsin undergrad he’d become acquainted with Chicago through its parks—Arlington, Sportsman’s, and Hawthorne....
people Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If anyone’s been groomed to take on this challenge, it’s Kyle DeSantis. Now 30, he’s the scion of a long-established local showbiz clan. His grandfather and mentor, Tony DeSantis, founded the Drury Lane chain of suburban dinner theaters, and Kyle—raised by his grandparents following the death of his mother—spent his teen years doing everything from selling tickets to managing the catering and convention operations....
In this installment of our weekly chef challenge, Phillip Foss of the Meatyballs Mobile food truck takes on freeze-dried saffron. Freeze-dried saffron tastes just like regular saffron, a red-orange spice from southwest Asia. It’s actually the dried stigma of the saffron crocus, and since each flower has only three stigmas, a pound of saffron can require up to 75,000 blossoms. The threads are usually steeped; freeze-drying makes that unnecessary. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Ottavia Piccolo plays the title character in Claude Sautet’s Mado Claude Sautet’s Max et les Ferrailleurs, playing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, is a fascinating hybrid of pulpy crime fiction and moral dramas. If you’re looking for more of the same—and haven’t exhausted Claude Chabrol’s massive body of work—I’d recommend Mado, which Sautet made a few years later. The film shares a number of strengths with Max: an impressive lead performance from Michel Piccoli, an engrossing depiction of complex legal procedures, plenty of sex appeal, and a plot that snakes unpredictably from one quiet revelation to another....
White Noise Royal George Theatre center But this new show, behind which Whoopi Goldberg has put her cash and cachet, recovers from its ridiculously miscalculated opening. To some extent, at least. Written by Matte O’Brien, with music and lyrics by Joe Shane and twin brothers Robert and Steven Morris, White Noise is problematic in many, many ways. One thing it isn’t, though, is a Mel Brooks-style joke—inadvertent or otherwise. In fact, it’s so serious that the press kit comes with a study guide on hate speech, prepared by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project....
You can read the history of Chicago in the buildings of the South Loop. They show in their bones the successive identities the area has taken on since the Great Fire of 1871: enclave for the city’s super-rich, great rail center, manufacturing district, publishing and printing hub, crowded slums welcoming African-Americans of the Great Migration, and the gentrifying boomtown. Though many of the mansions and industrial buildings have been torn down, a wealth of interesting structures endures....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a vinyl-and-download-only release (if you buy the LP you get a download code, of course), and Miles tells me that the album’s in stock (or will be soon) at Laurie’s Planet of Sound, all Reckless locations, and Permanent Records. The release party is Friday at Metro, with Thomas Function, Davila 666, and the Stranger Waves. The Mannequin Men set will include visuals by friends of the band from Ann Arbor–the folks who run the Bang!...
In 1998 the then-itinerant Lookingglass Theatre Company opened a new show, Metamorphoses, at the now-defunct Ivanhoe Theatre. Written and directed by Mary Zimmerman, it was based on a work by Ovid, completed in 8 CE—the same year the Roman poet was banished by Emperor Augustus for his allegedly immoral writings. Though Zimmerman’s 90-minute production barely skimmed the surface of Ovid’s 15-part epic, it captured the essence of his meditation on love—its power and fragility, its cruelty and whimsy, its ability to nurture and destroy....
