It must be tough to tell your own story when loads of talented writers have already told it. But that’s the task Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas took on in their new joint memoir, Life, on the Line (Gotham Books). Achatz was already an acclaimed chef, and Alinea—the restaurant he owns with Kokonas—had been deemed one of the best in the U.S. when he was diagnosed with Stage IV tongue cancer in 2007....
The Soul of a Cook County Commissioner There’s room for another great book about Chicago Soul. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born and raised in Chicago, I grew up in the “old ranch triangle” area when Paddy Bauer held Christmas parties at the old brewery (either I am over 40 or have a vivid imagination). There were always blacks in the area, then came the “poor whites” followed by the “Hispanics....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not the first time either, swee’pea, my cynical self wants to interject. In Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, Dern’s previous encounters with Lynch’s dream generator, she was just as flummoxed as she is here. Can’t be accidental, these utterly clueless resolutions, and in fact Dern’s undoubted ingenue appeal has a lot to do with the Svengali-Trilby dynamic that’s apparently been working itself out (in contrast, say, to Isabella Rossellini, who after a pair of canny collaborations with Lynch transferred her dark, antinomian intelligence straightaway to Guy Maddin land, not to be silly putty in anyone’s hands, I guess)....
The place called “Heartbreak House” in George Bernard Shaw’s 1919 play of the same name is a Sussex estate owned by Captain Shotover, an eccentric old seafaring man who’s invented such useful items as a ship with a magnetic hull that pulls in submarines. But it may as well be the New York home of the bohemian Sycamore family, from Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You. Or the enchanted Athenian woods in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream....
If you know about Nate Kinsella, it’s probably because of his astounding contributions to local post-posthardcore band Make Believe, which started in 2003 as a touring version of Joan of Arc (led by his cousin Tim Kinsella) and went on hiatus in 2008. Not only did he drive the music with his complex, propulsive drumming, he also added electric piano, using his right hand on a keyboard set up across his kick drum while he played his kit....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From what I could tell, the question on the minds of the few dozen people who turned up at Subterranean last night to catch the first Chicago appearance by Internet-famous rapper Riff Raff was, “Is Riff Raff actually going to show up?” Speculation about headliners bailing is common at hip-hop shows, but this time there was a bit more contributing to the situation than general rapper flakiness....
Sketchbook has gotten a makeover this year, and it’s about time. Collaboraction’s annual exercise in sensory overload—combining short plays, live music, art exhibits, and alcohol consumption—had been at risk of falling into irrelevance as its party atmosphere and ever fancier production values threatened to overwhelm the playlets that were supposed to be at the center of things. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, things are different this time....
Started on the north side in 1959, the Second City has become one of America’s great comedy theaters, with a long list of illustrious alumni, an Emmy-award winning TV series (SCTV), and a combined current enrollment of more than 3,000 students looking to be the next Colbert or Fey at training centers here and in Hollywood and Toronto. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend with performances, panel discussions, and screenings, highlighted by The Second City Alumni: One Night Only—”classic scenes from The Second City archives” performed live by the likes of Steve Carell, Harold Ramis, Jim Belushi, Nia Vardalos, Bob Odenkirk, George Wendt, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, Horatio Sanz, and many others (Sat 7 PM, $125)....
In her self-indulgent new play, writer-director-performer Sharon Lanza wanders the corridors of her own mind without showing much regard for the feelings or thoughts of her audience. The shape-shifting characters in this Rescuers production include an astronaut who becomes a doctor, a ballerina/cleaning lady, and a mermaid/singer/motivational speaker. Only Brad Smith as a security guard makes his character at all genuine; the other performers take a distanced, ironic approach, like space aliens parodying bad TV....
Urbana-based conceptual artist Sarah Ross explores the possibilities of artistic and social intervention offered by laziness with her recent installation piece of “contestational furniture,” InAction. Inspired by writings like “The Right to Laziness,” by Marx’s son-in-law Paul LaFarge, and echoing the call by contemporary theorist Slavoj Zizek to seek a form of politics inspired by Bartleby’s phrase “I would prefer not to,” Ross has developed “InAction Units,” backpack-size bright red mobile laziness modules, which unpack to form a sleeping pad and pillow....
Bim’s packing heat. Over the past couple months, Logan Square’s very own late-night regret factory the Owl has been getting into the rock venue scene, booking bands to play free shows in the bar. This Sunday, you can celebrate Easter there with Obnox, the solo project of Cleveland’s Lamont “Bim” Thomas, along with locals Ono and Running. Bim’s been kicking around the Cleveland punk rock scene for years as the groovy backbeat of Bassholes, This Moment in Black History, Unholy Two, and Puffy Areolas....
Mike Sula Garlic scape pesto At last month’s Green City Market Chef’s BBQ, Friend of the Food Chain and allium enthusiast Alan Lake and I were sitting around talking garlic scapes, the subject being unavoidable, as abundant piles of them were being used as table centerpieces. Scapes are the pliant, coiling green flower stalks typically cut off from the subterranean garlic bulb; usually they’re some of the first things to show up at spring farmers’ markets....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Thursday, August 11, 2005, the Cubs opened up a four-game series against the Cardinals, the reigning NL champs. Maddux was in the second year of his second stint with the organization and came into the game 8-9, facing a 13-5 Mark Mulder. Triple-crown threat Derek Lee helped Maddux’s cause with a three-run, 430-foot surface-to-Waveland missile in the fourth, his first of two HRs in the game, that gave the Cubs a five-run cushion on their way to an 11-4 win and Maddux’s first complete game in a year....
It’s hard to get the timing of a fall bike trip on the North Branch Trail just right: go too early, and the leaves won’t have turned color yet; too late and they’ll already be on the ground. The first time I took the trail to the Botanic Garden just happened to be on a perfectly crisp November day when the yellow and orange leaves seemed to glow in the sunlight....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If holiday cover sets aren’t your thing there are plenty of noteworthy live shows happening all weekend long that won’t require you to watch someone mimic Scott Weiland. (Or should I say mimic Chester Bennington filling in for Scott Weiland?) Tonight Oozing Wound celebrates its debut album, Retrash, at the Empty Bottle, and doomy, sludgy metal duo the Body opens....
Anyone passing through Logan Square has likely noticed the small brick building on the corner of Milwaukee and Logan and wondered, What the hell is that? Constructed in the early 20th century as a shelter for trolley passengers, the building eventually fell into the somewhat ignoble role of storage shed for the city’s lawn equipment. But in 2010 it was rescued by Logan Square Preservation and completely restored. Now Comfort Station serves as a community-focused art space featuring exhibitions, musical performances, and a summer film series....
“Stories are fundamental things,” says a high school English teacher in Byzantium. “We tell them to learn about the world and about ourselves.” This line could be uttered in almost any of Neil Jordan’s films, which frequently employ elements from folklore to ruminate on fears and desires we retain from childhood. Jordan’s perennial theme is that we’re attracted to the unknown even as we fear it. The Company of Wolves (1984) conveys this most explicitly, imbuing the Little Red Riding Hood story with teenage fears of adult sexuality....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seeing the film was a revelation for my 14-year-old self. The Bed-Stuy milieu bore a certain resemblance to the neighborhoods around the magnet schools I’d attended in West Pullman and Morgan Park. But Brooklyn seemed different than Chicago too. Instead of going home to islands of relative homogeneity at the end of the day to talk smack on other groups amid the safety of our own ethnicity, it seemed that the New Yorkers were in each others’ face 24/7....
When Robert Falls staged The Iceman Cometh at Goodman Theatre in 1990, I raved about it here in the Reader, calling it “great. Excessively great. Great in its excess. Four and a half hours of an obsessed poet named Eugene O’Neill, doing everything any dramaturge would tell him he absolutely can’t do and coming out of it standing firmly on his two dark, transcendent feet. If this were just a play it would be wildly misshapen and repetitive and wordy; but this isn’t just a play: It’s the truth....
DEAR READERS: I’m off this week. To tide all of your hot and/or kinky and/or sore asses over, here’s a column I wrote 15 years ago. Some newer readers might’ve missed this column when it originally appeared—some of you who were still in grade school, diapers, or amniotic sacs back in 1998—so I’m rerunning it now because I still get questions about “gerbiling” on a daily basis. This statement is not controversial for the reasons one would hope: it isn’t controversial in the “Hey!...
