Best Place To Buy A Restored Schwinn Cruiser

Mike Mitchell’s garage 708-522-9208 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For locally manufactured bikes, Mike Mitchell is the man to see. Schwinn shut down its Chicago factory in 1983, but Mitchell restores Chicago-made models from the 1960s and ’70s, taking them apart, cleaning them, and replacing any worn parts before putting them back together and reselling them for $250-$300 apiece at Randolph Street’s Chicago Antique Market or out of his garage in Oak Park....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 159 words · Chris Gallion

Burning Fuse Film Festival

Presented by Facets Cinematheque (1517 W. Fullerton), these six documentaries, all made in 2008, “represent decidedly unexpected views of the world, each revealing an unseen corner of the planet with passion and humor.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reviewing Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, Andrea Gronvall wrote, “With a magisterial sweep, this stirring video by New Orleans native Dawn Logsdon documents the prominence of African-Americans in the Big Easy from colonial times to the present....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 211 words · Edward Schreiber

Clayton Hauck Frans Hals And The Art Of The Party

It’s definitely homerish of me to say, but I really like the work of Clayton Hauck, regular Reader contributor and proprietor of Everyone Is Famous; I was pleased to figure out how to run his shots of Pitchfork at 800px wide, because they deserve it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s technically skilled, obviously, with a talent for getting great color in low-light situations and for on-the-fly composition (note the second pic on this page)....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 239 words · Monica Rogers

Despite The Speedos

Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh enjoy higher profiles, but Irish playwright Enda Walsh feels much closer to the spirit of Joyce and Beckett than either of his better-known contemporaries, who generally hew fairly close to the dictates of realism. Like Joyce, Walsh delights in wordplay and allusion, and like Beckett, his plays evoke closed environments where meaning, such as it is, comes from the repetition of stories and actions. In Bedbound (not yet produced in Chicago), a father and daughter deliver a series of voluble and recriminatory monologues from a filthy bedroom....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 337 words · Frances Chung

Exiled To The Art House

PERSEPOLIS ★★★ WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MARJANE SATRAPI AND VINCENT PARONNAUD WITH THE VOICES OF CHIARA MASTROIANNI, CATHERINE DENEUVE, DANIELLE DARRIEUX, AND SIMON ABKARIAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately Persepolis (whose Chicago release was pushed back to January 18 as this issue went to press) won’t get anything like the promotional blitz enjoyed by Ratatouille, which opened in nearly 4,000 theaters nationwide. After Persepolis premiered at Cannes in May, Satrapi told the International Herald Tribune that an English-dubbed version was in the works, and a subsequent story in the Hollywood Reporter listed Sean Penn, Gena Rowlands, and Satrapi’s hero Iggy Pop as voice talent for the alternate release....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 373 words · Kenneth Murphy

Fall Arts Guide 2009 Best Bets Silk Road Cabaret Broadway Sings The Silk Road

Since its founding in 2003, the Silk Road Theatre Project has specialized in work by playwrights of Asian and Middle Eastern descent. But its fall opener will consist almost entirely of songs by writers with a European pedigree. Curated by SRTP artistic director Jamil Khoury and directed by Rick Dildine, Silk Road Cabaret consists of selections from Asia-centric musicals by the likes of Rodgers & Hammerstein (The King and I, South Pacific), Stephen Sondheim (Pacific Overtures), George Forrest and Robert Wright (Kismet), Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil (Miss Saigon), and Elton John (Aida)....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 252 words · Meghan Elmore

Fall Books Special A Queer Eye An Open Mind

Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago’s LGBTQ Community, 1977-1997 Jon-Henri Damski, John Vore, editor; Albert Williams and Owen Keehnen, coeditors (Firetrap Press) Damski’s final column, published a few days before he died, was about how great sex is. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Yes, there are cops who would like to put down their blue armor. Would like to have a young man lie next to him; and bring out of them something their wives can’t do as well: bring out the young man still inside them to have and to hold....

December 30, 2022 · 3 min · 481 words · April Surita

Foxy Shazam And The Accidentally Racist Single

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The other day I was Gchatting with my friend Maura Johnston at the Village Voice. Maura is a great person to pay attention to if you like pop music but don’t have enough time or tolerance for exhaustingly overblown production and mastering to sift through all of it looking for the gems that haven’t made it into heavy rotation on KISS FM yet....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 170 words · Sergio Smolen

Heavenly Thoughts

The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn is best known for his sprawling, world-making lyrics, full of fascinatingly flawed characters, sketchy situations, a shitload of inside jokes, and the occasional epiphany. Though he doesn’t get to show it off as much, he’s also a fascinating musical thinker, and a couple weeks ago the Guardian gave him some space to talk about the inspiration behind the song “We Can Get Together” from their latest album, Heaven Is Whenever....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 199 words · Monte Maxwell

In Search Of The Itunes Killer

There’s something about Apple—probably its nearly monopolistic control of certain markets or its disproportionate influence on the zeitgeist—that brings out the bloodlust in new-media commentators and gadget bloggers. Whenever some company rolls out a new MP3 player or smartphone, they seem to relish calling it an “iPod killer” or “iPhone killer,” even though products that actually pose a threat to Apple—like HTC’s Google-branded G1 smartphone—have so far been few and far between....

December 30, 2022 · 3 min · 484 words · Jeff Riggs

In Town Only Through Saturday Inner Voices Is A Killer Farce

Fabio Esposito Toni Servillo as Alberto in Inner Voices Eduardo de Filippo’s Inner Voices (Le voci di dentro) starts out looking like a farce. But in the sharp, spare, perfect production directed by Toni Servillo—who also stars—the jokes are gradually overtaken by a darkness that feels an awful lot like tragedy. Alberto Saporito is an aging Italian everyman who runs a hand-to-mouth rental business with his brother, Carlo, and lives in a building where everybody knows everybody else and all the doors are left open....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 150 words · David Julius

In Which I Do My Part To Spread Disunity

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brooks also expressed his pessimism about the ability of Middle Easterners and Americans to imagine a shared future both with members of their respective societies and within the global community, as Americans become more divided by educational achievement and Middle Easterners remain divided by religious ideology. Americans carried a “powerful sense of universalism,” during the 1990s after the Cold War, Brooks said....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 133 words · Roberta Wilson

L Patron Tacos Mexican Home Cooking Hold The Tequila

Julia Thiel Tacos, not tequila Actually, you can drink tequila at this Logan Square taqueria—it’s BYOB—they just don’t serve it. And the restaurant sign’s similarity to the Patron tequila logo (it’s virtually identical, actually) is purely coincidental, says Raul Gonzalez, one of four brothers who run the place. “Patron” is what they call their father; the sign maker was supposed to write the name out in script, and this is what he came up with....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 149 words · William James

Let The Games Begin Berny S Boy Knows How To Pick Em

Watching the U.S. Olympic Committee pass through town last week, it struck me as a shame its members don’t have a say in all of Chicago’s fiduciary affairs. For the moment, Daley and the backers guiding Chicago’s bid contend that they’ll raise all the money from private investors–though none have been named–and by selling air rights, luxury skyboxes, and tickets and merchandise. To illustrate the fever of support supposedly building for the games, they breathlessly announced last week that they’d already sold 2,016 “Stir the Soul” Olympic T-shirts (only 300 left on the shelves)....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 282 words · Clarence Mcdaniel

Outstanding In The Field Announces Local Dinners

Outstanding in the Field, a traveling dinner series eloquently described by one participant as “a traveling culinary carnival, led by cowboy-hatted epicurean evangelist Jim Denevan,” has just announced several local dinners in August (“local” here meaning within a couple hours’ drive). The one at City Farm is sold out already, but there are still tickets for an August 3 dinner at Kinnikinnick Farm in Caledonia, IL, prepared by Stephanie Izard (of the yet-to-open Drunken Goat) and Ryan Poli (Perennial)....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 154 words · Elias Mirabella

Rat Trap

“The multitude of animators clearly paid close attention to facets of our daily lives that we take for granted: knife marks on a cutting board, the way raindrops splash when they hit the sidewalk, the glow from a street lamp. Sitting through “Ratatouille,” it doesn’t take long for you to forget that you’re watching an animated movie and just allow yourself to become immersed in this glorious realism.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 234 words · Theresa Hargrave

Reader S Agenda Tue 11 26 Santa S Lap And Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony Toxic Holocaust And The Tyranny Of Good Taste

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Christmas cheer abounds today at Daley Plaza. It’s your first chance this season to take a seat on Santa’s knee and tell him what you want for Christmas. Once you’ve accomplished that, stick around for the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony. Darlene Love will be on hand to play holiday music, and trainees from the Joffrey Academy of Dance will perform an excerpt from the Nutcracker....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 137 words · Ada Mcginley

Reggae Reigns At The International Festival Of Life

Since 1993 Martin’s International Culture has booked some of the biggest names in African and Caribbean music at the International Festival of Life. This year the event moves from its usual Washington Park location north to Union Park for Independence Day weekend, running Thu 7/4 through Sun 7/7 from noon till 10 PM. This year’s music—more than 50 acts total—includes international reggae stars such as Third World on Thursday, Luciano on Friday, Wailers guitarist Junior Marvin and Inner Circle (of “Bad Boys” fame) on Saturday, and Sanchez on Sunday....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 209 words · Blanche Tao

Savage Love

QI’m a 34-year-old straight woman living with a 32-year-old straight man. His daughter is two, and I am the only mother she has ever known. (Her real mother is a crack whore somewhere.) My boyfriend tells me he loves me, but it doesn’t feel like he wants to spend any time with me. I pay the rent and am the only person in our household with a full-time job. When I get home, I want to relax....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 407 words · Janelle Mitchell

Scary Stories To Tell With Some Art

October is the month that darkness claims as its own. The days grow shorter, the nights colder, and seasonal totems appear: black cats, spiders, jack-o’-lanterns in every conceivable emotional state. Styrofoam tombstones dot yards where mummies, scarecrows, and ax murderers slump in shadowy corners. Horror classics run in marathons on TV. A certain giddiness prevails. Are you afraid of the dark? “Yes!” we scream, giggling and running headlong toward it....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 221 words · Mariana Doucette