Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At last week’s preview event I had the opportunity to speak with all three of Eataly’s public faces—partners Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, and Joe Bastianich—each of whom has a different take on what Eataly is about and what it aims to accomplish (and be profitable at). Those interviews will appear here for the next three days; first up is Joe Bastianich....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seattle’s Rose Windows conjure up an impressive multilayered din on their recent debut album, The Sun Dogs (Sub Pop), crafting a pan-global psychedelic stew that’s alternately grabbed and compelled me. The group was formed by guitarist Chris Cheveyo in 2010, once he became comfortable appropriating ideas from old rock bands (he allows that they include the Doors, Grateful Dead, and Black Sabbath), got interested in music from southeast Asia and eastern Europe, and paired up with singer Rabia Shaheen Qazi, whose caterwauling voice characterizes the band’s music as much as their quasi-international flavor....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » February-March: City officials review initial application information submitted by potential bidders to determine whether the firms are qualified. The city won’t say how many bidders were rejected, how many were accepted, or how many were involved altogether; that won’t be released until the deal is approved and underway. Thursday, August 14: Volpe announces that the city faces a $420 million budget deficit....
Karl Clermont is certain an off-duty police officer pulled a gun on him. What he doesn’t understand is why it’s taking so long for investigators to determine if the officer should face disciplinary action. “This happened over seven months ago,” he says. Clermont is a 33-year-old cabbie who grew up on the north side, graduated from Sullivan High School, and now lives in the suburbs with his wife and five-year-old son....
Best Bets: Theater | Comedy | Dance | Visual Art | Lit | Film | Music Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fall doesn’t just come back—it brings the whole notion of “back” back. We go back to work and, unless you’re talking about the CPS, back to school. Farmers hope to get back what they put into the dirt. City people wipe off the beach sand and get back into slacks and sweaters....
I’ve always heard that living under or near power lines was harmful to your health. The other day after driving by a community located next to a massive power station with so many cables running out of it that you could actually hear the hum of electricity over the traffic, I got to wondering: is there any truth to this common belief? –Carlos G., via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now....
David Parr, actor and magician with the Magic Cabaret, is mesmerized by: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel At the recent Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, I met Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, who introduced me to their book Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel, a beautiful, lavishly illustrated hardcover volume that perfectly combines my childhood fascination for robots with my grown-up interest in history....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Times of London reports that those New York investors control two-thirds of the stock in 13-year-old Time Out New York, and they’ve forced Time Out founder Tony Elliott in London to reluctantly put TONY up for sale, the asking price being $40 million. Time Out New York owns half of four-year-old Time Out Chicago — Joe Mansueto of Morningstar owns the rest — and the New Yorkers want to unload that too....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Park Chan-wook film Oldboy is enjoying something of a resurgence of late. The gruesome thriller screened this weekend at the Music Box, and starting Wednesday the remake directed by Spike Lee (yes, Spike Lee) hits theaters nationwide. The original work, a likeable if lightweight piece of neo-noir pulp, is a hallmark film of the Korean New Wave, a period that still exists in some form today but enjoyed its most prolific stretch from roughly 1998 to 2007....
Among journalists, almost no one disputes the need for a federal shield law. Among politicians, the cause is not as noble. Journalists have been lobbying Congress for a shield law for six years, but Congress hasn’t passed one yet. So on to the full Senate with the Free Flow of Information Act! But coalition leaders knew it wasn’t so simple. Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Dick Durbin of Illinois had voted the bill out of committee on the understanding that before the Senate took it up they’d get to amend it....
Anyone putting off a visit to Xoco because of the daunting lines that have become an unintentionally ironic hallmark of Rick Bayless’s “quick-serve” Mexican street-food joint should know that the Chef Who Can Do No Wrong provides plenty to think about during the wait. For optimists there’s engrossing, if agonizing, reading material—the chalkboard menu hung high on the wall lists a half dozen caldos and nine or ten tortas (from the wood-fired oven or the griddle), all made with bounty from the local boutique farms Bayless has championed throughout his ascent as well as his own considerable tillage....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If there’s one album from 2012 that I overlooked when I made a list of my favorite LPs of the year, it’s probably Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold, wherein the Brooklyn band play a breathless run of airtight indie rock, each track sharing a similar riff, tempo, and sound. As much as I enjoyed the album, I was more impressed by their performance at this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, where they improbably reproduced a gapless run-through of their record....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The American Pie franchise returns after a nine-year hiatus to answer such haunting questions as “Can love survive the ravages of time?” and “What household object will Jason Biggs shove his dick into now?” Having tied the knot in American Wedding (2003), Jim (Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) now share a cute toddler and a rapidly cooling sex life; when Jim and his old buddies converge on their hometown for a high school reunion, he’s tempted by a young hottie whom he used to babysit when she was a child....
1631 Chicago, Evanston 847-868-8945 foundkitchen.com Unless my mom is reading this (hi, Mom!), I’ll confess there’s little in the midwest I hold in higher regard than restaurateur Amy Morton’s Found Kitchen & Social House, which provides at least three entries on the short list of reasons to get on the Purple Line: 1) Chef Nicole Pederson’s thoughtful, seasonal, and unwaveringly delicious small plates, flatbreads, sandwiches, and entrees. Pederson is a vegetable magician—a bowl of roasted brussels sprouts and squash, seasoned with harissa, was one of the best things I ate last winter—but that doesn’t change a simple supper axiom here: If there’s large-format meat on the menu, get it....
It’s nice to at least have the option of escape when attending a show with less-than-desirable opening bands (or headliners, for that matter). The cavernous Bottom Lounge not only offers one of the city’s best patios—with a nice near-west view of downtown and the illustrious Green Line—but the second floor’s Volcano Room boasts a row of six pinball machines (plus, there’s Bobby Orr Power Play on the first floor). Included are the Addams Family, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Gilligan’s Island, and Champion Pub, which is quite possibly the best pinball game on the planet; in addition to fighting a rough-and-tough, grizzled bare-knuckler, you train by jumping rope with your ball and nailing away at a speed bag with the machine’s flippers....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is so delightful that Cynthia Nixon, an actress most famous for playing Miranda on Sex and the City—a franchise whose most recent film had such bad sexual politics that it caused the Stranger’s Lindy West to renounce modern womanhood—can have ignited, over the course of one New York Times Magazine profile, a good and necessary debate about being gay: Is it a choice?...
Last week I led a tour of the site of the $800-or-so-million boondoggle Mayor Emanuel’s earmarked for the South Loop. You probably know it as the DePaul basketball arena project, the popular shorthand. The mayor says it will cost at least $55 million to buy land for this project and the money will come from the tax increment financing program, intended to eradicate blight in poor neighborhoods. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Before this goes any further, it should be made clear that, despite her nickname of the Gold Coast Madam, Rose Laws never considered herself a madam, per se. She was an agent who connected call girls with clients. Laws, who is now 78, will be at After-Words bookstore (23 E. Illinois) from 6 to 7:30 PM on Thursday to read from her new memoir. In order to capitalize on Laws’s tabloid fame—she received her nickname after an FBI raid and subsequent arrest in 2002, and served 22 months in prison—the publisher titled the book Gold Coast Madam....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friend of the Food Chain Dakota Prosch teaches fourth grade at Oglesby Elementary in Auburn-Gresham. Oglesby, the only CPS neighborhood Montessori program in the city, is in a video competition with four other schools across the country for thousands of dollars from FedEx to help fund various educational projects. The program is specifically targeted at Teach for America alumni, which Prosch is, who still teach at low-income Title I schools, which Oglesby is also....
Pinnick v. Corboy is a similar case here in Illinois. In Pinnick, the sums of money are, by and large, much smaller, but the impartiality of not one but four of the seven Illinois Supreme Court justices — a majority — has been called into question. All four justices were asked to recuse themselves, and refused. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “According to Boyle’s motion, Fitzgerald has received over $52,000 from Corboy & Demetrio partners, Freeman $5,000, Thomas over $16,000, and Burke and her husband, Alderman Edward Burke, over $25,500....
