Getting a national holiday named after you is tough to do. In the U.S. you have basically two options: discover the country (already taken) or stand up for liberty and justice against the kind of opposition that tends to involve assassination attempts. The government is hardly likely to give everyone the day off to celebrate the birth of the guy who’s arguably the most important hip-hop producer of the past two decades....
America’s eight-year war in Iraq officially ended in December. It took two additional months for the city of Chicago to end its legal battle with demonstrators arrested for protesting on the first day of the conflict. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In addition, the city spent at least $3.8 million on outside legal help, records show. That brings the total cost of fighting these cases to roughly $12 million....
Editor’s note: Chef Jeffrey Hedin left in the fall of 2012. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But while chef Jeffrey Hedin’s concise menu does throw a few curveballs, it also includes primary touchstones of that country’s cuisine: mussels, fries, rabbit (three dishes!), varied applications of mustard, and of course brussels sprouts. Of the two preparations of moules frites—one simmered with leeks and cured pork cheek in spicy California-brewed Devotion Ale and the other in a creamy white wine curry—I prefer the latter for its perfumed subtlety, which puts the focus on the plump, fresh mussels....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I fully like Crystal Castles, from their 8-bit blurbles to their semi-anonymous press photos to their sort of dickish overall ‘tude. (Not enough bands are willing to put out enough ‘tude to potentially evoke hatred or at least jealousy from their audience and too many seem overly focussed on their desire to be liked, rather than feared.) But there’s being a dick and there’s being a dick, and they seem to have crossed over into the latter category with their treatment of visual artist Trevor Brown....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is big news today. I’m too young to have been there, but apparently the sex-addicted son of a Neville Chamberlain sympathizer gave America the sense of national possibility it needed to get into the Vietnam War, leave a bunch of Cuban exiles for dead as part of the worst coup attempt ever, run to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, and help install the Baath party as the ruling party of Iraq....
When Veronica Roth graduated from Northwestern in 2010, at age 21, she had just sold her first book, which she’d written over a period of 40 days earlier that year. The whirlwind process, which Roth recorded on her blog—composing the first draft, finding an agent, revising, expanding, revising again, submitting it to publishers, and getting a book deal—had taken less than five months. In an entry from April, two weeks after HarperCollins picked up not just one book from Roth but a full trilogy, and two months before her college graduation, she wrote, “What if everything goes well?...
WINNEBAGO MAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rebney’s video outbursts have won him the sobriquet of Angriest Man in the World, but what makes the bloopers so arresting is his evident misery. If you’ve ever done any kind of recording, you know that the mental pressure increases with each error, until you feel as if there’s a house sitting on you. “My mind is just a piece of shit this morning!...
I read this article [“The Carnivore’s Dilemma” by Nicholas Day, July 13] with hopes to understand why people think it’s OK to eat humanely raised animals. All I was left with, yet again, was a sense of nausea as once again people ignore basic principles of equality, morality, and reason. Had the animals being described been domestic dogs or cats, I doubt that your reaction, or your readers’, would have been the same....
Who the fuck is Bibi Merhdad? Last of My Species II: The Perilous Songs of Bibi Merhdad is the nightly culmination of the Joyous Outdoor Event, the multiday spectacle/festival spearheaded by Redmoon Theater this weekend at South Belmont Harbor. Like most Redmoon productions, this promises to be a doozy: puppetry, whacked-out costumes, inflatable architecture, etc, plus bands programmed by Metro, including Ssion, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, My Gold Mask, and more....
An approving nod to the Sun-Times for finding it no big deal that Barack Obama is on friendly terms with Bill Ayers, even though, back in the day, Ayers was a Weatherman who “bombed the U.S. Capitol, a bathroom in the Pentagon, and even cased out the White House.” The Sun-Times regrets that Ayers “remains sadly unreflective about his Weatherman days, as revealed in his memoir Fugitive Days. . . ....
Last weekend I trekked out to Boston to attend my five-year college reunion, and between attending activities at my alma mater in the burbs and hanging with friends in the city I somehow managed to squeeze in just enough time to check out a newish record store called Deep Thoughts. I’d strictly planned to just take in the sights and not buy anything, but that changed after I came across a seven-inch one of the store’s owners released....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For some inexplicable reason Warner Music Australia went kind of nuts this fall over the classic Nuggets garage rock anthology, compiled by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye and responsible for at least three or four waves of garage revivals and revivals of revivals. They’ve just released a remastered version of the compilation and two Down Under-themed companion pieces: a comp of Australian garage rock from the same era called Down Under Nuggets: Original Australian Artyfacts 1965-1967 and a set of contemporary Australian covers of original Nuggets tracks called Nuggets: Antipodean Interpolations of the First Psychedelic Era....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this year’s Best of Chicago issue I called “I Don’t Like” producer Young Chop the Best Producer With a Chance to Become the Next Kanye. I’m not a gambling man, but if this were a betting-with-money scenario I’d also make sure to put some on C-Sick, another young local who started out making juke and has developed into one of the more inventive beat makers in the city—he won the national Red Bull Big Tune competition in 2008, when he was only 17....
The first officially grown-up thing I ever did was go to a Laurie Anderson concert by myself. This was in Vermont in 1984, and Anderson was touring behind her second album, Mister Heartbreak. I was 14. I’d been saving up pocket change, and I walked downtown and bought a ticket without telling anyone where I was going. I remember the sparseness of the crowd—filthy Burlington hippies, it seemed, had little use for robot art music....
Joe Moore, the 49th Ward alderman, stood to Del Valle’s side, looking out at everyone who constituted “us” at that time: the chanting neighborhood residents, union members, and public officials—including Cook County clerk David Orr and U.S. reps Jan Schakowsky and Jesse Jackson Jr.—rallying for Moore’s reelection bid. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moore had been so busy looking out for the interests of the poor, the voiceless, and the regular “neighborhood folk” that he hadn’t done a good enough job of getting people to the polls in February, Del Valle said....
His sets are intelligent without being pompous, brainy without shying away from what Bill Hicks called “the purple-veined dick jokes,” and full of unique observations about Chicago, relationships, day-to-day life, and statutory rape. But Adam Burke insists he’s not a rare bird in the aviary of local stand-up comedy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As influenced by English comic Spike Mulligan as he is by Woody Allen, Steve Martin, and Hicks, Burke, 35, has been telling jokes for five years now....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Thursday night jazz pianist Vijay Iyer returns to town with his redoubtable trio for the first time in several years, playing at the Mayne Stage. You may have read my two cents on the recent kerfluffle caused by a weird piece in the Seattle Weekly that blamed artists like Iyer for jazz’s lack of mainstream popularity—an odd conclusion, given that few contemporary artists make music as tuneful and dramatic as his....
The 28th Chicago Latino Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, April 20 through 26. Tickets for most screenings are $11, $10 for members of the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago; a festival pass, good for 12 general admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members. Following are selected screenings; for a full schedule see latinoculturalcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chinese Take-Away In the opening scene of this Argentinean comedy, a cow drops out of the sky and kills a young woman on a rowboat just as her lover is about to propose marriage....
A new party called Unbound gets off the ground this Friday at Reversible Eye, and the principle behind its bookings will have a familiar ring to anyone who spent many a delightful night at the Fireside Bowl in its grody heyday: bringing bands from different sounds and scenes onto one bill. The flyer lists those scenes as “Classic Goth, Deathrock, Post-Punk, Grave-Wave, Minimal-Wave,” which is not a terrifically wide range, but hey, old goths and nu goths should mingle!...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Superchunk “Majesty Shredding is the first new Superchunk album in nine years—a gap almost half as long as the Chapel Hill band’s career—so it’s not surprising that they’d spend part of the record looking back, half wondering where the time went,” writes Peter Margasak. “It’s not exactly retro for the band to play like they used to, in part because their old sound has been kept alive by so many younger groups, but Majesty Shredding is the spunkiest, most aggressive Superchunk record since the early 90s....
