QI’m a 24-year-old straight, married female. I have been religiously reading your column in the Portland Mercury since I was 16. Thank you for explaining things that my parents wouldn’t and for helping me clear the hurdles of adolescence! Someone who started reading my column at age 16—and that’s just the right age to start reading my column—should’ve known better than to marry a man she’d been dating for seven short months....
In two hours on one scorcher of a recent Tuesday, Sarah Kavage gave away 110 pounds of flour. But those 110 pounds were just a drop in the bucket. She still had 18,000 more pounds to go. “Trading grain,” Kavage says, “used to be this very intimate relationship between the product and the buyer and the seller. Before there was the Board of Trade you would come to the waterfront and you had your little sacks of grain loaded up on your wagon and the buyers and sellers are looking around for each other and the buyers are examining the crop and trying to set a price and the price is determined based on the quality of the individual crop....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I told a friend I was planning to revisit Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window at the Siskel Center this past Saturday, he made a joke about the movie’s corny twist ending, which reveals the preceding narrative to have been dreamt by the main character, a middle-aged professor played by Edward G. Robinson. It’s the sort of conclusion that feels tacked on, leading spectators to wonder if the filmmakers didn’t know how else to end the story....
In the popular imagination, gay marriage is conceived as a battle between right-wing fundamentalists with biblical ideas about compatible genitalia and loving gays and lesbians who simply want an official stamp on their relationship. But the issue emerged out of a complicated nexus of political and social movements, including the response to the AIDS crisis; the LGBTQ community has a long and often contentious history when it comes to marriage. As Leigh Moscowitz argues in her new book, The Battle Over Marriage, media representations have generally erased those complexities, while shifting dramatically in their tone over time....
“I am deeply troubled that the editorial board members were not allowed to address concerns raised about the Obama [February 1] and McCain [February 3] editorials, even though the endorsements were turned in more than two days before they were published. Instead, wholesale rewrites were done by people who aren’t even on the board, including one person who is no longer employed by the paper. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Few directors used the jump cut to more potent effect than Maurice Pialat; his films hurtle from one volatile scene to the next, skipping over anything that might suggest emotional stability in the characters’ lives. This 1972 drama—his second theatrical release and an unlikely commercial success in France—depicts the on-again-off-again relationship between a brutish aspiring filmmaker (Jean Yanne) and his younger mistress (Marlene Jobert), with many of the details drawn from Pialat’s own life....
I don’t buy all this talk about White Sox general manager Kenny Williams waving a white flag with dumping trades, simply because he called up ballyhooed prospects Gordon Beckham and Aaron Poreda. (It’s more a case of the Sun-Times waving the “buy me” desperation flag.) In fact, I think Williams is putting his best 25 men on the roster — in talent, if not performance — to see if this year’s team can still contend....
Christmas Vacation What Christmas carols are to pop music, Christmas movies are to cinema. You don’t see hide nor hair of them outside of the holiday season, and, much like Christmas itself, they’re so ubiquitous and unavoidable that even if you’ve never seen all of, say, A Christmas Story, or It’s a Wonderful Life, or Miracle on 34th Street, chances are you’ve caught enough on cable TV and in department store windows to piece them together....
Follow the Money at CPS We need a forensic audit. As taxpayers, we deserve to see where ALL the money is going. Huberman prides himself as a data wrangler, so whipping out the financial books should be no problem. The quote in the article “But that information was pre-layoff. So it had to be re-created” is very troubling. You don’t “re-create” data. The data is chronological. Again, for folks who pride themselves as being efficient and on point with “data,” their operation looks quite the contrary....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bill that passed the house Thursday, which imposes a 90% tax on bonuses to people who companies receiving more than $5 billion in government money and whose household income is $250K-plus, is a bad bill. As Nate Silver points out, it’s basically a machine-gun approach to the problem, encompassing solvent firms that took the money to increase liquidity in the market at the request of the administration, auto companies, and everyone else....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been trying all day to think about anything besides Hologram Tupac, and I’m finding it extremely difficult. There’s something so perfect about it on so many levels. Music festivals’ desire to combine nostalgia and spectacle in their headlining acts seems to have reached a macabre but inevitable conclusion in the virtual resurrection of a dead pop star, and odds are we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing in the future....
Jasonsmith.com Jon-Henri Damski When time passes and committees take over from founders, awards have been known to drift away from their original purposes. That has not happened to the award Lori Cannon established in 1998 to honor her late friend Jon-Henri Damski, a gay activist, writer, and singular personality. Damski’s last column, published a few days before he died on November 1 the year before, was a paean to sex....
Henry All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. The major flaw that plagues most short narrative is a filmmaker’s tendency to squeeze too much plot into a brief running time. Obviously, short films lend themselves to stylistic concision. The best are the ones that express things more succinctly but no less effectively than a feature; the worst the ones that attempt to cram in a feature’s worth of ideas....
The parking meter deal that my aldermanic caller and his City Council colleagues voted for last December–at Mayor Daley’s insistence–sucks. It sucked then. It sucks now. It will suck even more in the future. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, I suppose most of you–aldermen excluded–probably suspected as much from the start. But the thing about this deal is that the more you study it–and Mick and I have been turning it inside and out for months–the worse it looks....
My wife of 5 years, mate of 11 years, and mother of our two kids has dropped a bomb on me: she thinks she’s a lesbian. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So my question, Dan, is this: I’m hoping that she’ll tell me that this is a phase. I’m hoping that she’ll experiment with being a lesbian and realize that she wants me back....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until today I thought of the Slap Chop commercial as the Too Legit to Quit of the Vince Offer oeuvre, compared to the Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em of his bananas Shamwow spot–entertaining and with a few bright spots, but nowhere near as paradigm altering. (By extension that prostitute-punching incident could be considered his Funky Headhunter.) However, that opinion has been obliterated by this remix:...
Jeff TWeedy‘s headlining slot at the Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival at Mass MOCA this past weekend made a lot of longtime fans happy: joined by Sir Richard Bishop, Scott McCaughey, and members of the Books, Outrageous Cherry, and his current outfit, he worked in songs from better bands like Golden Smog and Uncle Tupelo. In other news, Pat Sansone‘s hair looks like a big golden butterfly. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the Cubs and the White Sox going south the last few days, both Lou Piniella and Ozzie Guillen lost it. Yet Sweet Lou’s tirades seemed real, while Ozzie’s seemed a bit of a masquerade, even though his language was harsher. Piniella barely made it through a minute of a post-game media conference after last Thursday’s blown save by Kerry Wood, triggered by a key misplay by left fielder Alfonso Soriano, and that was after bashing a Gatorade cooler....
In the annals of queer memoirs, some conventions have become cliches: Being Misunderstood, Coming Out, the First Relationship, Running Away. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new memoir, The End of San Francisco, reworks all of these into a text where memory is inherently unstable, and where such experiences achieve a freshness while remaining uncompromisingly queer. It’s a text that both remembers and reminds but is also a record of a historical and cultural forgetting....
The theme of this year’s Chicago Blues Festival is “Rollin’ Up the River: Celebrating the Blues With a Musical Journey Up the Mississippi.” The Mississippi River doesn’t come anywhere near Chicago, of course, but in its initial diaspora the blues spread from south to north, as though moving upstream—following a pattern similar to that of the Great Migration of African-Americans in the early and mid-20th century. Are there enough active blues artists who reflect this history to fill a festival, though?...
