Running a DIY venue is a rough business—not only do you always have to try to always avoid the cops (always), but the people you actually want at your shows can be a huge pain in the ass too. Bringing music to the masses can feel like a thankless task—especially the next morning, when you have to deal with piles of beer cans and cigarette butts and a wrecked living space that may have not been all that livable in the first place....
Brilliant Corners of Popular Amusements: Dan Deacon, Shellac, and some actual clowns Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brilliant Corners of Popular Amusements, a new circus- and Vaudeville-themed arts and music festival, debuts this weekend (Fri-Sun 9/16-9/18) in Eckhart Park at Chicago and Noble. Created by Mike Reed (the local jazz drummer who also produces the Pitchfork Music Festival), it’s three days of strangeness filled with live music, circus performances, carnival rides, and sideshows....
Labor Day, East Chicago Starting tonight and running through July 21, the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport will host a multimedia retrospective devoted to local hero Tom Palazzolo. The exhibit will include paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video installations of three documentary shorts that he directed: Labor Day, East Chicago (1979); At Maxwell Street (1984); and I Married a Munchkin (1994). According to the exhibit notes, these films reflect Palazzolo’s interests in reportage and niche communities....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a multiplex screening of Don Jon I attended last week, the 20 minutes of coming attractions (no exaggeration) contained previews for two upcoming features starring Christian Bale: American Hustle, which reunites Bale with The Fighter director David O. Russell and costar Amy Adams, and Out of the Furnace, a blue-collar crime movie from the director of Crazy Heart....
Dear Members of the International Olympic Let me explain. Faith in the predictions that the games would be an economic boon for Chicago is exactly that: faith. Science doesn’t support them. As my colleague Deanna Isaacs wrote a couple of weeks ago, studies have found that the games have a marginal impact on the local economy—one study, produced by the European Tour Operators Association, even concluded that “there appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games, and considerable evidence of damage....
Poisoned apple or pumpkin carriage? See what you get when the Fable Festival casts its spell across the Edgewater neighborhood, bringing performances based on fairy tales to public schools, cafes, bars, and empty commercial spaces. More than 20 artists and production companies appear over the course of five days, starting May 16. Here are the highlights: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three is the charm in folklore, and three is the number of puppet pieces constituting “The Storefront Show,“ to be presented where else but in a storefront at 1130 W....
There are other things I’m looking forward to seeing this fall: Bright Star (September 25), which was hailed as a comeback for director Jane Campion (The Piano) when it premiered at Cannes; The Damned United (October 2), whose screenwriter, Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), has no peer in transposing recent history to the big screen; Antichrist (October 23), the latest smack in the face from Lars von Trier (Dogville); and Fantastic Mr....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The place is well suited to its Columbia College environs, an industrial space with high ceilings hung with designy white lamps of various sizes and shapes, walls painted with bold abstract graphics, bright orange plastic seating made from recycled materials, and two flat-screen TVs showing a Japanese art film with the sound turned down. You order at a back counter from a concise menu: burger, turkey burger, chicken sandwich, portobello sandwich, egg-and-pepper sandwich....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While you’re thinking that over, I’ll tell you about the latest time it happened. I was sitting in a pancake house trying to master the New York Times crossword puzzle, and I couldn’t solve the upper right corner. The vertical clue that flummoxed me was “Unqualified,” and the answer was a five-letter word that seemed to begin with an s and end with an r....
GET SMART ★DIRECTED BY PETER SEGALWRITTEN BY TOM J. ASTLE AND MATT EMBERWITH STEVE CARELL, ANNE HATHAWAY, DWAYNE JOHNSON, ALAN ARKIN, AND TERENCE STAMP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years that fantasy has suffered some real growing pains. In the postfeminist era, stunning women are still a requisite of the James Bond adventures, but gone are the days when 007 could help himself to sex kittens with such smarmy names as Holly Goodhead and Pussy Galore....
She wants to be you—but would you want to be her? Melissa McCarthy knows how to use her bulk; she hurls herself around the screen as dangerously as Chris Farley or John Belushi, and I can’t think of any woman in American movie comedy quite like her. She also registers some credibly poignant moments in this otherwise rote feature, which exhausts most of the comic potential from identity theft in the first 20 minutes and then turns into a solid but unexceptional road picture....
from Broken Deal Randy Michaels Some thoughts on “Broken Deal”, this week’s riveting Tribune series on Sam Zell’s buyout of Tribune Company in 2007, and on the bankruptcy that soon followed and from which the battered company didn’t emerge until last December. The yarn told by Michael Oneal and Steve Mills deserves to be expanded into a book, of course, but as I read I kept thinking, HBO series....
Curated by Patrick Friel and presented by Chicago Filmmakers, the 24th Onion City festival begins Thursday, June 21, with an opening-night program at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, and continues Friday and Saturday, June 22 and 23, in two screening rooms at Columbia College, 1104 S. Wabash, fifth floor. For more information and a complete schedule see chicagofilmmakers.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rediscovery of history is a recurring theme of this year’s selections, and no work expresses it more potently than Seeking the Monkey King (Sat 6/23, 6 PM), a digital video by legendary director Ken Jacobs (Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son)....
“You would look so cute without an eye to offend you and without a tongue to offend me and mine.” —Hate mail to Vashti Cromwell McCollum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rosenstein, a Chicago native, teaches television production at the U. of I. His best-known documentary prior to this one is In Whose Honor?, a 1997 study of Native American mascots in sports. He’s lived in Champaign since 1985, and says McCollum’s story is local lore there, which is how he came to hear about it, seven or eight years ago....
Those who are fed up with the romantic cult of individual genius and the increasing tendency to demand payment for even short quotations of copyrighted material would have us believe there’s no such thing as plagiarism. Last week at the Art Institute they had their say. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The panel discussion, held under the auspices of the Chicago Humanities Festival and the University of Chicago’s Franke Institute for the Humanities, was moderated by former New Yorker staff writer (and current CHF artistic director) Lawrence Weschler and headlined by novelist Jonathan Lethem and Judge Richard Posner....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, no one–no alderman or member of the public–argued against a proposed ordinance that would require the city to do it, and several media and technology experts even offered to help out for free. “We’ve gathered quite a bit of information here today, and I think we have a lot of loose ends to tie up with our law department, and I think we’ve heard some recommendations from other aldermen, so we’re going to hold this,” said 39th Ward alderman Margaret Laurino, chairman of the council’s Committee on Economic, Capital and Technology Development, which held the meeting in conjuntion with the Committee on Finance....
The theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival is “America,” and the content is appropriately expansive. Some off-the-beaten-path highlights follow, but they barely scratch the surface. A full schedule, as well as the complex details of ticketing policies, are at chicagohumanities.org. The prices given here are for general admission. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In their conversation titled The Power of Words, journalist Adam Hochschild and editor Tom Englehardt ask, Whither writing and editing in an age when both have been devalued (Thu 11/1, 6 PM, Francis W....
thursday11 Thursday11 Shapers Friday12 Kenny BarronBattlefield BandThe Marriage of FigaroPretty Good Dance MoviesVoivod ClaychellaHarvey MilkJoe HenryTed Leo + PharmacistsPretty Good Dance Moves Sunday14 Diamond Rings Monday15 John DoeThe Marriage of FigaroReal Estate Tuesday16 ROVA Saxophone Quartet Tuesday17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BATTLEFIELD BAND The Battlefield Band’s motto is “Forward With Scotland’s Past,” and their latest CD, Zama Zama: Try Your Luck (Temple), exemplifies it as well as anything they’ve done....
My wife and I were sitting on our front porch one evening this summer, having a drink and watching the sunlight head west up the street, and she said, “This is the best room in the house.” And I agreed. And that’s how this year’s Nest Issue got its theme. A Busy Beaver’s Kitchen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As founder and CEO of Busy Beaver Button Company, Christen Carter has plenty to do....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oakland experimentalist Gregg Kowalsky named his terrific new album, Tape Chants (Kranky), after an elaborate live sound project where he “played” several mono tape machines arranged around a room. The recording makes no attempt to capture the spatial effects produced by that setup, but it’s still rich and engrossing: Kowalsky manipulates tape speed, volume, and other variables, creating mutable mixes of the droning, resonant source material on each tape: piano, analog synthesizer, contact mikes, motors, sine-wave oscillators, gongs, water, glass, electronics....
