Writer-director Luc Besson hit the jackpot in France with The Professional (1994), starring Jean Reno as a tenderhearted hit man who takes little Natalie Portman under his wing. That same year Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta arrived as lovable killers in Pulp Fiction, and since then the assassin has become a cuddlier figure in American movies, going back to high school (Grosse Pointe Blank), working out the kinks in a professional marriage (Mr....
Patrick Semansky/AP Photos Ray Rice has made indignation easy for the media. Sports sections do indignation nicely! But there are so many indignities sometimes they blur together. Levenson’s e-mail to team execs addressed the issue of a troublingly small season-ticket base, which he’d been told was due to a failure to “get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs.” I have been open with our executive team about these concerns....
”We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence,” Mayor Emanuel said last week. ”They have pulled back from the ability to interdict . . . they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.” Emanuel made the comment at a summit of mayors, police chiefs, and federal prosecutors called by U....
The first thing you notice in “Future People,” Derrick Adams’s solo show at the Stony Island Arts Bank, is a wide, two-tier gray platform that sits in the middle of the gallery; it looks like a stage. On top of it are four black bucket seats (outfitted with seat belts) and a table covered by a polished silver globe, turntables, a mixer, and a MacBook. The setup strongly resembles the bridge of the starship Enterprise—that is, if Captains Kirk or Picard were also DJs....
Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Sonos Thundercat One of the biggest shows to come to town this week is jazz-beat wizard Flying Lotus’s stop at Concord Music Hall on Friday night—I’d recommend getting there early enough to catch opening act and frequent FlyLo collaborator Thundercat. Formally known as Stephen Bruner, Thundercat also recently played bass in Suicidal Tendencies, and his nimble, frenetic bass playing allows him to jump between the latter’s thrash-metal blitzkrieg and the plasmatic R&B-funk fusion of his solo recordings....
An expansive new version of the Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP) has been unveiled by south-side journalism production company the Invisible Institute. The database, created by independent journalist Jamie Kalven, was already the largest public repository of Chicago police misconduct records. Now it’s quadrupled in size to include more than 240,000 misconduct complaints made against more than 22,000 CPD officers going back to the late 1960s. The database has also been enhanced by the addition of Chicago Police Department use-of-force reports and officer commendation records....
When Jeff Koons was 17 years old, he mustered up all his courage and telephoned Salvador Dali to ask if the two could meet. His mother had read in the newspaper that each winter the eccentric surrealist took up residence in an opulent suite at the Saint Regis Hotel in New York, where he’d walk his pet ocelot up and down the halls on a leash. The concierge put him straight through to the artist....
Q: I’m a 29-year-old straight woman facing a dilemma. I dated this guy about a year ago, and in many ways he was exactly the guy I was looking for. The main hitch was sexual. Our sex was good, but he had a fetish where he wanted me to sleep with other guys. Basically, he gets off on a girl being a “slut.” He was also into threesomes or swapping with another couple....
Rich Hein/Sun-Times What’s that Mayor Rahm’s whispering to Alderman Solis? Could it be something about how to get the South Loop deal through the zoning committee? For all the energy he’s exerted on his big DePaul/Marriott deal, you’d think Mayor Emanuel would be shouting its praises from the rooftops. He was up to his old tricks at last Wednesday’s meeting with the zoning committee for the DePaul basketball arena and the Marriott hotel—which you, the taxpayer, will pay to build on land that you will also pay to purchase....
Maybe you had the TV-commercial-perfect Labor Day: a racially diverse group of neighbors barbecuing in a lush backyard, everyone with a frosty can of [insert beer brand here] in hand. But I had the organizing-stuff-before-school-starts kind, lived vicariously through social media. And from those channels, it seemed like there was a lot of transitioning going on. According to Facebook, a lot of people got married—Boka chef Lee Wolen did; so did La Sirena Clandestina chef John Manion and food writer Matt Kirouac....
One Christmas when Detroit native Sophie Evanoff was six years old, she asked Santa for a play kitchen. She ended up getting her wish, though on Christmas morning she had to look for the kitchen outside on the deck, since her parents told her Santa couldn’t fit it through the chimney. That little red and white kitchen ended up foreshadowing Sophie’s career as a pastry chef and owner of Vanille Patisserie, with four locations throughout Chicago....
Dan Crawford has helped organize every Newberry Library Book Fair since the event began in 1985. Thirty fairs later, the 56-year-old is still excited by the wonderfully random and rare literature donated to the annual sale of more than 120,000 books. “I’m still seeing things I haven’t seen before,” he says. “You just never know what people have in their basements.” Recently, a man donated a large collection of Asian studies....
Gossip Wolf has been impatiently waiting for the release of the full-length Wax Trax! Records documentary since first hearing in 2015 that it was in the works. On Saturday, April 1, the Vic presents two screenings of a rough cut of the flick—these days bearing the title Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A with a different panel of label luminaries, including Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult singer Groovie Mann, Paul Barker of Lead Into Gold, and Barker’s Ministry and Revolting Cocks bandmate Chris Connelly....
As a grammarian, I commend Spike Jonze for using the objective case to name his comedy Her, because this futuristic tale, about a man who falls in love with his computer’s artificially intelligent operating system, is preoccupied with the old subject-object relationship. The subject is Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely bachelor in a Los Angeles of the near future; his bland, bespectacled face, lit by icy blue eyes and bisected by a cheesy Tom Selleck moustache, fills the screen in gigantic close-ups....
AP File Photo President John F. Kennedy, speaking in the House chamber in January 1963, with Vice President Lyndon Johnson behind him. Kennedy put poverty on the presidential agenda, but it was Johnson who set the War on Poverty in motion. Not everyone was singing Lyndon Johnson’s praises after he declared war on poverty 50 years ago this month. “Assuming that by spreading a bit of poverty among the rich through taxation, you could spread a bit of richness among the poor, who gets the credit?...
Don’t be misled by the Weight’s unassuming appearance. I realize that Piece can be a tough place to spend much quality time, especially if you’re old and cranky and prefer to be able to talk to people rather than hollering at their ear holes from point-blank range. (I like loud bands, not loud bars.) It’s a noisy cavern of a restaurant, and its multitudinous flat-screen TVs attract yahoos who like to yell at sports in groups....
Q:I’m a 30-year-old, Asian-American, hetero-flexible cis woman. I’m also newly diagnosed with bipolar II. I’m on medication—the doctor is trying to figure that out—but no talk therapy for right now, as my last therapist wasn’t great and I haven’t managed to find a new one. My question for you is regarding the relationship between bipolar and kink. One of the common symptoms of the manic stage of bipolar is “risky sex....
The highest purpose of bar food, in all its cheesy, starchy, pinguid, deep-fried trashiness, is to sponge up as many bad decisions as possible before you wake up with a katzenjammer. This utilitarian function has become a lesser priority in this day of cheffy haute drinking food. The smoked hummus at the Fountainhead is delightful, but how is that going to help you after six pours of Macallan? The meat and cheese plate at Scofflaw is as well curated as a museum collection, but Bacchus help you after you start chasing your swizzles with Malort....
“John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you’ve made your mark on history those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you.” This sentence, from “Thinking the Unthinkable About John Lennon,” Lester Bangs’s subversive, caustic, and dead-on eulogy for John Lennon—and quoted in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen‘s How to Be a Rock Critic—could just as easily have applied to Bangs as it did to Lennon....
The Ox King A couple of cross-town festivals are shaping up this week: Tomorrow Never Knows begins on Wed 1/15 with Cayucas at Lincoln Hall, the Jim Jones Revue and Minor Characters at Schubas, and an in-store at Saki with Diane Coffee. The Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival is underway as well, which features Tiny Miles & the Big Kids at Tonic Room on Tue 1/14, and the David Grisman Folkjazz Trio at City Winery on Wed 1/15 and Thu 1/16....
