Pixsooz/Photos.com The tools of the trade The mistakes journalists make that actually bother us—as distinct from the “mistakes” that incite readers to curse our names and demand our heads—are simple things: a faulty statistic, a date a year off, a name misspelled. A false fact, in short. Everything needs to be checked. What the Democracy Fund has in mind is research into ways journalists can identify false facts originating from without, not within....
Five years ago, you wouldn’t have seen a cocktail bar in Uptown’s Lawrence House. Though it was constructed in the 1920s as a luxury apartment hotel, the building had long since fallen into disrepair and was in foreclosure, notorious for its numerous code violations. But in 2013 the Chicago-based investor Cedar Street bought the building and began renovations, restoring an indoor pool that hadn’t been used since the 1930s and adding a 7,000-square-foot gym and rooftop deck, along with other amenities....
Abyssal, Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius (Iron Bonehead) Anonymous UK trio Abyssal swooped in out of nowhere in 2011, and the aftershocks of their arrival are still rippling outward. The latest incarnation of their excellently murky sophomore full-length, Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius, is this vinyl reissue by Iron Bonehead, which comes snapping at the heels of a CD version by Profound Lore (which was itself a reissue of a self-released effort)....
For her recently released third album, Highway Queen (New West), Nashville singer Nikki Lane reveals a new level of self-awareness, on the title track counting the miles she’s logged on the road while also reflecting on the mixture of hard work and posturing required to find success. Later, on “700,000 Rednecks,” she seems to apply both themes to the motivation afforded by her hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, and the red-meat hokum the country industry feeds upon....
You could be forgiven for mistaking Electric Jungle for a gardening shop at first glance. Potted plants fill the windows of the new Rogers Park record store at 1768 W. Greenleaf, which opened without fanfare during the last weekend of July. The storefront is largely unadorned, though there’s a small green sign on the front door with the shop’s name and business hours. It’s open just a fraction of the week: 2-7 PM on Tuesday and Thursday, and noon-7 PM on Friday and Saturday....
The Summer of Flying Fish The Summer of Flying Fish, which begins a weeklong run tomorrow at Facets Multimedia, isn’t the best new Chilean film to play here this year. (Sebastian Lelilo’s Gloria remains the front-runner for that title.) Still, it reflects the present good health of Chile’s national cinema, as well as the growing number of female auteurs all over South America, one of the more encouraging trends in movies today....
The full lineup for this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival came out this morning. Joining previously announced headliners LCD Soundsystem, A Tribe Called Quest, and Solange are alt-rock icon PJ Harvey, west-coast rap phenom Kamaiyah, Australian sample masters the Avalanches, and D.C. postpunks Priests, among dozens of others. A handful of the returning acts (Danny Brown, Angel Olsen, Dirty Projectors) might suggest that the festival’s taste in contemporary “indie” music ossified a few years ago, but that’d be reading too much into too little—Pitchfork also continues to step outside its comfort zone, making booking decisions that don’t slavishly toe the line about what’s supposedly hip on the summer festival circuit....
Monsieur Verdoux On Friday, the Silent Film Society hosted a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, accompanied by the Greensboro Symphony Youth Orchestra of North Carolina, at the ill-fated Patio Theater. Chaplin, of course, was a stalwart of the American cinema and one of the preeminent purveyors of the form. When he began making short films he had a fascinating working style, often constructing stories and images on the spot, revamping and embellishing those that worked and discarding those that didn’t....
Midwestern Cuisine A little more than a century ago nearly all the milk consumed in Chicago was produced within 60 miles of the city. Almost none of it came from Wisconsin. McHenry was the third largest milk-producing county in the country, and Kane was the fourth. This wasn’t close to the situation in places like New York and Boston, where dairy had to be shipped in from much farther away. Suburban sprawl has wiped away Illinois’s dairy industry, but the historical disparity between Chicago and other cities struck Travis Pyykkonen when he came across it in a 1910 USDA report titled “The Milk Supply of Chicago and Washington....
Kinmont Restaurant Squid ink pasta at Kinmont Element Collective has been promising us chicken forever, but it looks like we’re getting fish first. The restaurant group behind Nellcote and Old Town Social keeps teasing us with Facebook pictures of the gay-friendly chicken sandwiches it’s been promising since Leghorn was first announced and I talked to them about it here, more than a year and a half ago. But it seems like it was easier to open a fancy fish restaurant than a little chicken stand, as Kinmont will beat it to opening on Saturday at 419 W....
When black metal reached American shores in the early 90s, it started a movement of artists trying to re-create the chilling, nihilistic sounds of their Norwegian forefathers—and it didn’t get much better than Xasthur. Formed in 1995 and operated mostly as the solo project of Malefic (aka Scott Conner), Xasthur embodied everything that was great about black metal while improving upon it. Staying completely underground and mainly sharing his massive discography via self-released tapes and CDs, Malefic appropriated the harsh, dissonant tremolo guitars and blast beats of Burzum and Dark Throne, adding personal lyrics and sweeping, mournful progressions to stir up a depth and beauty never before heard in the genre....
Last year scrappy, minimalist New York duo 75 Dollar Bill dropped their second proper album, Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock (Thin Wrist), whose awkward title serves as a list of the basic ingredients that guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown draw on. (“Second” doesn’t count their three cassette-only titles.) Though still rooted in the visceral, cyclical grooves of North African guitar music—Chen has studied under Mauritanian guitarist Jeiche Ould Chighaly, a key member of Noura Mint Seymali’s band—75 Dollar Bill have been loosening their rustic foundations through a mix of accretion, displacement, and electronic manipulation....
Chicago has a long and illustrious alternative comics history, from the now-canonical 90s old guard like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes to influential minicomic icons like John Porcellino and on through important current creators like Lilli Carré and Edie Fake. Quimby’s is one of the country’s top alternative comics stores, but until the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) debuted two years ago, the city didn’t have a convention of equal stature to match....
When filmmaker and musician Dorian Electra decided she wanted to create a pop song and music video about the history of gender-nonconforming performance, Chicago and its drag scene were at the forefront of her mind. “I’m a cisgendered woman, so there’s only so much I can speak to, but so much of the history of femininity in general has a lot to do with the oppression of trans women and gay men and all these other people that aren’t necessarily thought about when people think about women’s history and the history of women’s sexuality,” she explains....
Yes, yes, I realize that we should have gone to Income Tax Bar on Tuesday to drown our sorrow over being newly poor. But the weather was so nice on Tuesday and, anyway, the government hadn’t cashed the big checks we mailed to it, so the sorrow was more abstract. It was easier to be sad on Wednesday when it turned cold and blustery and our bank accounts were noticeably smaller....
Somewhere in the Hermosa neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest side, a storage locker is filled with thousands of VHS copies of Cameron Crowe’s schmaltzy ode to premature midlife crisis, Jerry Maguire. To explain the existence of this bizarre stockpile it’s necessary to understand the methodology of the video collective Everything Is Terrible! The group’s members regularly raid thrift-store shelves in search of obscure and discarded visual media—B movies, instructional tapes, public-access shows—to use as raw materials for their hyperkinetic mashups, which first were published on their blog and are now being commissioned by the likes of MTV and Adult Swim....
I don’t expect you to remember who David Bright is—though if you’re Jewish and were once ashamed of him, you might. He’s the Chicago restaurant owner and mashgiach—overseer of Jewish dietary laws—I wrote about in 1996, when he suddenly disappeared. Bright dropped out of sight after the federal government accused him of laundering $2 million in drug money. Because CJN ran its report on Bright before anyone else ran anything, readers protested that the paper had made a big deal of a nonstory....
There are a lot of secrets in the kitchen at Gorée Cuisine, a new Senegalese restaurant in Kenwood. There are secrets in the soupe khandje, a thick stew of lamb neck, red snapper, and okra that is the most elemental and forthright expression of surf and turf I’ve ever encountered. There’s a secret going in the Senegalese omelets the cafe is planning to serve during breakfast. And there are some very old secrets in the tiebu djeun, a sort of West African paella revered as the national dish of Senegal, which accepts a multitude of interpretations but demands that one firm rule be obeyed:...
This Saturday at 7 PM, the International Children’s Media Center (at 625 N. Kingsbury) will present a program of international short films titled “If Only.” The films were selected by inmates at Cook County Correctional Facility as part of WorldScene, a 14-week arts residency and job training program designed, according to the ICMC, to “support self-determination among marginalized and court-involved youth ages 18-24.” “If Only” consists of six films from six countries, which were selected from a pool of more than 150 entries....
R &B wunderkind Khalid trades on a sound and persona that can’t help but feel responsive to the Weeknd-influenced goth soul of his peers Bryson Tiller, Dvsn, and 6lack. On American Teen (RCA), he’s humanistic where they’re supervillainish, interpersonal where they’re self-important, and more interested in surfing the groove than achieving introspective catharsis. He doesn’t quite get the job done on his biggest hit so far, “Location,” where he’s limited by his reliance on his own vocals to carry the sparse arrangement—basically, he doesn’t have the range....
