Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Revisiting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Music Box this weekend (as part of the ongoing series of classic musicals) rekindled an internal debate that I’ll likely never resolve: Who’s the greatest American filmmaker, John Ford or Howard Hawks? Every time I consider the question (it happens every couple years) I know I’m embarking upon a fool’s errand, and yet it seems vital that I do....
Koechner (right) with Ethan Embry in Cheap Thrills Tomorrow the pitch-black indie Cheap Thrills begins its Chicago run at the Music Box. Described by at least one critic as a hybrid of Jackass and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, it takes place over a long night as two down-and-out guys get lured by a wealthy couple into a bizarre “game” wherein they perform strange dares for cash. (Full disclosure: I used to volunteer with one of the film’s writers, David Chirchirillo, at Odd Obsession Movies in Bucktown....
When it comes to dystopian science fiction, the most ingenious conceit can be done in by the tiniest flaw in plausibility (unless you’re writing the Hunger Games trilogy, in which case no one bothers to care). So perhaps playwright Kim Z. Dale’s most impressive achievement in her dark high-tech fantasy is its airtight logic. Billionaire mogul Dr. Westmore is offering implanted “brain enhancements” to those who’ll sign over the rights to their future augmented mentations, and brilliant computer scientist Claudine, dead-ended in the unchallenging coding job she accepted years ago to make room in her life for motherhood, incautiously signs up for the procedure, hoping that she’ll finally reach her full potential by creating the perfect encrypting algorithm....
Winter is a lonely time if you’re a dog in Chicago: long hours at home with nobody to talk to except humans, when you can only find out what’s going on in the world (Dog World, the only world that matters) through quick sniffs during the daily hustle around the block while someone tugs at your leash and tells you to hurry up because it’s cold. There’s clearly a dog with considerable influence behind the scenes at the Chicago Park District, because The Secret Life of Pets is one of the most frequently shown Movies in the Park this year....
If I’d been on Two Brothers‘ press list for more than about four months, I might suspect the brewery was specifically baiting me by making a beer called “Midwestern Death Metal.” Sure, the label art will hardly have Three Floyds and Surly looking over their shoulders, but the name! Come on! The taste isn’t as sweet as you might expect from the aroma—it’s not actually very sweet at all, not for a barrel-aged imperial stout....
Some local bars (cough, Billy Sunday, cough) come up with clever concepts to bring their highfalutin’ cocktail menus back down to a blue-collar Chicago earth that’s full of dives, corner taverns, and sports bars. Yet sometimes there’s no need for such cerebral mischief. Take the Sportsman’s Club: Heisler Hospitality’s Humboldt Park hot spot has a rotating selection of superlative craft cocktails (the mint julep they served on the day of the Kentucky Derby is up there with the Bluegrass State’s finest), and even an amaro machine....
Fran Spielman/Sun-Times Media Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett haven’t found a way to hire school librarians. I was reading a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s letters—great book, by the way—when I came across a missive from February of 1983 that sort of sums up Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s curious attitude toward libraries. “I have complied with this request. Since books are to libraries what asphalt is to highway departments, I assume that Indiana is also asking donations from suppliers of asphalt for her roads....
Sun-Times Media University of Chicago students study low-temperature chemistry in 1962. Cryogenic science may soon be able to let people live in the future—but why would they want to? Change is like the stranger in the movies who arrives in town and is a little too smooth and a little too friendly to children. We know he’s up to no good. When we look back to where the human race was a few hundred years ago, we might concede change some respect....
J.R. Robinson releases his latest LP as Wrekmeister Harmonies, Night of Your Ascension, today via Thrill Jockey, and along with the epic record comes a brand-new music video staring noise-rock legend David Yow. Wrekmeister is a project whose records are known for their dark, minimalist, hypnotic drones, but on Night of Your Ascension, Robinson’s assembled a cast of more than 30 names from the heavy metal and experimental world—members of the Body, Cave, Corrections House, Bloodyminded, and Anatomy of Habit are among those involved—and together, during the course of a year, created a massive, monstrous racket....
Mick Dumke Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tio Hardiman campaigns in Uptown with running mate Brunell Donald, insisting, “This is real!” Tio Hardiman has pulled his van over and the windows are fogging up, but he’s just getting started. “We have campaign literature, a website outperforming everyone else’s, and we’ve got a campaign office—and if you call our office, a receptionist answers the phone. This is real! And the guy who has all the money—what’s his name?...
As part of his ceaseless effort to find other people to blame for the bad shit that happens on his watch, Mayor Emanuel jetted home from his ten-day vacation in Cuba on Tuesday to announce that police have to do a better job of responding to “mental health crises.” But you know, I think the mayor ought to be a little reluctant to ever mention the words “mental” and “health” in the same sentence, given his rather shameful policies on this issue....
I ’ve been a fan of Chicago emo hero Bob Nanna since 2003, when I was in high school and downloaded “The New Nathan Detroits” by his band Braid via a crappy dial-up Internet connection. My friend Matt, who I got to know after a 2009 Lincoln Hall show by Milwaukee post-emo outfit Maritime, is also a huge fan of Braid. So when I decided to do a story about Downwrite, a songwriting service that Nanna and former Spitalfield front man Mark Rose launched in February 2013, I got an idea....
Rober A. Reeder William F. Buckley’s National Review reponds to the discussion about discussing reparations. What’s so interesting about “The Case for Reparations,” the cover story by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the June Atlantic, is how easily that case is made. Coates points out that everything awful (short of systematic genocide) that can be done by one people to another was done by white Americans to the blacks brought in chains to serve them....
Losing in Gainesville By Brian Costello (10/14, Curbside Splendor). Book-release party with performances by Mannequin Men, Bobby Burg, Matchess, and the Coldies, Fri 9/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600, emptybottle.com, $10. In line with the theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival, “Journeys,” we posed a question to some of the fest’s headliners: If you could go anywhere, where would you go, and why? Eula Biss, author...
The Salem witch trials took place over the course of nine months in 1692 in a small Massachusetts village. Twenty men and women (plus two dogs) were eventually executed, most by hanging. It’s a comparatively short episode in American history, and yet we remain transfixed. The trials, in the popular imagination, have spread to encompass the entire state of Massachusetts, where witches were burned en masse. In The Witches, Schiff transports her readers back in time to colonial America and forces them to “return the humanity” to the historical figures involved....
Knowledge is power, the saying goes, though if you look at how the world actually works, ignorant rich people have a lot more power than knowledgeable poor ones. A more precise formulation might be that marketable knowledge is power, which is why your friend in the financial services industry rolls his eyes whenever you hold forth on the subject of French medieval poetry. Two documentaries opening this week, Ivory Tower and The Internet’s Own Boy, touch on the subject of monetizing knowledge, and you’re liable to find each infuriating in its own way if you see the U....
Four-day general admission passes to this year’s Lollapalooza sold out in about two and a half hours this year, but if you’re eager to get to Grant Park that weekend you can still spring for a platinum pass. It’ll get you into two air-conditioned “hospitality lounges,” separate viewing areas for four of the stages, special restrooms, free drinks and catered meals, and you’ll be able to catch a ride to all the stages on a golf cart....
In Italy, sgroppino—cocktails made with lemon sorbet, vodka, and prosecco—are usually served as a digestif or a palate cleanser between courses. At Lone Wolf, where patrons are more likely to be having pre- or postdinner drinks than a full meal, it’s not likely to arrive between courses of food, but the fruity, refreshing cocktail works equally well as an aperitif. Stephen Cole, who designed the bar’s cocktails, learned about the 500-year-old drink from a business partner who visited northern Italy, and decided to put a modern twist on the classic cocktail....
There are few people with more moral authority than Holocaust survivors, and at a press conference at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie Thursday, they used that authority to speak out against President Donald Trump’s immigration ban—which, they noted, had, in a supreme irony, been enacted on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Eighteen survivors came to the museum to show their solidarity for the refugees and nationals of seven primarily-Muslim countries who have been forbidden entry into the U....
As so often happens, it was Reader critic Monica Kendrick who got this wolf hooked on local atmospheric black-metal band Vukari, writing about their “eerie beauty” and “unrelenting horror” in a concert preview last year. In late July, Vukari posted on Bandcamp a tasty new four-song EP, En to Pan, that blends symphonic postrock sweep and desperate banshee wailing. Vukari guitarist Johan Becker (who also plays violin on Roads to the North, the recent LP from black-metal mountain man Panopticon) also has a gothy new atmospheric-pop project called Vaskula that adds a whole heap of melody to Vukari’s elegant darkness....
