I first started hearing about this “lizarmstrong” person about three or four years ago. I was getting to know a group of kids around the Wicker Park area at the time and lizarmstrong was a part of that scene. And that’s just the way they referred to her: “lizarmstrong this, lizarmstrong that,” and it started to annoy me. I mean, no one else I knew got their whole first and last name included with every reference....
[snip] Conservative evolution. A lot of liberals may assume that because conservative, patriarchal families are reproducing faster than liberal secularist ones, America’s headed back to the Dark Ages. But as sociologist Kieran Healy writes at crookedtimber.org, “the terms ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are moving targets. Even assuming all the kids of conservative parents grow up relatively conservative, does this mean they’ll hold the same substantive views as their forebears? Insofar as there has been any drift in generally shared ideas, it seems to have been in the direction of adopting views that would have been considered liberal or radical in previous generations....
Sorry, Saartjie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fascination with Baartman stemmed from her ethnicity and her anatomy, both of which seemed exotic to 19th-century Europeans, according to historian Stephen Jay Gould, who included an essay on Baartman in his 1985 collection, The Flamingo’s Smile. Khoisan women were known for impressively proportioned rear ends, Gould wrote, and Baartman was apparently well-endowed in that department....
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, Congo Square Theatre Company, at Theatre Building Chicago. Javon Johnson sets his weird, witty fable in a halfway house where five ex-cons struggle to stay straight with assistance from a zealous parole officer and a prostitute named Grace. The magic realism of this world premiere takes getting used to, but soon we accept English speakers praying in Arabic and spiritual instructions arriving by pay phone. Johnson’s rogues’ gallery includes Mitch (the excellent Gary Saipe), whose fortune–made in Avon products–disappeared when he killed his wife; now he’s reduced to trying to kill the neighbors’ dog and being called “Skin So Soft” by the others....
Clarence Thomas got a pat on the back the other day in Britain’s Economist. Critics complain “that he is cruel,” observed an unsigned essay on the Supreme Court justice and his new memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. “Rather than seeking justice, he coldly applies the law as it is written. To conservatives, that is his chief virtue. Judges who conjure up rights that are not mentioned in the constitution–such as the right to an abortion created by Roe v Wade in 1973–undermine the rule of law....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It really is remarkable that for all the bellyaching about the decline of bipartisan behavior in DC there’s very little attention paid to the fact that there are actual reasons this has happened beyond Newt Gingrich being a meany and bloggers being too shrill. The Jim Crow South gave rise to an odd structure of American political institutions whereby both of the parties contained substantial ideological diversity....
A six-person ensemble provides timely, belly-shaking laughs using both improvised material and bits from Second City’s archives. Festive sketches and songs cover tedious newsletters, romantic expectations of the holidays, an endless road trip to grandma’s, and a Ghost of Christmas Present with a liberal agenda. Musical director Stephanie McCullough’s tickling of the ivories is like a narrator’s voice, sensitively enlivening the pace or varying the mood. Improv buffs may cringe at the cast’s onstage giggles (world’s cheapest laugh getter) and dips into the scatological (second cheapest–and tiresome after the fifth skanky butt-licking reference)....
Two summers ago Greg Allen started drinking. He’d made it to 40 without having much more than the occasional beer at a party, but now he caroused regularly with a new group of friends, all in their 20s. Walking from a bar to a party he’d yell out, “Midlife crisis!” “They were all very amused,” he says. But Allen was only half joking. While he was away Allen produced more work than ever before, which is saying something....
Developed by S.O.S. Productions (apt), this performance has no single writer or director–and that shows in the flat dialogue, derivative characters, lamely executed stunts, and amateurish comic timing, which belies the cast’s extensive improv training. A ramshackle set doesn’t benefit from the Cornservatory’s junior high band-room stage. Supposedly a sitcom about office workers foiling the Big Brother schemes of Homeland Security agents, the show deals mostly in banal bestiality jokes. Of course all this juvenile humor does provoke a few “why did I laugh at that?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Give up your grudges! It’s time to forget President Bush’s many blunders (Katrina, for starters) and bad policies (invading Iraq instead of building up Afghanistan). There is much worse afoot. Although it sounds like a bad role-playing-game scenario, Bush is now at the point of obtaining what can only be described as despotic powers, through what’s called the “detainee measure” or the “law on military commissions....
When American Music Club announced last summer that they’d reunited, it was easy to take the news cynically–it looked like a retreat by band leader Mark Eitzel from a messy, weakly received solo career and an acknowledgment that he wasn’t the genius people said he was a decade ago. But even the critically acclaimed AMC never sold well, and revisiting their discography reveals that the band was pretty messy as well....
We asked some of our most active critics to list their “best bites” of the past year–the truly outstanding dishes they’d encountered in the course of exploring what has become one of the premier American restaurant scenes. For more of their picks, see our blog the Food Chain at chicagoreader.com. Jeuk suk yum so bok um (goat stew) at Chun Ju Restaurant Among a raft of positive health effects, this superrich and earthy stew is said to have virility-enhancing qualities and is a more socially acceptable delivery system for them than dog meat....
Todd Bartelstein’s first student is a German shepherd named Jordan. As Bartelstein pulls padded overalls over his clothes and adds a knit cap and arm pads, Jordan begins to whine insistently, like a car alarm. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bartelstein has been training dogs this way for more than 13 years. He suffered his first serious bite while training a police dog ten years ago....
One day last summer David Kolata, an obscure researcher for the Citizens Utility Board, was sifting through mounds of boring documents on arcane energy matters when he found records he says suggest that Peoples Gas and Enron engaged in questionable transactions during the winter of 2000-’01. “You always hope you find some decent information when you go through materials,” he says. “But in my wildest dreams I never imagined I’d discover this....
This touring program of films runs Friday through Thursday, May 6 through 12, at Facets Cinematheque. Unless otherwise noted, all screenings will be video projection. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-4114. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson built their video documentary about capital punishment around Governor George Ryan’s decision to empty death row before his term ended in January 2003, and the sleekly tooled narrative is so rich with political history, moral argument, and raw emotion that I found myself on the edge of my seat even though I already knew the outcome....
Nicolas Collins likes to refer to what he does as “tickling electronics.” He’s been building his own musical circuits since 1972, when he was 18 years old, and since then he’s established a worldwide reputation as an instrument inventor and composer, creating complex, intricate music with odd jerry-rigged contraptions–most famously a wired trombone that worked as a sound processor, with a speaker driver instead of a mouthpiece and a homemade interface attached to the slide....
When I’m here it reminds me of a time when I followed through on a little fantasy of mine about going up to a complete stranger, kissing him out of the blue, and immediately leaving–no phone numbers, no words exchanged, nothing. One night a friend and I saw this absolutely adorable boy, and she started prodding me–“He’s the one.” I got up the courage to walk up to him and broke my own rule by saying, “Do you have a girlfriend?...
Charles Busch’s 80-minute beach-blanket travesty covers a lot of ground, spoofing Hitchcock films, surfer stereotypes, Eisenhower-era repression, homosexual panic, and the use of mental illness as a plot device. Perkily irreverent, Busch’s one-act requires unstoppable energy and well-targeted mugging to ride the waves of comedy to the shore of success, and Michael Buino’s affectionate staging for A Reasonable Facsimile Theatre Company captures the craziness. Tina Haglund patents Tinsel Town buyer’s remorse as a runaway Marilyn Monroe-style movie star, Steve Hickson rampages from one B-movie cliche to another as a Malibu matron with a Technicolor past, and Steve Truncale exudes beatnik wisdom as Kanaka, the philosopher who can hang five....
This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/4. This year features two full-length trilogies, “The Madelyn Trilogy” by Beau O’Reilly and the “Danger Face Trilogy” by Idris Goodwin. Admission is $15 or “pay what you can,” except where noted. Performances take place at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, and the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, and elsewhere as noted below....
You might expect the title of Robert Pollard’s second post-GBV studio album, Normal Happiness (Merge), to be at least a little ironic. But he actually plays its 16 songs completely straight, sounding giddy as a teenager hopped up on Red Bull and hormones, spazzing out to the Raspberries in front of a mirror. There’s no middle-aged, been-around-the-block self-consciousness to the songs, even when he’s plumbing piano-driven country blues on “Serious Bird Woman (You Turn Me On)” or darkly pouting on “Give Up the Grape....
