Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I first took up birding about 15 years ago, what surprised me most was how, well, interesting so many of the common birds suddenly became, the ones I’d always taken for granted—robins, house sparrows, even, every once in a while, pigeons (or “rock doves,” as one of the state’s top birders insisted they be called … no snickering over “flying rats” for this guy)....
Critics in the UK have compared this ensemble comedy to Magnolia, Short Cuts, and Amores perros, but that’s a clear case of oversell: at 105 minutes, it operates on a much smaller scale than any of those ubernarratives. But Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, who wrote the script, has an admirable sense of dramatic proportion that suits his intertwining stories; theater director John Crowley, making his film debut, has a sure hand with his actors; and an excellent cast (including Colm Meaney, Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Macdonald, and Cillian Murphy) enlivens this web of romantic and criminal intrigue, set in a gray suburb of Dublin....
I used to come here when this was Medusa’s, an under-21 club. I was leaving one night with two of my friends and, not surprisingly, we were pretty tanked up. We were staggering down the street toward what I thought was my car when I saw someone in the passenger seat and said to my friends, “That can’t be my car–there’s someone in it.” Just then this guy, who’d been stealing my car stereo, saw us....
A big game is a big game no matter what media shows up, if any [Hot Type, January 16]. People don’t need sportswriters to tell them they have a rivalry with another high school, for example. Athletes and fans create rivalries, not media. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, sportswriters haven’t consistently created heroes since Grantland Rice. And when announcers say, “They’ll talk about this forever,” generally it’s because they have a visceral sense that people will talk about it forever, not because they’re forcing something down the fans’ throats....
The Big Empty Tent Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tullman says he met with Blackman Saturday and agreed to loan him the money, but was later told Blackman’s calls to the union and contractors hadn’t been returned. (A union spokesman says representatives met with Blackman Saturday night and “he didn’t want to come to an agreement.”) “By Monday it was pretty clear time had run out,” Tullman says....
If you saw Syriana you know. Laws get broken, spies tortured, and princes assassinated over oil. Imagine what we’d stoop to if we didn’t have enough of something really important, like water. In Arizona, according to an e-mail sent to me by independent research scientist Alan Christopher, “groundwater reserves are draining at a steadily increasing rate that mirrors the rate of population growth. Even though the groundwater reserves in some areas are enormous, continual pumping eventually drains them....
In 1966 photographer Bob Fitch set up a formal portrait of Martin Luther King. Fitch was working for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (for “five bucks a week and room and board,” he says), and the photo was to be taken at the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. King’s office was too dark, but Fitch spotted something in it he wanted for his shot: a picture of Gandhi hanging near King’s desk....
Tiffany Calvert, who’s showing eight witty paintings at Lisa Boyle, is fascinated by museum dioramas and other extravagantly artificial interiors. During her first year of grad school at Rutgers her interest in medically inspired images, which she’d been doing for years, was waning. When a fellow student asked her what she really cared about, Calvert recalled her “near obsession” with the dioramas at the Field Museum (she lived here from 2000 to 2003) and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (she now lives in New Jersey)....
Jim Thome, the White Sox’ newly acquired slugger, moved along the right-field stands of Arizona’s Tucson Electric Park signing autographs. A product of Peoria, Thome is well-known to Sox fans from his days as a persistent nemesis with the Cleveland Indians, and he wore a big smile as the fans welcomed him. About 20 minutes before the Saint Patrick’s Day spring-training game was to start–it would be played with green bases, though the Sox stuck with their basic black jerseys this year instead of green pinstripes–he moved over to the right-field line to stretch and swing a bat....
You can’t expect Ma and Pa Old Media to be hep to every single popular page on the Web, and say what you will about the quality of DKos, but to admit to never having heard of it is an admission of truly staggering ignorance about the political world and of a general, gross incompetence. Would you trust a Web editor who’s never heard of Google? A sportswriter who didn’t know what steroids were?...
In its 1980s heyday northwest Indiana’s AugustFest brought the Guess Who, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Koko Taylor to industrial Hammond, but in later years it started to draw a seedy crowd. By the time the city canned it in 2000, it was known locally as “CritterFest.” Its replacement, the three-year-old, family-friendly Festival of the Lakes, focuses on the area’s water–lakes Michigan, Wolf, and George. And since the city has been working on turning brownfield sites into green space, the festival highlights those improvements with outdoorsy events....
Anna Joelsdottir discovered she had a hearing impairment when she was in her mid-30s, in about 1982. She was having dinner at home in Reykjavik, Iceland, and her husband asked one of their kids to turn off a game-playing device because of its annoying sound. She couldn’t hear it. Tests revealed that she had a problem with high-frequency sounds, possibly a lifelong condition. “It explained a lot of things,” she says....
Jon Langford & Rob Lentz Take me where the cement grows Certainly the installation does demonstrate a sort of devotion, though, as with many acts of worship, both the motives and the beneficiaries are ambiguous. Take Langford’s paintings. For the most part, each of them focuses on a single Barn Dance star: cowgirl singer Patsy Montana, for example, or square-dance caller Arkie the Arkansas Woodchopper. Langford’s MO is to render a single promotional image of the performer and then doodle around it–cute little country-western icons, flowers, musical notes, whatnot....
Anyone who’s read my writing more than a few times knows that I love music with a sense of place. That’s at least partly because I worry that “place” is a dying concept; I see chain stores, chain fashions, and chain music everywhere I go, from Chicago to my native Virginia to my former residences in urban New York and rural Ohio. So I especially love music that sounds like places I’ve never been, and Alaskan fiddler-poet Ken Waldman works hard at evoking his home state, as if he were the only man charged with bringing its tales down to the lower 48....
On her Rhymesayers debut, The Death of Frequent Flyer, local MC Psalm One demonstrates a remarkable fluidity–she changes moods like they were clothes, though her easygoing swagger is recognizable no matter the outfit. On “Rapper Girls” she decapitates female MCs with lines like “Never be more than that girl who raps good for a girl / But really, those titties is givin’ wood to the world.” But she turns vulnerable on the next track, “The Nine”: “I was a chubby girl, did I mention that fact?...
DIALS 1/30, BEAT KITCHEN On the six tracks of its self-released debut, Sick Times, this Chicago quartet combines garage and new-wave elements into a sound that refuses to be pinned down as merely referential or retro; Emily Dennison ties it all together with snaky organ lines. Guitarist Patti Gran also plays with New Black, and bassist Rebecca Crawford was in the Puta-Pons. CLUMSY LOVERS 1/31, WISE FOOLS PUB A grump might argue that these British Columbians are missing the point of bluegrass by playing it with a drummer–the relentlessly rhythmic music just doesn’t call for one....
The front door of the Park Bait Shop at Montrose Harbor opens toward the water, away from the high-rises that line Marine Drive. White letters nailed to the rust-colored wood spell out everything needed for a day of fishing: nightcrawlers, redworms, minnows, coho bait, tackle, coffee. Inside there’s a doughnut tray for early risers and glass cases full of safety-orange bobbers and sinkers that look like Civil War bullets. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
William Shakespeare was the greatest English-language writer of all time. I know this because everyone says so. Heck, I even read some Shakespeare back in high school. The hitch is simple–I don’t get it. Sure, Willy’s plays are timeless tales of love and revenge and whatnot. Lots of people die in them. These attributes are found all over the place, though. What makes Shakespeare’s work so much better literature than Tom Clancy’s?...
Though Thursday was the first emo-aligned act to achieve major mainstream success, clearing the way for a tsunami of sensitacho dreck, the New Jersey six-piece stands outside the genre it helped bring to the fore. While his eem-peers are busy trying to peel the panties off the white-belt girls in the front row, front man Geoff Rickly is hell-bent on enlightening his fans, even if he winds up alienating them in the process....
Also on the 21st: Wired‘s Ryan Singel, on the invaluable privacy/security blog Threat Level, totally dismembers Klein’s “argument.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tuesday, November 27: Jane Hamsher of the widely-read blog Firedoglake tracks down Klein’s editor, Priscilla Painton, who dismisses Hamsher and hangs up the phone. Wednesday, November 28: The Chicago Tribune–one week after the original article ran and after any reasonable observer will conclude that it was terrible, terrible journalism, something that anyone who even pays a moderate amount of attention to some of the most prominent political bloggers on the Internet would have noticed–publishes a straight excerpt from the article, sans correction....
