Six months ago the city set up a $12 million fund earmarked for compensation in cases of patronage-related job discrimination. Since then, 1,451 claims have come rolling in. No doubt at least a few of them are pretty unusual. But perhaps the most unusual comes from a guy you’ve read about here before: Jay Stone, hypnotherapist, political activist, and son of one of Mayor Daley’s closest City Council allies, longtime 50th Ward alderman Berny Stone....
Zizek! An excruciating moment near the end of this crisp, compelling documentary, screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week, shows the adulation Zizek constantly receives and the way he deals with it. After yet another high-energy lecture to yet another oversize audience about the insidiousness of liberal capitalist ideology–an ideology that pretends it isn’t one–a fan interrupts him in the midst of a semiprivate conversation to give him a one-way hug....
A Prairie-style place on a big corner lot, Kim Mitseff’s house could easily melt into its Oak Park neighborhood. But on May 5, it was pretty hard to miss. There was a rockabilly band playing in the backyard right next to a big wooden half-pipe. A trailer full of white marble pebbles was parked at the curb, and these big palm-frondy sort of lamppost things led up the path to the front door....
Paul Weller has long had a bit of stubbornness and stodginess about him–he seems to attract patriarchal-sounding nicknames like the Modfather and the Guv’nor–which may help explain why critics in the UK have been so quick to dismiss him as the dean of dad rock in recent years. (In the current issue of Word magazine he rails against MTV, the Internet, and cell phones.) True, none of the solo albums he’s released since his 1992 debut have the punk fire of the Jam or the jazz-pop eclecticism of the Style Council, but his recent work isn’t as dire as many suggest....
Ray Frewen’s production of Meredith Willson’s quintessential middle-American musical–aided by Gregory Slawko’s colorful, period-perfect costumes and James Zager’s sassy choreography–captures its exuberance, tartness, and mischief. Gene Weygandt is the lovable Professor Harold Hill, sauntering through River City with a great sense of rhythm and self-assured charm as he rips off the citizens for uniforms and instruments the kids will never play (though someone should slip him a Red Bull before high-powered numbers like “Trouble” and “Seventy-Six Trombones”)....
What would make you leave the country you call home? When does your sense of right and wrong override your desire for comfort and familiarity? I draw the line at abortion. If it becomes illegal again, I’m out of here. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In some ways Jane was alarmingly informal, from the limited medical training to the hush-hush shuffling between venues to the striped sheets on the beds, but they used sterilized equipment and administered drugs with medical precision....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August the New Yorker had a terrific article about the widespread trade in bunko olive oil, which gave me a newfound respect for the Cretan stuff I’ve been buying lately at Andy’s Fruit Ranch. Terra Creta Extra Virgin isn’t going to make you fly, but it’s OK for everyday use. It is fun to play with. By plugging your bottle’s five-digit lot number into the company’s Web site you can get all kinds of specific information about the particular oil you’re dressing your salad with, starting with a satellite photo of the grove it came from in Crete’s northwestern Kolymvari region....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Besides, Mitchell identifies far too many culprits for baseball to punish. “Obviously the players who used performance enhancing drugs are responsible for their actions,” he wrote. “But they did not act in a vacuum. Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades–Commissioners, club officials, the Players Association, and players–shares to some extent in the responsibility for the steroids era....
The officers in each of the city’s police beats hold a meeting every month with a neighborhood volunteer known as a “beat facilitator” and anyone else who decides to come by. (Meeting dates, times, and places are posted on the department’s Web site.) Generally the sessions consist of a police update on recent crime statistics from the area, complaints or questions about criminal activity or police inaction from residents, and pledges from the cops that they’re all over it....
No nation outside the U.S. has a longer jazz history than France, home to Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, Europe’s first bona fide jazzmen. It’s been a continuing source of major artists ever since then, from Jean-Luc Ponty in the 60s to Michel Petrucciani in the 80s to Jean-Michel Pilc in this decade. You can include bass clarinetist Denis Colin in that group, though unlike his predecessors he’s made a career out of skewing away from France’s jazz tradition....
Deb Olin Unferth used to have a problem with goals. “I never had access to normal values, like how to be successful or have satisfying jobs,” says the 35-year-old writer. “I was against goals; I felt like pointing yourself in a direction was so American, so simpleminded.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unferth grew up in Chicago and the northern suburbs; her father was a Chicago landlord who once, when she was very young, took the family on a road trip to Mexico and Central America....
Voiceover is a friggin’ sweet gig if you can get it,” says Alex Borstein. “Here I am, a chubby little Jew from Deerfield, Illinois, and I can play anything I want.” On the animated sitcom Family Guy, Borstein (a sketch comedy veteran and former MADtv cast member) provides the nasal voice of Lois, wife of bumbling title character Peter Griffin, as well as such supporting roles as black neighbor Loretta and token-Asian TV reporter Tricia Takanawa....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The whole gastroworld is waiting breathlessly–or so hypes the hype–for reviews of chef Gordon Ramsay’s first U.S. restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at The London, which launched last Thursday night in New York. The restaurant, Ramsay’s tenth, opened with small formal and casual dining rooms in the London NYC Hotel (formerly the Righa Royal) that, Ramsay notes pithily, must earn their keep, but good: “The till has to start working,” Ramsay told the AP....
Secret Window I’ve seen four movie adaptations of Stephen King books that have writers as heroes–The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), The Dark Half (1993), and now Secret Window–and I know of a few others. This isn’t necessarily self-indulgent on King’s part. An author this prolific would eventually run out of material if he didn’t use his own experience as a writer, and besides I happen to prefer the plotlines of The Shining and Misery to those of other King stories I know....
Fairly funny rather than unfairly cute, Second City E.T.C.’s 28th revue begins and ends with wry ballads about the cruelty of cool (“apathy is sexy”) and the usefulness of scapegoats. (But in a flagrant example of hip reductionism, one hapless audience member gets blamed for everything awful in America.) Hit-and-run sketches take aim at the stupidity of intelligent design, fundamentalists, personalized ring tones, self-fulfilling fears, fantasy football, and Chicago’s VA office....
Since expatriating from Belle & Sebastian, where she sang and played cello, Isobel Campbell has flirted with twee on her solo disc Amorino and with indie chamber pop as the front woman of the Gentle Waves. On her latest, Ballad of the Broken Seas (V2), she collaborates with man of many bands Mark Lanegan, whose knowing growl acts as ballast to keep her gauzy, nuanced baby voice from floating off into the sky....
“Losing My Edge,” the 2002 debut single from New York’s LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, was a hilarious satire of hipsters who endlessly claim they were around for seminal moments in music history: “I was there at the first Can show in Cologne … I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan.” But as the double-CD release LCD Soundsystem (DFA/Capitol) shows, the song also provided a list of the ingredients that inform maestro James Murphy’s auteurlike work....
Writer, spoken-word performer, and snow-globe artist Marvin Tate went big and bold as the front man of D-Settlement, a large, chaotic funk party of a band. On his first solo album, Family Swim (IVR), he takes a different tack entirely: with multi-instrumentalist and regular collaborator LeRoy Bach (of Wilco and 5ive Style fame) he creates a subtle hoodoo brew of gospel and cabaret, spiked with a dash of Tom Waits. Walking bass, percussive piano, and soul choruses cast a spell powerful enough to keep even the most feral listener quiet through the spoken-word bits....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January 2004 Charles Gonsoulin of Los Angeles, then 40, attempted to visit a Quebec woman he’d met online two years earlier but was denied entry to Canada because of a 1984 robbery conviction. This February Gonsoulin tried again: he set out from Pembina, North Dakota, planning to sneak across the border on foot and get to Winnipeg (about 70 miles away), where he could catch a bus to Quebec (another 1,600 miles)....
Orphaned at the age of seven, Jorgina Pereira was placed in the care of her godmother in Rio de Janeiro, who worried that her temperamental young charge might try to poison her with arsenic. That was a popular method of dispatching characters on the radionovelas she listened to all day long in the kitchen. So although Pereira was permitted to watch as her guardian prepared food like the national dish, feijoada (black beans simmered for hours with up to seven different beef and pork parts), she was never allowed to cook....
