A Night at the Stone Burlesk Info 773-472-3492 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Stone was in business for close to 50 years, and during that time Milton assembled a remarkable archive of film and burlesque ephemera. “He was a complete pack rat,” Matthew says. Included in his trove were boxes and boxes of vintage lobby posters, scores of nudie mags, and, by Matthew’s count, more than 10,000 adult film shorts....
I’ve been dating a wonderful guy for four months. He’s 41, I’m 37. We enjoy each other’s company immensely; we laugh a lot and he fucks like a champ–definitely a keeper. But I have a couple issues with him that I don’t know how to broach. He has a dental bridge that looks like it’s in serious need of a change. He also uses his floor as his closet, and his apartment isn’t always tidy....
In Robert Koon’s new play, the stranger who comes to town is death, and the focus is its impact on the dead woman’s ex-husband and sister. John Dewey is a professor burdened with the philosopher’s name who was cashiered for plagiarizing and handled his disgrace by drinking and wrecking his marriage to Marie. Though he later inherits Marie’s house, receives an unsought offer to write another book, and houses Marie’s resentful sister, Camille, when she volunteers to be his unpaid cook, still he does nothing but drift and despair of salvation....
Here in Chicago we like to invent new, unusual kinds of pizza. That’s because we can’t figure out how to make the regular old kind. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But we Chicagoans are enterprising, can-do people. Because pizza to us is not delightful but disgusting, we keep trying to improve it. Thus we have a number of things called pizza, which in the spirit of this special user’s guide to Chicago, are arranged below into five essential types....
I tend to approach green documentaries with all the enthusiasm of an unemployed logger, but this hard-charging digital video about genetically modified organisms kept me on the edge of my seat with its lucid exposition and frontal assault on Monsanto. Many people see the rapidly expanding use of GMOs as a recipe for disaster; writer-director Deborah Koons Garcia provides a political context by showing how corporations exploit the patenting of genetic variants to increase their hegemony over global agribusiness....
Vacant for seven years, the gorgeous brownstone that formerly housed the Waterfront has finally been restored to its turn-of-the-century beauty by the Sassi family, owners of the new MERLO ON MAPLE (the original Merlo Ristorante is still open in Lincoln Park). “We had so many customers coming from the Gold Coast who asked if we’d open a restaurant closer to them,” says Giampaolo, the Sassi patriarch. The Sassis stripped and stained the building’s oak banisters and floors and built three semiprivate dining rooms–one on each floor–and an inviting bar near the entrance....
This monologue by Glen Berger is an existential comedy akin to Waiting for Godot, full of clues to what is most likely a mystery without solution. As performed by the exceptional Larry Neumann Jr., Berger’s story of a librarian’s quest to determine the origin of a book returned 113 years overdue is even more moving than it is thought provoking, though Neumann also knows how to make the most of the script’s plentiful wit and wordplay....
When residents of Irving Park got wind of the plans hip-hop label owner Rudy Acosta had to build a 42-foot-high castle on the vacant lot he owns overlooking the Kennedy Expressway, they went on the attack, castigating city officials and lawyers for failing to give them adequate notice. Now they’re battling on a second front: in their efforts to kill the castle they’ve made provocative accusations against John Fritchey, a well-connected state representative who’s threatening to sue them for defamation....
I’ve noticed something about artists born in the 80s. It’s as if the Internet has ruined their lives–with all the ugliness of the world at their fingertips, they seem to want to retreat into childhood, and much of their work is suffused with the cheery colors of Saturday-morning cartoons and the naive simplicity of eight-bit video games. Jona Bechtolt, aka YACHT (or Young Americans Challenging High Technology, after a sign he saw on a building in Portland), is one such artist–though ironically he uses some ultra high-tech gear....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Al Casey died last weekend. This isn’t the same Al Casey who was the great jazz guitarist in Fats Waller’s band–he died last year. The Al Casey who just passed away was a different but equally notable musician. I’ll leave the bio info to others, but the gist is that Casey was one of the unsung heroes of 50s and 60s rock ‘n’ roll, and one of the most significant figures in the history of Arizona music, right up there with his pal Lee Hazlewood....
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BUSH Craig Unger (Scribner) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Team B concluded that the CIA had vastly underestimated Soviet power and that supporters of detente were merely assisting the Kremlin’s drive for world domination. It was an imaginative assessment, given that the economy of the USSR was crippled and its military infrastructure was suffering—as CIA officers pointed out....
Of the four short plays in this production, only Shawn Pfautsch’s Ichor is worth recommending. Directed by Nic Dimond and featuring Staci Stoltz and Mike Griggs, this funny, provocative piece about a robot experiencing existential angst explores scientific progress in terms of ego, memory, emotion, and family relationships. But an entertaining, intriguing 20 minutes can’t make up for the other disappointing works. Steve Simoncic’s Discovery Channel is a dull scene about a man considering calling off his wedding; Timothy McCain’s White/Blue is an overstated, drawn-out political piece; and Charles Berg’s An Elegy for Julian Grace, about immortality, criminality, and Hollywood culture, is odd and impenetrable....
Environmentalism is a kind of religion, and that’s OK, William Cronon told an audience of 150 at the Chicago History Museum in late November. Just don’t get fundamentalist about it. To put it another way, Joni Mitchell was wrong: there is no garden, we can’t get back to it, and trying to do so will just make it harder to protect nature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As with Chicago, so with you and me....
The walls of the Newberry Library are decked out in America. Stretched from the ceiling are snow-flecked Idaho pines at dawn, a sky that’s a range of blues on the North Dakota prairie, a cloud exploding over the Montana flatland. The hangings, measuring 10 by 22 feet, were blown up from 35-millimeter negatives–a mite of dust in comparison. “I read the article and ten minutes later the idea was formulated and I started research,” he says....
The first meeting between Marc Falkoff and Mohamed Mohamed Hassan Odaini occurred in a retrofitted storage container, with Odaini’s legs shackled and chained to a bolt in the floor. It was November 2004. Falkoff, who now teaches law at Northern Illinois University, says he was immediately struck by how young the 21-year-old prisoner from Taiz, Yemen, looked–skinny with elfin features and scraggly facial hair–and by how open he seemed: after almost two and a half years at Guantanamo and countless interrogations, he seemed neither wary nor mistrustful of yet another American asking him questions....
Connie Walger sleeps, but Connie Oh!, her performer analogue, does not. Walger explained this to me while her “happy death metal” band, the Fuzzy Bunnies of Death, loaded up the U-Haul van they’d rented for last Friday night’s “Cabaret of the Nameless,” held in a decrepit warehouse full of artists’ studios near Kedzie and Cermak. Connie Walger wears glasses and studies fashion at the International Academy of Design and Technology; Connie Oh!...
Zelienople, Odawas, Jorma Whittaker, Mike Tamburo INFO 773-472-5139 The two of them, along with Christensen’s old friend Brian Harding, had already started Zelienople, and since then they’ve stuck to making music at their own pace–they play out inconsistently, never tour, and haven’t ever bothered recording in a proper studio. Most people have no idea who they are, but over the past few years their haunting, homemade drone pop has emerged as one of the most distinctive sounds in the city....
George and Susan Sullivan are rehabbing their 90-year-old brick three-flat in Rogers Park–gutting it and then some. They want to make it the city’s greenest Arts and Crafts building, as well as the first privately owned multiunit residential rehab in the country to get the federal government’s Energy Star certification. In three years and counting, they’ve caulked, insulated, replaced windows, added brick walls to soak up sunlight, and installed new heating and cooling systems....
So Preckwinkle was shocked to show up for Wednesday’s full council meeting and get the news that the city had called the settlements off, at least for the time being. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Along with many of my other colleagues, we were anxious to vote on this today,” Preckwinkle said after Burke was done. “It should be as clear as we can possibly make it that this [delay] is not the result of city action in any way....
NER*D Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » NER*D’s sophomore release, Fly or Die (Virgin), is a record that could only have been made by somebody who’s got other ways to pay the bills. Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, aka the superproducer team the Neptunes, play all the instruments themselves, and with their plinky piano chords, rudimentary midtempo drumming, and cute three-note guitar solos they sound like the best campus band in Akron busting out the Joe Jackson covers at last call....
