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Chicago Reader Politics
Breaking: Goat cheese is flammable
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 16:07OK, so it's not really breaking news—it happened last week. And it's not technically cheese: brunost, also known as gjetost, is made from the whey of goat's milk and is popular in Scandinavia (but while it's sweet, it's usually referred to as cheese).…
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Gig poster of the week
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 13:33
ARTIST: Mathias Valdez
SHOW: Graveyard and the Shrine at Lincoln Hall on 2/5
MORE INFO: lastleafprinting.com
The local media exposes similarities between situations that aren't actually similar at all
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 12:48
The Tribune editorial page and Sun-Times op-ed columnist Steve Huntley both made the same sorry stab at equivalency Tuesday, deriding as Washington shenanigans two very different attempts to alter the political process.
The first was President Obama's attempt to get the National Labor Relations Board up and running again by making three so-called recess appointments to the board a year ago.…
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Reader's Agenda Wed 1/30: Nordic Thunder, The Flying Ace, and Sonia Sotomayor
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 12:10
Looking for something to do today? Agenda's got you covered:
The world's foremost air guitarist, Justin "Nordic Thunder" Howard, melts some faces over at Cobra Lounge.…
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A writer picks at the family scab in Other Desert Cities
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 10:00Goodman Theatre stages Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities. by Zac Thompson "Write as if your parents are dead." That was Philip Roth's tip to Ian McEwan when the younger novelist was just starting out.…
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Solo Jams: ten shows, individually wrapped
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 10:00MPAACT's Solo Jams offers ten late-night, one-person performances. by Hannah Gold There are lots of things it's good to have more than one of, like words to live by and gloves. But MPAACT is out to demonstrate yet again that talented artists can shine individually.…
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Gossip Wolf: A flood of new tapes from Teen River
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 10:00New tapes from Teen River, news from superduo Acteurs (Disappears, White/Light), and more. by J.R. Nelson and Leor Galil This wolf has been a fan of Chicago cassette label Teen River since it launched in late 2011. Its catalog so far contains tapes by postpunk group Toupee, garage-psych band Bigcolour, and bedroom-pop dude J Fernandez, among others, and the six new releases the label has on deck include music by Quicksails (the synth project of Ben Billington, drummer for Tiger Hatchery and Moonrises) and psychedelic prog outfit Cool Memories.…
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Location is everything in the Brazilian drama Neighboring Sounds
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 10:00Neighboring Sounds takes us somewhere real. by J.R. Jones This weekend I had the unhappy experience of catching up with Les Miserables, which suffers from more problems than I can detail here but notably—and fatally for a period picture—lacks much sense of place. The digital long shots of 19th-century Paris look phony, and because director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech) likes to close in on his warbling actors, the inky interiors seldom register.…
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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris, inventor of musical conduction, dead at 65
Wed, 01/30/2013 - 01:19
This morning great musical thinker Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris passed away at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Fort Hamilton section of Brooklyn following a struggle with cancer. He was 65 years old.…
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The Hamburg Ballet makes its Chicago debut
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 23:00The Hamburg Ballet dances John Neumeier's two-and-a-half hour Nijinsky. by Laura Molzahn The Hamburg Ballet makes its Chicago debut on an epic scale with Nijinsky, a two-and-a-half-hour work by the company's artistic director, John Neumeier. A sixth-grade teacher cemented Neumeier's obsession with incendiary dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky by scolding him for reading Anatole Bourman's The Tragedy of Nijinsky.…
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When an artist dies before he can figure it out
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 22:13
Perhaps there's no good reason why the image of masticated gum on a New York City sidewalk should remind me of a grainy Polaroid depicting a drug-fueled orgy, but it does.
Irving Penn shot the gum—several pieces of it, actually, each crushed into a tiny, self-contained world on the city's filthy pavement.…
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Cleetus Friedman's City Provisions deli closes
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 21:03
Last night chef Cleetus Friedman announced that City Provisions, his Ravenswood deli and catering company, would close—effective immediately. No nostalgic last days of business or closeout sales here.…
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This month at the Logan Theatre: Grab bag VHS titles and more
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 20:31
Tomorrow nightA week from tomorrow the Logan Theatre launches a new late-night series called Wednesday Rewind. The series, slated to occur weekly at 10:30 PM, will be devoted to weird or otherwise obscure items from the 70s and 80s.…
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Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake reunite in the top ten
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 20:00
The ongoing collision between mainstream pop and underground club music began in the early aughts when megastars like Britney Spears began recording noisy, aggressively dance-floor-focused singles that bore the avant garde influence of electroclash producers, and DJs responded by making tracks like "Toxic" and Justin Timberlake's "My Love" staples at even the edgiest, most secretive club nights. Now, with ur-hipster Diplo at very near the top of the pop music A-list and relatively obscure EDM artists signing marquee recording deals, it can be hard to remember exactly how strange and unprecedented this felt at the time.…
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Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 19:02
"The discovery of an unpublished manuscript by John H. Watson may well engender in the world of letters as much skepticism as surprise," Nicholas Meyer wrote in his introduction to The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, his mock Sherlock Holmes adventure that shot up the best seller charts in fall 1974. The book is beautifully done, nicely re-creating the Victorian prose of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories but bending it to a wacky narrative in which Dr. Watson, fearing Holmes's cocaine addiction is about to take him over the edge, delivers him to the care of Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna.…
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12 O'Clock Track: Cakes da Killa's E-40-ish "Goodies"
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 18:00
Cakes da Killa's already been lumped in with Le1f, Mykki Blanco, and all of the other gay New York rappers that other gay New York rappers always get compared to. But on "Goodies," the first single from The Eulogy—his Mishka-sponsored follow-up to 2011's Easy Bake Oven—he most closely resembles the Bay Area's E-40, with whom he shares a taste for bouncy beats and cramming as many syllables as possible into every bar.…
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Did you read about Ray Lewis, Richard Nixon, and an Iranian monkey in space?
Tue, 01/29/2013 - 17:13
Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us.
Hey, did you read:
• Thomas Mallon in the New Yorker on Richard Nixon? —Steve Bogira
• That publications should intervene early and often in their stories' comments sections—lest the conversation derail, leading readers to confuse trolls' commentary with the story itself?…
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