Thanks for “A Year Without Journalism” [December 30] and its elitist response to the blogger and Internet advertising challenge, as if bloggers aren’t journalists too. The same self-serving cries were heard from the monasteries when Gutenberg printed his Bible with movable type. And from the movie industry when television came along. But we’re not going […]
Tag: Vol. 35 No. 15
Issue of Jan. 5 – 11, 2006
Posted inNews & Politics
Tale of a Ticket
A Roscoe Village businessman thinks someone is making him pay for being a pest.
Posted inArts & Culture
Patricia Barber
Listeners who’ve witnessed Patricia Barber’s evolution from a superb jazz pianist to an arresting vocalist–and more recently into a full-fledged writer of musical commentary–won’t blanch at her latest project: an 11-piece song cycle inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The product of the Guggenheim fellowship she received in 2003, Mythologies is wildly eclectic, employing a variety of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
This Checks Out
Mike [Miner]: I want to attempt to set the record straight and end all the nonsense of posters, plaques, and reminiscences about who coined the advice to young reporters “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” [Hot Type, December 9]. City News Bureau legend A.A. Dornfeld, better known as Dorny, is continually […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Yearning
This week the Gene Siskel Film Center launches a two-month retrospective on Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse (1905-’69) with two features: the 1952 melodrama Mother (see listings) and this late masterpiece (1964) about a war widow whose beverage store is being supplanted by a supermarket. The film clarifies why Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Queen of All Media
Richard Bluestein may be Chicago’s first podcasting star.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
It’s a staple of ghost stories, horror films, spooky TV shows, and creepy books. And I suppose for someone with a heart condition, it may well be true. But can a young, healthy person be literally scared to death, without any physical cause? –Rebecca S., Seattle For once fiction writers and doctors agree: it’s possible […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Match Point
Woody Allen’s streamlined erotic thriller is similar to his Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) but with more clever and intricate plotting, less rhetorical flab, and no distracting one-liners. An Irish upstart (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) marries into the London aristocracy but betrays his new wife (Emily Mortimer) by having an affair with an American expatriate (Scarlett Johansson) who […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Thank God for Hip-Hop Film Festival & Action Conference
Presented by Kennedy-King College and the Chicago Local Organizing Committee for the 2006 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, this series of screenings, lectures, and panel discussions runs Wednesday, January 11, through Sunday, January 15, at Kennedy-King College, 6800 S. Wentworth. Following are programs through Thursday; for more information visit www.chiloc.com/events.html. WEDNESDAY 11 The Birth of a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Be Here to Love Me
“I think my life will run out before my work does,” singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt predicts in the voice-over that opens this documentary portrait. “I’ve designed it that way.” He wasn’t kidding. When he died of a heart attack in 1997 he’d spent 30 years boozing and courting death (he once jumped off a fourth-floor […]
Posted inArts & Culture
MED, Outerlimitz
Veteran SoCal rapper MED (formerly Medaphoar) rounded up some impressive company on his debut album, Push Comes to Shove (Stones Throw), and the guests wind up outshining the host. Most of the tracks were produced by Madlib, who brings his trademark mix of clipped, bumping beats, soul and jazz samples, and digitized slicing and dicing; […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Best Film of the Past Two Years
And 24 more picks from what the industry thought us yokels could handle in 2005