1133 N. State 312-911-1001 Named after the round-the-world route flown by Pan Am from 1942 to 1984, this small New York-based travel-accessories chain looks to the most glamorous era of air travel for inspiration, even stocking blue nylon bags emblazoned with the erstwhile airline’s logo. But most of the inventory is explicitly geared to the […]
Tag: Vol. 35 No. 37
Issue of Jun. 8 – 14, 2006
Posted inArts & Culture
Love in the Title
It’s 1999 and 37-year-old Katie’s spending a day in the Irish countryside with her mother, Triona, and grandmother Cat. Only not really. Cat’s dead and Triona’s impossible, so Katie’s communing with their younger selves–who turn out to be no less difficult for being phantasms. Caught in 1964 at 30, Triona’s a withholding priss, while the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Trio Braam de Joode Vatcher
Pianist Michiel Braam is one of the most exciting and prolific composers in jazz, but like most of his peers on the Dutch scene he doesn’t hold his sheet music sacred. In fact, he seems to love running his songs through different permutations, both within a specific group and across formats, from solo to big […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Brightblack Morning Light
I recently heard someone at an art lecture argue that the Manson murders didn’t end the 60s, as Joan Didion contends, but actually kicked off “The 60s,” an era of nu-hippie romanticism that’s now in its fourth decade. Listening to the full-length debut from Brightblack Morning Light, due later this month on Matador, I’m not […]
Posted inMusic
The Empire Builder
Rudy Acosta, the would-be castle dweller who runs the hip-hop label the Legion, has a new major-label deal and a raft of releases ready to go.
Posted inNews & Politics
Can You Spot the Blight?
Insiders say Mayor Daley wants to re-up the Central Loop TIF, a barely overseen slush fund that sucks tax dollars away from schools and other public services in the name of stimulating development.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
No Longer a Parking Garage, Not Yet a Museum; Apple Tree Uprooted; The Keillor-Altman Connection
The Museum of Broadcast Communications is in limbo. Founder Bruce DuMont blames the state.
Posted inArts & Culture
Nudity
Music is hardly an exact science–sometimes things go wrong. Say, for instance, that you’re trying to start a hippie blues band, but then you do some fucked-up amount of acid and all of a sudden you’re in Black Sabbath. Or maybe you and your friends start out trying to play Crypt-style garage stomp, but you […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
I’d like the Straight Dope on one of the great controversies: Who was first to reach the north pole? I lean towards Robert Peary because of Frederick Cook’s background, but is it that simple? –Richard, via e-mail Not unless you’ll take “maybe neither of the above” as an answer–the claims of both men were bitterly […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The DaVinci GayCode
GayCo Productions’ latest revue opens with a brilliant, devastatingly funny political sketch about the literal marriage of church and state and closes with a poignant, amusing bit about women who discover they’re lesbians late in life. But in between there’s only an uneven mix of sluggish moments, banal gags, and sketches that are OK but […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Greg Palast
Muckraking journalist Greg Palast specializes in stories that get disturbingly little play in the U.S. media. In 2001, for example, he was the first to reveal how Florida Republicans used outside contractors to disenfranchise thousands of minority voters in that state, tilting the 2000 election to George W. Bush. Since then he has doggedly pursued […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Golda’s Balcony
William Gibson’s timely one-woman play examines the threat of Mideastern conflict mushrooming into nuclear holocaust. Valerie Harper plays Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974, recounting her crisis of conscience during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when she considered using nukes against the Arabs (the title refers to her observation post in a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tom Verlaine
Marquee Moon, Television’s 1977 debut, has a well-deserved reputation as one of the all-time great rock ‘n’ roll albums: it’s a perfect mix of killer hooks, poetically gritty lyrics, and incendiary, gorgeous guitar interplay. That made it a tough act to follow, and though most of Tom Verlaine’s solo releases contain songs that match Television’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
This Sidewalk Could Kill Your Dog
New York and Boston have gone to great lengths to eliminate “stray voltage,” a phenomenon responsible for death and injury to both animals and people. Though Chicago’s seen at least three such incidents, no similar effort is under way.
Posted inArts & Culture
Pink Mountaintops, Black Angels
Axis of Evol (Jagjaguwar), the latest album from the PINK MOUNTAINTOPS, leans hard into the question of redemption, going so far as to suggest that the answer lies in getting down with God’s son (and I don’t mean Nas). It’s a funny fixation–funny ha-ha and funny strange–because the previous PMs record was a nonstop freakathon […]