Sunday, September 30, 2012
Weekly Top Five Film The Weekly Top Five: Debuts
Posted by Drew Hunt on 09.30.12 at 04:00 PM
For this post, I decided on the theme of "Top Five Debut Films"—my favorite first features, thereby excluding short films. It also excludes first films that are also a director's only film, so no Night of the Hunter, for instance.
Books Arts Irvine Welsh on Skagboys, Trainspotting, and . . . Miami
Posted by Jerome Ludwig on 09.30.12 at 10:00 AM
- Jeffrey Delannoy
- Irvine Welsh
JL: About Skagboys: Why revisit these characters 20 years later? Were they just kind of stuck in your head? They had more to say?
IW: Yeah, I mean there was a lot of mileage in them. It's a sort of first love kind of thing. They're the first characters I wrote, really, and I kind of identify strongly with them, personally. I wanted to do something with it for a long time, but I just kept putting it off and going to other things and thinking about, you know, the 100,000 words at the beginning of it, which I thought was just a kind of a way of finding my way into the characters and all that. And I thought that it'd be interesting, and it never seemed the right time to do it, and then I thought, 'Well, if I don't do it now, I never will." And I just got this idea of doing the prequel, but making it about what happened to them in Trainspotting. You can't make a kind of "what happened," you have to kind of make it into a kind of "why did it happen?" You know, what happened to them, to make them into heroin addicts, what happened in their community, what happened in the families, what happened within them, you know, in the relationships that they had. So the question is about trying to find the answers, from the individuals looking outward in concentric zones to the families and the communities and the kind of society they were living in and the sort of changes they were experiencing.
Do This The Reader's Agenda: Sun 9/30
Posted by Drew Hunt on 09.30.12 at 06:15 AM
It's nearly October, which of course means Oktoberfest is nigh. Saint Alphonsus Church has the first celebration of the season, featuring authentic German food, music, and, of course, brews.
The fifth annual Chicago Gourmet, taking place this weekend in Millennium Park, features food from more than 100 restaurants and chefs, plus wine, spirits, and beer. Cooking demonstrations, seminars, tastings, and book signings are also part of the festivities.
The Randolph Street Market is one of the largest vintage shopping centers in the city. Everything from clothes to household wares is on sale.
For more on these events and others, check out the Reader's daily Agenda page.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Mudville Adam Dunn HR Watch Recycling Week Sports Baseball prediction update
Posted by Ted Cox on 09.29.12 at 02:00 PM
- Paul Boucher
- Paul Konerko's midseason beaning at the hands of the Cubs' Jeff Samardzija: an omen of what was to come.
Kind of like the Sox themselves, I was flying high for a while only to see my pursuit of the Golden BAT go up in smoke of late.
In the National League, I picked the San Francisco Giants to win the West. Then, I can boast that I picked the Washington Nationals to make the playoffs—although not even I was bold enough to say they'd win the East—and had them in one of the two expanded wild-card slots. Otherwise, though, I had the Milwaukee Brewers in the Central and the Los Angeles Dodgers as the other wild card. I never imagined Dusty Baker wouldn't find a way to screw up the Cincinnati Reds in the Central, and I never expected the Atlanta Braves to right themselves from last year's collapse to make the playoffs. So give me credit for two playoff teams, one in the right position, and I have the Giants to win the pennant, so I'm still alive for the bigger prize.
Do This The Reader's Agenda: Sat 9/29
Posted by Drew Hunt on 09.29.12 at 06:04 AM
The ninth annual Chicago Horror Film Festival is in its second day at the Portage Theater. Independently produced horror flicks will screen all day, with appearances from the directors and actors who made them.
The legendary Mission of Burma, who penned the postpunk anthems "Academy Fight Song," and "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," stop by Lincoln Hall in support of their latest LP, Unsound, which Bill Meyer says "includes some of the trickiest and most complicated music Burma has ever played."
Cartoonist Chris Ware appears at Riverfront Theater to talk about his new graphic work, Building Stories, as part of Printers Row Live.
For more on these events and others, check out the Reader's daily Agenda page.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Gross Media Buzzfeed wants you to look cool
Posted by Asher Klein on 09.28.12 at 06:00 PM
- via Buzzfeed
Anyway, I've been curious to know what they put in the water over there that they're doing so well, so I stopped in at a Social Week Chicago talk given Monday by the website's chief revenue officer, Andy Wiedlin, about how Buzzfeed tries to connect its advertisers with its audience. The site has a pretty plausible theory on the mechanics of article sharing on the Web, which every Internet user can probably learn from.
Music Post No Bills Saturday: The uncivil noise of Australia's Slug Guts
Posted by Peter Margasak on 09.28.12 at 05:22 PM
Music Post No Bills The rise of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival
Posted by Peter Margasak on 09.28.12 at 04:13 PM
Foreign Film This week in New German Cinema
Posted by Ben Sachs on 09.28.12 at 03:36 PM
New German Cinema was as much an act of cultural intervention as an aesthetic breakthrough, confronting buried traumas in the national culture that included not only Nazism but social inequalities within the postwar Federal Republic. If you'd like to learn more about it, I'd recommend reading Candice Wirt's recent essay at Mubi.com, which explains the origins of the movement (incidentally, the Oberhausen Manifesto, which introduced its goals to the world, was written almost exactly 50 years ago this week). And on Sunday night the Nightingale will screen Studies for the Decay of the West, a 2010 work by Klaus Wyborny , another lesser-known member of the group.
Theater Arts Comedy Dance Good People and bad dads: new performing arts reviews
Posted by Meg Pier on 09.28.12 at 02:45 PM
The Reader recommends Woyzeck on the Highveld at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Handspring Puppet Theatre transposes George Buchner's tale of alienation and murder from 19th-century Germany to South Africa during the apartheid era, using artfully crafted puppets and resonant projected animations to create what Tony Adler calls "a mournful, gorgeous progress through the lumpen tragedy."
Meanwhile, Adler laments that the progress through Goodman Theatre's Sweet Bird of Youth can't be as satisfying. Director David Cromer seems to have been overwhelmed by Tennessee Williams's 1959 play, which leaves "no one and nothing" to rein in its "unmitigated, excessive Williamsishness." Adler finds Mary-Arrchie Theatre's Geography of a Horse Dreamer indulgent and I Love Lucy Live on Stage pointless.
David Lindsay-Abaire's new play, Good People, suggests that he may yet prove himself worthy of the Pulitzer Prize he won back in 2007, for the awful Rabbit Hole. Still, Justin Hayford says only the last half hour is truly gripping.
