Whoever is posting these jobs is grossly misinformed as to the nature of rock stardom. Or accounting. Or both.

The use of "rock star" has truly ceased to have any meaning in job descriptions (via @triblive). "Dynamo? Rockstar? Badass? Sound like you?"

Um... do I have to take a drug test? If so, which outcome is considered failing?

It's free to attend.

• James Kennedy

Show: Funny Ha-Ha Loves You Readings and performances by James Kennedy (The Order of Odd-Fish), comedian Cameron Esposito, Poetry magazine associate editor Fred Sasaki, and poet Robbie Q. Telfer (Spiking the Sucker Punch), along with short films by Steve Delahoyde. Claire Zulkey (An Off Year) hosts.

6:30-8pm, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia Ave., 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401, $5 suggested donation to benefit Neighborhood Writing Alliance.

Dinner: The Southern The former Chaise Lounge is now the Southern, a more casual bar and restaurant featuring the regional cuisine of chef Cary Taylor (Blackbird, Ambria, Avenues). One of several restaurants that are too new to review.

1840 W. North Ave., 773-342-1840

"I think after the Carothers issue, people are losing confidence in government," Mayor Daley said yesterday, according to the Tribune. "It broke the camel's back."

The camel was apparently in fine health before Carothers pleaded guilty to bribery and tax evasion last week, becoming the latest local elected official to run afoul of the feds.

The camel wasn't at all affected by Daley's complete co-opting of the City Council, his use of patronage workers to bully opponents and win elections, the Duff scandal, the Hired Truck scandal, the illegal hiring scandal, his support for the installation of Todd Stroger as county board president, the decline of city services, the festering murder problem, the deterioration of the CTA, the deterioration of the city parks, the privatization of public space, the privatization of the public schools, the sale of the parking meters, or the use of taxpayer money to subsidize profitable corporations while the rest of us are trying to pay our property taxes or rent.

Joy is not the same thing as simplicity. The Fifth begins and ends in crystalline major-key tonality, but it is a staggeringly unconventional work. The schemata of sonata form dissolve before the listener’s ears; in place of a methodical development of well-defined themes, there is a gradual, incremental evolution of material through trancelike repetitions. The musicologist James Hepokoski, in a monograph on the symphony, calls it “rotational form”; the principal ideas of the work come around again and again, though each time they are transformed in ways both small and large. The themes really assume their true shape only at the end of the rotation—what Hepokoski calls the “telos,” the epiphanic goal. Music becomes a search for meaning within an open-ended structure—an analogue to the spiritual life.

If $1.00 is too rich for your blood, the Civic Orchestra also plays regular completely free ensemble gigs throughout the city, usually on a schedule of two or three different ensembles every week or two; check the CSO calendar for details. The woodwind ensemble plays the National Museum of Mexican Art next Friday; the brass ensemble plays Gage Park the same day.

Hawkins and Humphries spotlight Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, site of the most intact Gullah/Geechee culture, in their documentary The Will to Survive: The Story of the Gullah/Geechee Nation.

It screens for free, Tuesday 2/9 at Noon at Kennedy King College.

Leo's Coney Island of Chicago, the local outlet of a Detroit mainstay for Coney dogs, breakfast, burgers, and other diner standards, opened soft in Lakeview last week; its official opening is Monday, February 15.

Chef Cary Taylor’s regional-American reworking of Chaise Lounge, the Southern, opened Friday, featuring dishes with a southern twist such as duck cassoulet with black-eyed peas. There’s also a decent selection of cocktails (including mint juleps and Planter’s Punch), bourbons, and southern beers at what’s touted as being a “kickass bar.”

Their big hit in the Netherlands during that time was "Dong Dong Diki Diki Dong," an enjoyably ditzy piece of psych pop with one of the most embarrassing titles in rock history. My personal jam of the moment, though, is a few years older and comes from a time when the group had a darker garage sound. "Daddy Buy Me a Girl" is a pretty song, filled out with Autoharp and 12-string guitar, but it's got a bite of menace in its aftertaste that I find addictive. Given that it's a song about a broken-hearted rich kid who's been burned by a gold digger, it only makes sense that the band filmed a video where they take a hot chick to the circus:

There are a couple of problems with the comparison.

Bravo to the great Calumet Fisheries, which was just given one of the James Beard Foundation's America's Classics Awards honoring "small, regional restaurants, watering holes, shacks, lunch counters, and similar down-home eateries that have carved out a special place on the American culinary landscape."

Following last year's feature on No Reservations, the humble south-side shack's profile has blown up quite a bit. But it wasn't always so.

Why are Superbowl commercials, hailed for their creativity, often so casually sexist, racist, and homophobic? Credit the watchful eye of the CBS Standards and Practices department, which ensures that Superbowl ads bring in millions of viewers looking to be shocked—without offending their delicate sensibilities.

To achieve this difficult balance, ad makers are forced to play within a very small range of acceptably “outrageous” topics. Since casual sexism, racism, and homophobia are main sources of shock-jock humor—and since these attitudes are too pervasive to inspire true outrage in the average American—companies compete to put the most creative twist on the lazy stereotyping without going too far off the deep end. And so: CBS bans an ad that shows two gay men kissing, but greenlights several commercials that play off “gay” stuff for laughs. It bans an ad that shows a guy’s head up his own ass, but lets fly a commercial that makes fun of those silly, backward South Asians who answer your tech support calls (racism: officially less controversial than asses). Even the advertisement decried as the most “controversial” of the evening—college football superstar Tim Tebow’s antiabortion ad—concluded not with a politically controversial rallying call for life, but with Tebow totally sacking his own mother. That’s gotta sting!

Continue reading "Why Superbowl Ads Are So Racist, Sexist, and Homophobic">>

• Che Guevara in "Cuba: An African Odyssey"

In her 2007 documentary Cuba: An African Odyssey, Egyptian-French filmmaker Jihan El-Tahri follows Cuba's role in African anticolonialist campaigns, from Che Guevara's failed 1965 bid to oust Belgium from the Congo, to the 450,000 troops Castro committed to take on Portugal, South Africa, and the CIA in Angola.

The second half of Cuba: An African Odyssey screens Monday 2/8 at Biblioteca Popular.

* About which just a couple things:

1. It was an okay game, not a great one, but I did appreciate the goal-line stand and the onside kick. Sean Payton is my Super Bowl MVP.

2. I feel like the Who were sort of the end of the line for halftime shows featuring bands everyone theoretically likes. Since next year the big game is in Dallas, I am expecting country (Faith Hill: 3-1; Tim McGraw: 5-1; Brad Paisley: 10-1) but I'd just as soon go back to the days of marching bands. The obvious pop choice would be either Kanye or Lady Gaga, but I can't see the schoolmarms who run the broadcast getting behind either, even though the latter would be like the Cremaster cycle for the rest of us.

3. For instance re schoolmarmism:

CBS has rejected another Super Bowl ad, this time for telling viewers to "Go to Hell."

The trailer for the epic Electronic Arts' game "Dante's Inferno" contains plenty of scenes of a warrior fighting beasts in the netherworld. But it was the game's widely used marketing tagline that had CBS seeing red.

The commercial will still air, only with the tagline "Hell Awaits" instead.