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I Saw You I saw you respond to an I Saw You

Posted by Kevin Warwick on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 6:15 PM

Johnny Sampson

Go ahead and tell me that you've never trolled the Reader's I Saw Yous or Craigslist's Missed Connections, and I probably won't believe you. What if the attractive girl sitting across from you on the Blue Line happened to notice your rugged good looks and wanted to offer a suggestive glance or two over a cup of coffee? It would be a shame for you not to know.

Or maybe you're not even searching for Internet love but simply playing the voyeur and dreaming up responses to side-pocket attempts at romance. Either way, I bet you've clicked through posts that are set in your neighborhood.

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Paranormal / Food Chain / Food & Drink The Asparamancer

Posted by Mike Sula on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 5:07 PM

This was shot last month. Take it with a grain of salt. Everybody knows you don't consult an oracle that uses out of season produce. Video after the jump.

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The Reefer / Politics Memo to Mayor Rahm: You won!

Posted by Ben Joravsky on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 4:26 PM

Believe it or not, I have an old friend who works for the central office at the Chicago Public Schools.

I won't reveal his/her name 'cause if I do, Mayor Emanuel will have a fit and send him/her a dead fish for even talking to me.

I'm not sure what the mayor has against me. It couldn't have been anything I wrote—or over the fact that I went to Evanston while he went to New Trier. Those old high school rivalries last forever!

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Music This week's featured gig poster

Posted by Luca Cimarusti on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 3:43 PM

ARTIST: Dan Grzeca
SHOW: Tortoise and Dent-de-Lion at Empty Bottle on 1/24

MORE ONLINE: dangrzeca.com

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Architecture Irrational exuberance, institutional scale

Posted by Deanna Isaacs on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 3:01 PM

Karla Kaulfuss

The Chicago Tribune recently published an update on the Spertus Institute, which is still in a dicey struggle to "reinvent" itself, five years after opening a striking new building. Working on last week's cover story about another striking new building, Roosevelt University's "vertical campus," also brought Spertus to mind—as the poster child for upgrade fever. The ten-story architectural trophy, which Spertus went deeply into debt to construct, is right next door to the serviceable ten-story building that was its longtime, wholly-owned, previous home.

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Flotsam and Jetsam / Lit & Lectures / Visual Art Saturday is Fluxus Day!

Posted by Sam Worley on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 2:13 PM

Patrick Hoesly

What’s happening this weekend, and it may not be anything at all, is happening at the Chicago Cultural Center, which hosts a day of happenings inspired by Fluxus, the 1960s anti-art movement famous for its bizarre, anarchic “happenings.” George Maciunas coined the term, which is related to the Latin word for “to flow,” in 1961. In a review in the Reader in 1993, Fred Camper noted that Fluxus artists “worked in a wider variety of media than any other ‘movement’ I know of,” and to the extent that people still follow the movement, that’s true—in 2010 the Experimental Sound Studio hosted a Fluxus-inspired musical bike ride. In conjunction with its show "Write Now: Artists and Letterforms," that bastion of avante-gardism the Cultural Center presents Fluxus Day on Fri 2/11 from 11 AM to 5 PM. Some highlights lie beyond the jump.

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Film Gene Siskel Film Center announces schedule for the 15th annual European Union Film Festival

Posted by Ben Sachs on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 1:30 PM

Hors Satan (Outside Satan)

The European Union Film Festival, the city’s best film fest for several years running, begins in three weeks. The Gene Siskel Film Center announced the schedule yesterday (it’s already online), and it’s another commendable program: if I can find the time, I hope to see about two dozen of the 65 titles they have lined up. As usual, the program strikes a balance between crowd-pleasers and more challenging work, with local premieres from some of the most important living filmmakers. Some of this year’s major selections include Outside Satan (Hors Satan), a stark fable by the ever-polarizing Bruno Dumont (L’Humanité, Hadewijch) that Cahiers du cinema listed as one of its top ten films for 2011; a program of shorts by Claire Denis, Jean-Marie Straub, and José Luis Guérin (In the City of Sylvia); and Alps, the latest from Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos.

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Film Oscar-nominated live-action shorts: Time Freak

Posted by J.R. Jones on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 1:00 PM

All this week I'll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for best live-action short, which open Friday at Landmark's Century Centre. Check back this time tomorrow for the next installment.

At ten minutes, Andrew Bowler's Time Freak plays like a pitch film for a feature-length concept comedy, though not a particularly original one. Evan (John Conor Brooke), a young slacker, visits his neurotic inventor friend, Stillman (Michael Nathansan, who has the balefully sad eyes of Zero Mostel), and discovers that he's finally perfected his time machine. In testing it out, however, Stillman has fallen into the habit of continually and self-consciously revising his encounters from the previous day, one with a querulous cashier and the other with a young woman he fancies. "So you haven't made it to ancient Rome?" asks Evan. "Dude," Stillman replies, "I haven't made it past 2:30." Actually the best course of action might have been traveling back to 1992 to forestall production of Groundhog Day. A trailer follows the jump.

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Crickets / Music 12 O'Clock Track: Beauty Pill, "Afrikaner Barista"

Posted by Leor Galil on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:00 PM

Chad Clark

For most folks, Dischord will always be synonymous with the style of punk known as the "D.C. sound." In the 80s that meant hardcore, in the 90s it meant postpunk, and in the aughts things started getting weird—a lot of material Dischord put out challenged every notion of a local sound. Take Beauty Pill, an excellent experimental postrock act fronted by Chad Clark (formerly of Smart Went Crazy) that fuses punk, jazz, hip-hop, funk, and anything else that pops into an irresistible whole.

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