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Inside the Reader In this week's Reader: We bother with Valentine's Day

Posted by Tal Rosenberg on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 9:00 AM

In this week's Reader, we caved and did a Valentine's Day issue. But it turned out really well, and Julia Thiel, Kevin Warwick, and Sam Worley did an excellent job putting this feature together. Start at our table of contents page and work your way through—I promise that you will be entertained. Come back to the Bleader this week to submit your own responses to I Saw Yous, and check out Regrets Week, next week's edition of "Variations on a Theme."

Michael Miner expounds on the "connection" between Obama and Saul Alinsky.

In Mudville, Mick Dumke ponders why he roots for losers.

And it might be overkill with the Valentine's Day issue, but just in case, here's Savage Love.

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Soul Week / Music Minnie Riperton's "Reasons"

Posted by Miles Raymer on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 8:00 AM

The story of Minnie Riperton's life is all kinds of frustrating. Although she possessed one of the most shockingly beautiful voices in the history of pop music—a tender and supple thing that somehow spanned a physically impressive five-octave range—there were only a few years where she was alive and the world at large cared much at all. The Chicago-based psych-pop-rock-soul outfit Rotary Connection that she fronted early in her career wasn't the commercial A-bomb that Marshall Chess presumably was hoping for when he put it together, and her 1970 solo debut, Come to My Garden, was, upon its release, a straight-up flop. (Both Garden and the Rotary Connection catalog have since found a loving audience in the record geek community.) Despite those setbacks fate, Stevie Wonder, and an Epic Records intern managed to conspire to produce 1974's Perfect Angel—its breakout single "Lovin' You" brought Riperton to the level of fame that she deserved, which she enjoyed until her death from cancer just five years later.

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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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Twitter

AdultMoviesNet: Like a virgin | Performing Arts Review | Chicago Reader http://t.co/iZTaXMHZ
9:31 am on Thursday, February 9 retweet
DatingRockstar: DR's Love Update How do you like them Apples to Apples? http://t.co/cEgyDYpf #speeddating #love
9:31 am on Thursday, February 9 retweet
AdultMoviesinfo: Like a virgin | Performing Arts Review | Chicago Reader http://t.co/UMSgGFeU
9:31 am on Thursday, February 9 retweet
Chi_Humanities: Kudos to composer extraordinaire Anna Clyne! At 30, she beat out all the Brahms of the world for a plum job with CSO: http://t.co/euSltqSF
9:28 am on Thursday, February 9 retweet
pmarg: My feature on composer Anna Clyne, whose "Night Ferry" gets its world premier Friday under the baton of Riccardo Muti: http://t.co/NOlSgC4w
9:27 am on Thursday, February 9 retweet

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Chicago Reader Fiction Issues

Index of the Reader's annual fiction issues since 2000

Savage Love

What are these two old married dudes thinking?

By Dan Savage

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Hyde Park

Lincoln Square & North Center

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Rogers Park & West Ridge

South Loop

Ukrainian Village & East Village

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Agenda

Other Stuff Get Physical The theme of this month's Get Physical dance party by DJs the Fabulous Ladies of Fitness is "love is a battlefield." They'll be spinning "songs of tragedy, love …

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News & Features

Valentine's Day: Why bother? An unlikely ode to the most odious of holidays

By Julia Thiel, Kevin Warwick and Sam Worley

Cheering for losers Even the excellent DePaul women’s basketball team stinks it up when I get behind them

By Mick Dumke

How not to hook up Tales from the Continental's den of 4 AM iniquity

More News & Features …

Music

Anna Clyne scores big Symphonies still prefer dead composers, but Clyne beat the odds to land a plum job with the CSO at the tender age of 30

By Peter Margasak

In Rotation: Jail Flanagan of Forced Into Femininity on pissed-off diva Xina Xurner Plus: Reader music editor Philip Montoro on Finnish black-metal psychonauts Oranssi Pazuzu and composer Charles Joseph Smith on Rockford piano prodigy Emily Bear

Q&A with Ninja of Die Antwoord "We kind of noticed why everyone likes us. It was like, Oh shit, I have a gun and I didn’t know that I had a gun."

By Miles Raymer

Soundboard | More Music …