Friday, May 30, 2014
Old Movies to Watch Now Film Klute, Talk Radio, and other Reader-recommended movies to watch online this week
Posted By Reader staff on 05.30.14 at 11:03 AM
• Orgasm, Inc., Liz Canner's film about female sexuality and the pharmaceutical industry.
• Pi, Darren Aronofsky's debut feature.
• The Fountainhead, King Vidor's Ayn Rand adaptation.
• Klute, Alan Pakula's New Hollywood staple.
• Mary Poppins, the Walt Disney classic.
• Talk Radio, Oliver Stone's drama.
• Tell No One, Guillaume Canet's smash thriller.
$$$ Politics News Everybody knows the parking meter deal stinks—but is it legal?
Posted By Mick Dumke on 05.30.14 at 09:32 AM
Lawyers argued the point once again before a three-judge panel of the Illinois Appellate Court on Thursday. It was the latest round of a lawsuit filed in 2009 by attorney Clint Krislov on behalf of the IVI-IPO, a public-interest group.
Krislov argued that when the city turned over control of the street parking system to Chicago Parking Meters LLC, it unconstitutionally gave up control of its "police powers"—that is, its ability to regulate traffic and parking. He stressed that every time the city changes meter locations or hours, or takes them out of commission for street repairs or neighborhood festivals, it has to compensate the private company. The tab for such "true-up" payments adds up to millions of dollars a year, which severely limits the city's ability to enact public policy, he maintained.
"The city can outsource buying a pencil rather than making one itself," Krislov said. "But it's an entirely different situation for the city to sell the public way and then have to pay every time they make a change. CPM now has a cash flow that the city is obligated to protect."
Education Neighborhoods Politics News Obama College Prep site in doubt
Posted By Steve Bogira on 05.30.14 at 08:30 AM
- Kevin Tanaka/For Sun-Times Media
- 27th Ward alderman Walter Burnett Jr. and Mayor Rahm Emanuel at an el station in Logan Square in December. Burnett says the city is now examining other sites for Obama College Prep.
Alderman Walter Burnett Jr. told me yesterday that the city and school board are seeking a better spot in the neighborhood, which is in his 27th Ward. "We're looking at several different sites to see if any of them are feasible," he said.
Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago Public Schools announced plans for Obama Prep on April 24. The original proposed site—about a block north of Division and a block east of Halsted—has been roundly criticized for two reasons: because it would gobble up a park, and because another selective enrollment school, Payton College Prep, is nearby, and many low-income areas of the city have no selective enrollment high schools. (The Near North Side is one of Chicago's richest neighborhoods.)
The search for a different site is motivated by the park issue and not the equity complaints, Burnett said.
Opening Film Krzysztof Zanussi, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the rest of this week's hard-to-spell screenings
Posted By J.R. Jones on 05.30.14 at 07:35 AM
Do This Arts Reader's Agenda Fri 5/30: Do-Division Street Fest, Festival Del Taco, and Bill Charlap Trio
Posted By Will Greenberg on 05.30.14 at 06:12 AM
- Jose Martinez Jr.
- Oozing Wound
Summertime weekend festivals are off and running with Do-Division Street Fest, which starts today. Hosted in Wicker Park, the event features music, craft vendors, food, and family activities through Sunday. Tonight's performers include High On Fire, Oozing Wound, and Basic Cable.
Tacos aren’t reserved for Tuesdays at this year’s inaugural Festival Del Taco in Little Village. Starting today and running all weekend, food will be plentiful with vendors like Taqueria La Mexicana and La Ciudad providing tortas, tamales, and, of course, tacos. Tonight Grupo Orgullo Guerrerense and Los Chicos Montecarlo perform.
Jazz's elite Bill Charlap Trio plays at the University of Chicago tonight. The Reader's Peter Margasak writes, "These guys aren't pushing the envelope, but they inject the standard repertoire with charged vitality, irresistible swing, and melodic grace—traits in full bloom on their most recent album, 2007's Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note).” Dick Hyman—known for scoring Woody Allen's films, among many others—headlines with a solo set.
For more on these events and others, check out the Reader's daily Agenda page.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Media News On the case for reparations—and the National Review's response
Posted By Michael Miner on 05.29.14 at 04:07 PM
- Rober A. Reeder
- William F. Buckley's National Review reponds to the discussion about discussing reparations.
When I came to Chicago in 1970 one of the big ongoing local stories concerned the legal struggle against those sellers by the Contract Buyers League, which Coates tells us was made up of south-side and west-side blacks "all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation." When they lost in court in 1976, Coates writes, the jury foreman said he hoped the verdict would end "the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense."
The first African slaves in America arrived in Jamestown in 1619. If that's ancient history, 2012 isn't, that being the year Wells Fargo paid $175 million to settle a suit alleging the bank was targeting blacks for predatory home loans. Slavery, says the intro to Coates's story, is a "deep wound that has never been healed or fully atoned for," that rather "has been deepened by years of discrimination, segregation, and racist housing policies that persist to this day." Coates doesn't go so far as to say who should pay whom, and how much. He wants America to confront its past. He wants a soul-searching conversation.
Do This Film Visual Art The first Scored Silent Film Festival hits West Town on Saturday
Posted By Ben Sachs on 05.29.14 at 03:14 PM
As longtime accompanist David Drazin suggested to me earlier this year, the visual language of silent cinema can be so unlike that of contemporary sound films that audiences unfamiliar with the form might embrace it as something totally new. Saturday's event seems like a step in this process of cultural recovery, as it identifies common ground between silent movies and more recent forms of creative expression.
Things I Love Music Oozing Wound and Black Pus ready a split LP
Posted By Luca Cimarusti on 05.29.14 at 02:00 PM
Food Chain Food & Drink Lifting the curse: Chef Kevin McMullen at the Brixton
Posted By Michael Gebert on 05.29.14 at 01:30 PM
- Michael Gebert
- Kevin McMullen at the Brixton
I had reason to stop by the Brixton and talk to Chef Kevin McMullen for something coming up in these pages/pixels—which you'll see in due course—but while I was there I chatted with him for a few minutes about the Andersonville bar-restaurant, which so far has succeeded in lifting what appeared to be a curse on its location.
The building, 5420 N. Clark, was home to the wine bar In Fine Spirits (see it in its old Key Ingredient video here) for a number of years, but then the owners reconcepted it as Premise under former Graham Elliot chef Brian Runge. Despite serving impressive and very interesting food, which might've have brought Andersonville a lot closer to Randolph Street and Logan Square than it has been before or since, Premise's fine dining feel was pretty much a mismatch with the space, which was unmistakably a bar, and it closed in only a few months.
Brasserie 54, an outpost of the LM Bistro group, followed but provoked little excitement. Meanwhile McMullen, who by then had left El Ideas, was working at Longman & Eagle and was set to be part of the team opening the same company's Dusek's. Then the space on Clark was taken over by Tim Casey and Ted Webler, who own the Drum and Monkey on Taylor Street.
Media Sports News Hawks, night editors rise to test
Posted By Michael Miner on 05.29.14 at 12:35 PM
In the Sun-Times: SECOND WIN
Which in its quiet way is really nifty. In the Tribune:
Old man winner
And the problem with that is this is late May.
Then again, the Trib came up with this one online:
Handzus stars in 'The Old Man and the See I Told Ya So'
It's a fiercely competitive art form.
