Posts

Braunschweiger, a type of liverwurst that’s usually smoked, has some ardent fans. Stephen Colbert likes it so much that when Martha Stewart appeared on The Colbert Report in 2010, he not only prepared her a snack with the pork sausage, but also licked some off her blouse after she dropped it. Simmons hasn’t lost his taste for braunschweiger over the years. He made two three-pound sausages, and he and his kitchen staff consumed half of one in a single afternoon—and the other half the next afternoon....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Rauner slams GOP Holocaust denier running for local congressional seat Governor Bruce Rauner has slammed Holocaust denier and congressional candidate Arthur Jones. Jones, who is also a white supremacist and anti-Semite, is the only candidate running in the Republican primary for the Third Congressional District seat currently held by Democrat Dan Lipinski. “There is no room for Neo Nazis in American politics. I condemn this man in the strongest possible terms,” the governor said in a statement....

Alamo Shoes 5321 N. Clark 773-784-8936 alamoshoes.com Runner-Up: Nordstrom

Wilson Skate Park

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, December 22, 2016. Richest man in Illinois donates $12 million to separate the lakefront bike and jogging paths Billionaire Ken Griffin has donated $12 million to the Chicago Park District in order to separate the bike and jogging paths on the Lakefront Trail. The gift from Griffin, a major donor to politicians including Governor Bruce Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, will allow the Park District to separate the paths along the entire trail....

Natural realism has been the holy grail of animation since the 1920s, when Winsor McCay established the art of character animation with his groundbreaking Gertie the Dinosaur cartoons, and the 1930s, when Walt Disney elevated it to a new level with the supple, emotionally precise character movement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The quest lives on in the age of 3-D digital animation, when motion-capture technology offers a new frontier in creating hyperrealistic characters....

In a 2013 LA Weekly feature on the flurry of teenage rappers transforming hip-hop using no promotional machinery grander than their own Internet connections, writer Jeff Weiss took a particular interest in one MC: “The most gifted of them all might be Chester Watson, a 16-year-old phenom from St. Louis, who describes himself on Facebook as a ‘producer, playwright and rapper.’” Watson recorded his first mixtape at age 14, after abandoning an intense three-year study of ballet....

Eastland disaster footage On July 24, 1915, the Western Electric Company chartered the steamship SS Eastland to ferry a few thousand employees from downtown Chicago to a company picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. Four stories tall and nearly the length of a football field, the Eastland was as spectacular as the Hindenburg—and just as poorly designed. It capsized on the Chicago River before it even launched, and 844 people died, the greatest loss of life from any tragedy in Chicago history....

Algren and Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All ​ The past year brought not one but two documentary portraits of Nelson Algren, the bard of Division Street: Michael Caplan’s Algren, which premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival last October, and Mark Blottner, Ilko Davidov, and Denis Mueller’s Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All ​ , which debuted here at Gene Siskel Film Center in April....

Admiral Theatre 3940 W. Lawrence 773-478-8263 admiralx.com Runner-Up: Pink Monkey

The Shithole Open Studio Project Finalists: Three Walls, The Martin

Zen Leaf Happy Daze Finalists: Vape Daze, Uncle Stu’s

There are plenty of reasons to leave your house this weekend. Let us help fill your cultural calendar with our list of recommended things to do. Fri 2/21: The touring dance project IN THE WURKZ focuses on the lives of dancers from the west and south sides of Chicago. Capacity is limited; RSVP online. 7 PM, Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island, rebuild-foundation.org, free. Sun 2/23: Uppers and Downers is a celebration of craft beer and coffee culture (sometimes combining both!...

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “For me to buy a colored piece, it has to be specific and bold,” says educator and photographer Rose Velez, a New York City transplant who typically wears black. But due to her current infatuation with the Crescent City—”I’m all about New Orleans,” she says—Velez has been adding more vibrant colors to her wardrobe....

The lesson for today is about taxes—property taxes, to be exact. Others are more willing to share for the common good, but they’re too broke to keep pace with the taxman—or tax person’s—ever-increasing demands. Cook County assessor Fritz Kaegi determines your assessment based on a computer calculation of sales of similar properties in your neighborhood. Obviously, Ricketts’s assessment should have increased, because Big Daddy is worth more than Baby Huey. Especially since Big Daddy’s a “5,000-square-foot North Shore home nestled on a meticulously landscape lot complete with a Japanese-style garden,” as the Tribune put it....

Dear John Adams: Isn’t that great? Didn’t you maybe already think a little bit about it yourself? I love Elton John. I wish him well. But that would be a terrible mistake. But we’ll need a loser baritone for Cruz. I hope we don’t have to import him. If we do, and that would be disgusting, Mexico will pay. We don’t want any immigrants except gorgeous Slovenian sopranos.

Don’t think of Chicago’s Loop art scene as just the city’s pretty face. Of course, Broadway/Times Square is hard to overlook. And those 28.4 million annual visitors? They include not just paying customers but also a guesstimate of how many folks are merely walking around, looking at public art. The research consists of information gathered from nonprofit, for-profit, and government bodies in the Loop area (including 72 arts institutions, 120 public art pieces, and more than 50 architecturally significant buildings), and the results of an online survey conducted between October 15, 2017, and January 15, 2018, that was completed by 12,161 people....

La Luz de un Cigarrillo (literally “the light of a cigarette”) is the Spanish title of Marco Antonio Rodriguez’s play about a troubled man’s return home for his estranged father’s funeral. It’s better than the awkward English title Rodriquez has chosen for the English-language version and more fitting for a play in which characters routinely tamp down their feelings with food and cigarettes. It promises the audience a story as moody, moving, and graceful as a plume of cigarette smoke, and Rodriguez delivers on that promise....