Tag: Chicago

Green Alley, signed by Richard M Daley

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egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalContentItemAc…

wonder if some of Daley’s naming rights will be revoked, now that he’s no longer Mayor For Life? His name is emblazoned on seemingly 30% of the entire city of Chicago

Without shadows is without magnificence

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Developed in SwankoLab for iPhone using Vinny’s BL94, Vinny’s BL04, Noir Fixer, and Noir Fixer.

Wonder how long the SwankoLab “blue” bug will remain? Has been quite some time now.

Click here for Lightbox version

You can see the erroneous blue tint in the upper right of the photo; amusingly, Riverbend Condominium does have strips of blue lights on their buildings, just not quite like this.

Roger Ebert Is Still Cooking

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Kim Severson spent some time with Roger and Chaz, cooking, and talking, and discussing The Pot, Roger Ebert’s forthcoming book.

But soon, in a flurry of hand gestures, glances, scribbles in a little spiral notebook and patient asides from his wife, Chaz, he’s having a conversation. You’re laughing. And you get to ask the question: How bad do you miss eating?

“For a few days I could think of nothing but root beer,” he said about the weeks after the surgery that removed much of his jaw. He passed through a candy fixation, romancing Red Hots and licorice-flavored Chuckles.

And he circled back time and again to a favorite meal served at Steak ’n Shake, an old-fashioned hamburger chain beloved in his part of the Midwest. When he wrote about it last year on his blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, people saw that the legendary movie critic for The Chicago Sun-Times could also knock out some great food writing.

“A downstate Illinois boy loves the Steak ’n Shake as a Puerto Rican loves rice and beans, an Egyptian loves falafel, a Brit loves banger and mash, an Indian loves tikki ki chaat, a Swede loves herring, a Finn loves reindeer jerky, and a Canadian loves bran muffins,” he wrote. “These matters do not involve taste. They involve a deep-seated conviction that a food is absolutely right, and always has been, and always will be.”

(click to continue reading Roger Ebert on Food – Still Cooking – NYTimes.com.)

Pot O Rice

 I ordered a copy, why not? I have a rice cooker, though I don’t make plain rice in it, only a couple of dishes of my own creation.1 Plain rice is too simple to require a different appliance, and to be honest, I don’t have the counter space for appliances. However, Ebert is a pretty good writer, and that’s enough for me.

Footnotes:
  1. some sort of chile thing, and a vegetable curry of some sort [↩]

ACLU challenges Illinois eavesdropping act

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Continuous Video Recording in Progress

Kudos to the ACLU, the police shouldn’t have rights that citizens don’t.

It’s not unusual or illegal for police officers to flip on a camera as they get out of their squad car to talk to a driver they’ve pulled over.

But in Illinois, a civilian trying to make an audio recording of police in action is breaking the law.

“It’s an unfair and destructive double standard,” said Adam Schwartz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

On Wednesday, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago challenging the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which makes it criminal to record not only private but also public conversations made without consent of all parties.

With cell phones that record audio and video in almost every pocket, the ability to capture public conversations, including those involving the police, is only a click away. That raises the odds any police action could wind up being recorded for posterity.

Opponents of the act say that could be a good thing and certainly shouldn’t lead to criminal charges.

The ACLU argues that the act violates the First Amendment and has been used to thwart people who simply want to monitor police activity.

(click to continue reading ACLU challenges Illinois eavesdropping act – chicagotribune.com.)

and isn’t this backwards?

Illinois is one of only a few states, including Massachusetts and Oregon, where it is illegal to record audio of conversations that take place in public settings without the permission of everyone involved.((unless you are a cop, of course))

Illinois’ eavesdropping ban was extended in 1994 to include open and obvious audio recording, even if it takes place on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists and in a volume audible to the “unassisted human ear.”

The police can record you without asking your permission, but even on a public street, you can’t video them? Ridiculous.

Miami blogger Carlos Miller has been advocating changing these sorts of laws for quite a while. If you read a few postings there, you’ll become progressively more angry at police state tactics.

Chicago – My Kind of Technocracy

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James Warren has lived in Chicago many years longer than I have. I moved to Chicago right as Congressman Rostenkowski was being drummed out of office, so I don’t have many memories of the old Chicago. I of the new Chicago, the Chicago built upon information, upon technology, upon the characteristics that James Warren describes more eloquently than I can.

Urban Archeology

DAN ROSTENKOWSKI, a gin and porterhouse kind of guy, surely would have felt out of place at the Chicago restaurant where President Obama celebrated his 49th birthday the other day.

Mr. Obama went to the celebrity chef Graham Elliot Bowles’s eponymous new joint, which has featured risotto with green apple, Wisconsin cheddar and Nueske bacon, and foie gras dusted with Pop Rocks. It’s one of many dining spots that make this city a destination for foodies, with the now-defunct Gourmet magazine tagging one, Alinea, as America’s best.

Who knew?

The disjunction between the city’s national image and reality was underscored by homages to Mr. Rostenkowski, the longtime Congressional titan who died last week at age 82. He was recalled as a tough, master dealmaker without a college education who brought home the pork and used his link to the city’s Democratic machine to create an imposing don’t-mess-with-me aura.

It played to an overriding caricature of Chicago: bad winters, Al Capone, slimy politics, the lovable loser Cubs. It can be found in the lame narrative advanced by critics of Mr. Obama and his top aides, which portrays them as products of a nefarious, indigenous “Chicago way” of politics in which backstabbing is a fine art.

Lost in the Rostenkowski coverage was this: He came from a very different Chicago than that of Mr. Obama, whose Harvard pedigree, sophistication, itinerant past and cerebral cool are far more in sync with the reality of this new, little-understood city.

(click to continue reading James Warren – My Kind of Technocracy, Chicago – NYTimes.com.)

Impromptu Christopher Wheatley memorial at Avec

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www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/08/firefighter-criticall…

Sad Chicago news while I was away: a firefighter by the name of Chris Wheatley fell 35 feet to his eventual death attempting to put out a grease fire across the street, at Avec. Avec has been closed since, and there are fresh flowers at the spot.

Sean Parnell Knows His Drinking Trivia

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For future reference…

Rainbo Club neon

or most of 2001, I got paid to stumble from bar to bar for a book called The Official Chicago Bar Guide. At the time, I fancied myself Chicago’s top authority on the subject, but the city’s ever-shifting nocturnal scene—and a sudden glut of listings online—rendered my book irrelevant almost immediately. One of the 11 or 12 people who bought it was a Wrigleyville resident named Sean Parnell, who’d been doing his own research for Chicago Bar Project, an exhaustive online bar encyclopedia that kicked my little book’s ass all over the city. I never met him and never forgave him.

Until this past May, that is, when Parnell released Historic Bars of Chicago. One look at the book, which overflows with adoration for Chicago’s taverns and the implausible legends that haunt them, and I knew I had never been anything more than a nightlife dilettante. When I finally met Parnell, 36, over Guinness pints at Brehon Pub (731 N. Wells St.), I was embarrassed to find that he knew every word of my book and had never realized we were at war. He told me about the most underrated bar in town (Cody’s Public House, 1658 W. Barry Ave.); a pub that got its name because it once siphoned beer into its taps directly from the brewery next door (Schaller’s Pump, 3714 S. Halsted St.); and a place where patrons drink shots from an inflatable sheep’s rectum (Friar Tuck, 3010 N. Broadway). But it wasn’t until Parnell quizzed me on bar trivia that I grasped the truth: I’d never known bars—or loved them—quite the way he does

(click to continue reading Chicago Bar Project’s Sean Parnell Knows His Drinking Trivia – Chicago magazine – August 2010 – Chicago.)

I know I’ve blogged about the Chicago Bar Project before1, but it is a pretty cool project. Too bad there isn’t a location based iPhone app…

Footnotes:
  1. disclaimer, I think a few of my photos are still being utilized by Mr. Parnell, with my permission of course. [↩]