Though fresh from a painstaking digital face-lift, Martin Scorsese's breakthrough 1970s Masterpiece Taxi Driver is not your typical summer escapist fare. The dark antipode of feel-good Spielbergian kinderfantasie like 8mm, the film is a gorgeous yet repellent head-on confrontation with the violent and sexual energies that crash through films like Transformers stripped of the CGI sheen and sublimation of mechanized bodies to absorb the supposedly cathartic violence. Its anti-hero Travis Bickle is a very different sort of Captain America, as if Steve Rogers had been injected with the bloody muck of My Lai instead of "super soldier serum." more ›

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market... more ›

One of our fellow employees, a lifelong Chicagoan, brought a book to work one day. Unaware that taking in external knowledge was allowed at our office, we took a gander. It was a pictorial book about the Cows on Parade exhibits from 1999, before we ourselves became a permanent fixture in the city. While we thought the cows themselves kind of cheesy (no pun intended), we enjoyed the idea of public art on such a... more ›