Results tagged “meta”

Chicago Calling, a collaborative festival linking Chicago-based artists with international friends and counterparts, continues tonight and Saturday, the exclamation point to Chicago Artists Month 2007. The festival as exchange program is perfect for an age where Skype, Google Talk, and unlimited wireless plans have dissolving the distance between us and our European, African, and Asian friends. If you’re commuting through the Thompson Center tonight, stop by the front plaza to hear Jennifer Karmin’s “Beast Poem,”...

Here at Chicagoist, R&B superstar and alleged water-sports enthusiast R. Kelly has given us more than our fill of laughs and head-scratching moments. Now it looks as though the "sexasaurus" has discovered the power of YouTube. His completely staged "Real Talk: Behind the Scenes" is the best meta singsong since Screaming Jay Hawkins had the "Constipation Blues." It's also loaded with profanity, so if you're at work, keep the volume low. "Profanity represents how real...

One of our favorite rock albums of the last year was created by two guys who don’t play a single conventional instrument. To add insult to injury, the gentlemen in question also come from a nation that despises the phrase “freedom fries.” Worse yet? They threw one of our own fair city’s preeminent hip-hop celebrity missionaries into a tizzy when they snatched an MTV Europe award from his hands last year, spiraling said local celeb...

The “Chicago theater season” is as anachronistic as our Columbia House Record Club membership. August was simply a lull before the crush of Fall openings coming to major institutions and their well-funded houses, who'll receive sufficient ink and column inches in the daily and weekly papers. We’re turning an eye to those less heralded venues doubling as rental space, educational resource, and meeting locale. None of these theaters are named after deep-pocketed donors, but that...

Happy Father's Day! For those of you who have dads, are dads, or know dads, this one's for you, from all of us at the Gothamist network." It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by...

October is almost upon us, which means it’s time for cool weather, trick-or-treating and more film festivals than you can shake a sprocket at. The Chicago International Film Festival begins next week with the Humanities, Reeling and Music Box Masascre fests soon to follow. This weekend is the appetizer to that full-course meal as the Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival begins tonight and runs through Sunday. The schedule is impossible to find through their main...

We hear there’s a free show featuring Chicagoist favorites The Assassins and local kids The Redwalls tonight. Now a free show featuring The Assassins would be enough to get our collective panties in a proverbial bunch but there is a nice little added bonus to this evening’s festivities. Chicago homeboy and musical chameleon Chris Holmes is coming into town to DJ this evening’s event. Since moving out West a few years ago Holmes had moved...

After a two month hiatus following the awards show, The Midwest Independent Film Festival is back. On February 7, the festival will host the Chicago premiere of Casting About, a film documenting the casting process of selecting from a pool of aspiring actress auditioning for The Part. It's a meta-movie if we've ever seen such a beast. After looking at an IMDB cast list longer than anything we've ever seen, we fired off a...

Chicagoist doesn’t drive that much (even less since we lost our car keys) so we aren't hip to what’s going on in the world of radio and specifically on NPR. When we heard that Recent Photo had been chosen as a featured song on The All Songs Considered’s Open Mic, we decided to check out what it was. All Songs Considered began because people kept writing in to find out what music was being...

If you missed last year’s The Book of Ralph by John McNally, you missed a great little “meta-memoir” about growing up in the southwest suburbs--but you weren't the only one. The novel--described on its cover as "a fiction"--has just come out in paperback and McNally has started up a tour again and stops in Chicago every day this week, culminating in two big events on Saturday. At 11 am, he’ll be at Duke’s for “the...

The Pre-Show Ah, what to say. Everyone looks so...puffy. We're watching WGN because...well, we can't find the remote honestly. 6:10 PM - Do you even have the right to complain about cheesy presenters if you're watching an Oscar pre-show? Isn't that like visting a dominatrix and complaining about the pain? Still, we have a deep burning hatred of Sam Rubin. 6:17 PM - Hilary Swank going against the grain with no cleavage display. Wearing drapes...