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Is the musical really back? Was it ever actually gone? Is Chicago seriously the best “modern musical”? These are all questions state more or less implicitly by Future of Classic’s listicle of the Top 10 Modern Movie Musicals. On the one hand, what about Hustle & Flow and the South Park movie? On the other [...]

Yes, real estate in bigger, older cities is awful uncertain in the current climate, but all that seems like so many small fries when compared to the disasters unfolding in many mid-size cities whose ballooning real estate markets were mostly based on projectioons of continuous growth. In a piece chronicling the lightning fast transition from [...]

The annual movie media blitz session came and went with surprisingly few surprises. (Do we say that every year?) With this last little rush for our Weekly Wednesdays list-of-lists we’re officially putting the Oscars to bed for the next ten months.
Sleep well exhausted golden man, know that even though you gave it up to some [...]

Last year, an ambitious plan to redesign the Tappan Zee Bridge just North of New York City got us all excited. After all, bridge construction in this city is basically a once-in-a-century sort of thing, and we had bold hopes for a nifty new bridge design because, let’s face it, nice solid 19th century structures [...]

It seems like most major professional sports teams in the U.S. have undertaken a stadium change in the last ten years. In New York alone we have the new Mets stadium Citi Field, Yankee Stadium, and the Meadowlands’ Jets stadium all under construction. There are also more long term (likely imaginary) plans for a new [...]

As we overdose on inauguration coverage today and tomorrow, we’ll be seeing so many American flags that by Wednesday we’ll think every blank surface is covered in stars and stripes. To complement the plethora of flags in today’s news coverage, we’ve been seeing a lot of a fictional flag being waved lately. All the commercials [...]

Some time ago, in an earlier edition of our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays, we looked at some of the most overt, excessive and unsubtle phallic monuments built by man. While the need to put power, potency and might into concrete (and steel and glass) expression smacks of typical late-capitalist chauvinism, it would be a mistake [...]

With today’s news that Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich was essentially auctioning off President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant senate seat to whomever could promise him and his wife the best career boosts, the Windy City’s historical tendency towards corruption has come full circle (how fitting that such news should break on International Anti-Corruption Day).
With that history [...]