This Week's Staff Favorites: Volume 39

Norm Macdonald Live
Remember Norm Macdonald? I love Norm Macdonald. Some people don’t think he’s funny, but I do. If you liked him as the host of  "Weekend Update" on Saturday Night Live, seen the film Dirty Work, or are interested in deadpan interviews with celebrity comedians including Gilbert Godfried, Super Dave, Larry King(?) Andy Dick, and Russell Brand, you should watch the video podcasts on YouTube. He seems like he is intentionally losing sponsors, so watch it while you can before it abruptly ends (like his two short-lived TV shows.

-Mike, Reference

ThinkGeek: Stuff for Smart Masses
Do you have any smart masses in your life?  Is your home overrun with smart masses?  Is your office mate a secret smart mass?  Does your best friend exhibit latent smart mass tendencies?  Perhaps, when you look in a mirror, there’s even a smart mass staring right back at you?!  Well, fret not!  We, er, I mean they (yeah, they, uh huh, them…those ones, over there) aren’t dangerous.  Smart masses are just shy, misunderstood creatures yearning for connection and meaning and any number of the most craptacularly stupendous oddities ever created or collected by humankind.

I’m here to tell you that today is your lucky day.  They made a place for you to find everything you need to calm, distract and befriend any and all smart masses you may find wandering through your life.  ThinkGeek.com has everything (yes, EVERYTHING!) you could ever imagine imagining.  But, I must warn you, once you enter the emporium of geek, you may lose all concept of linear time.  You didn’t realize it but up there, right around the time I typed ‘EVERYTHING’, you lost me for a good thirty minutes as I was sucked into the vortex of awesome oddness.  But, I fought my way back to you even though resistance is, indeed, futile.  I can feel the pull right now…it’s waiting for us.  So, take the quantum leap into a world filled with things you never knew you wanted to want, needed to need or loved to love…join me in Nerdvana.        

- Danielle, Tech Services

Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya
Gary Kamiya riffs on San Francisco's beauty, eccentricities, and cyclical cataclysms in this new book. First, the specs: this seven-by-seven mile square sits on a craggy peninsula on the edge of the continent and hosts seven unpredictable microclimates. It was built by the feverish Gold Rush of 1849, then survived earthquakes in 1906 and 1989, the sudden emptying of Japantown due to Executive Order 9066, the AIDS epidemic, and the silly exuberance of the dot-com boom and its acrid bust. Kamiya, a former cab driver, is a masterful guide who combines a fluid, encyclopedic knowledge with his own madcap experiences. Cool Gray City of Love is wonderful, and it's available from SWAN.

-Megan, Reference

This Week's Staff Favorites: Volume 38

Wither by Lauren DeStefano
While dystopian novels are one of young adult literature's most popular genres, Wither by Lauren DeStefano is a novel marketed as a utopian novel. Wither takes place hundreds of years in the future after a cure for ailments has gone awry. While scientists were able to cure children of any and all diseases, healthy girls began dying at the age of 20 and boys at 25. While scientists are busy looking for the new cure, Rhine Ellery is separated from her twin brother and forced into marriage to bear children. Although Rhine eventually gets along with her shy, somewhat clueless husband, she is horrified to learn what lengths her father-in-law is willing to go to find the cure and begins looking for a way to escape. All the books in The Chemical Garden Trilogy are the perfect antidote to the deluge of violent dystopian books like Veronica Roth's Divergent and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. DeStefano's protagonists are realistic, while the villains are multidimensional, and the plot moves quickly making reading all three books in a sitting entirely plausible. While the book may be better suited to older young adults, the themes and questions that arise throughout concerning women, genetics, family, and responsibility are provocative and substantial.

-Anna, Youth Services

All the World’s a Stage…
 Yes, I’m going to do it.  Prepare yourself.  Banish from your mind all the terrifying memories brought on by the word ‘Bard’.  Forget the forced memorizations.  Forsake the droning, nonsensical interpretations you were wrongly programmed to abhor.  Embrace the fear of the name that could make your brain quake and your eyeballs sweat in mere anticipation.  Baby, it’s Shakespeare time!

I promise, no reading required...not one single word. In fact, I promise an enthralling mix of pageantry, beauty, humor, action, adventure and romance all ending, as is always the case with Shakespeare, in either marriage or death (but, hey, that’s life, right?).  And, as if that’s not enough, it’s all available practically in your own backyard.  Chicago Shakespeare Theater is located right in the middle of Navy Pier and offers a breathtakingly beautiful and surprisingly intimate re-imagining of the original Globe Theater.

This season’s Shakespearean offerings include the comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, a shortened version of the comedic fantasy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the drama, Henry V.  My recommendation for those taking their first steps into the world of masterfully produced Shakespeare is the Short Shakespeare! presentation of Midsummer.  My introduction to this theater and its amazing troupe of actors was through a full length production of that very play complete with a punk-rock fairy world and a pink-haired king of the fairies holding court while the real world slumbers.  It was magical and unforgettable and I promise the experience will be nothing less for you.

So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends...

- Danielle, Tech Services

The Act of Killing
I had the chance to see a screening of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago and I recommend watching it when it comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray on Nov. 25. The film follows a few leaders of a pro-government paramilitary force that killed between 500,000 and 1 million alleged Communists and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1965. Oppenheimer offers the unapologetic murderers a chance to make a celebratory film about their deeds and the proud “gangsters” (as they call themselves) take him up on the offer. The result is a documentary of interviews and behind-the-scenes looks at the disturbing filming process of the gangsters/death squads reenactments. The documentary is a bit disturbing, but well worth the uncomfortable experience. Plus it’s executive producers include Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, so you know it’s a decent documentary.

-Mike, Reference