Ray Pride

Amid the low ceilings and mirrored walls of Maxim's, a magazine was turning 10 for a room filled largely with clever almost-thirtysomethings. The most authentically Chicago moment at Friday night's tenth-anniversary party for local slick Stop Smiling came right at the door for me, when veteran Chicago journalist Rick Kogan, out front of the Lincoln Park space snagging a fag, cocked a snoot at my oversized winter Icelandic hat as if it were a drunken alderman's toupee. In the Maxim's Goethe Street basement space, managed by the city's Cultural Affairs department, the room's disco past was unmistakable, with Chicago Film Festival honcho Michael Kutza on hand to affirm that there was a blurry 1960s (or was it 1970s?) history that even he didn't remember. The mix of new flesh and long memories suits Stop Smiling's Chicago-centrism, with the recent locally themed issue demonstrating keen curiosity about earlier days (and the current Daley). Near the branded open bar, a grand piano is shuttered but layered with back numbers. A DJ spins in one room, Fred Lonberg-Holm and fellow musicians cover Sun Ra in the other. Low ceilings and mirrored walls amp the time capsule Hef-osity of the pseudo Art Nouveau trappings. Women in dark cocktail garb make a field of heels, cleavage, bared shoulders, eccentric tattoos. Thrill Jockey's Bettina Richards and music publicist Kathryn Frazier cross paths. A local columnist pirouettes a sweet zebra-stripe dress neatly for one photographer. Two of the city's best-known horn-rimmed figures are odd bookends, Ira Glass in a smooth chalk stripe suit talking to Lumpen's Ed Marszewski, wearing a luau-bright guayabera. And the man behind the magazine that wants to be a party? JC Gabel is smiling.

(2006-03-07)

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