I think this was the first time I’d ever been here sober. I was here with a friend at the DJ Spooky show. The show starts and these kids are dancing and I can’t figure out what kind of drugs these kids are on–or if they’re just high on crazy. We didn’t dance, mainly because we were so interested in watching everybody else. My attention was taken by this big, unwieldy guy in a Red Dwarf T-shirt....
The 13th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, continues Friday through Thursday, November 9 through 15. Screenings are at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and by video projection at the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $9; passes are also available for $40 (five screenings) and $80 (twelve screenings). For more information call 773-486-9612. Programs marked with a 4 are highly recommended....
The centerpiece of Sabrina Raaf’s installations and photos at Klein Art Works, Searchstoretrash, is an engaging reminder that art can also be fun. The viewer sits in a chair facing a monitor and holding a remote control that moves a tiny vehicle with a video camera along an elaborate 150-foot roadway that loops along one wall of the gallery. The vehicle’s journey is tracked on the monitor–a goofy mix of low and high tech that’s mirrored in other works....
For Sidney Hamper and his wife, Grace, caretakers of the John H. Vanderpoel Memorial Art Collection, every picture really does tell a story. Take Roscona at Sunrise, a scene of a tall ship in a Venetian harbor that assumes a prominent spot in a back alcove of the Vanderpoel Gallery in Beverly. It was painted in 1892 by marine artist Walter Brown, a friend of the Dutch-born John Vanderpoel, who was an influential teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for more than 30 years....
HIDEOUT BLOCK PARTY 9/22, THE HIDEOUT Late last week after way too much news I ventured out to a couple shows, where I ended up in conversations with club owners who’d had qualms about staying open but had ultimately decided that providing gathering space for their communities might be the most helpful thing they could do. So if you’re looking for something to celebrate, however weakly, consider: September 22 is this year’s autumn equinox; the date of Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale’s 1776 hanging by the British, prior to which he reportedly regretted that he had but one life to give for this country; and the date in 1862 on which a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation was issued....
Playwright Sean Farrell has spent the best years of his life daydreaming. A self-described late bloomer, Farrell bounced around boarding schools in the northeast during his teenage years and reluctantly came to Chicago in 1987 to attend Loyola, the only college that accepted him. During his first year he came so close to failing that he took the next year off, moved back home to Boston, and drove a cab. “The structure of school just wasn’t for me,” he says....
In 1998 cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded the Silk Road Project, whose many artistic and educational programs include the presentation of traditional and classical music from countries along the ancient Eurasian trade route that stretched from Japan to Italy. Sixteen composers have been commissioned to write works that represent, as Ma has emphasized, “meetings” rather than “fusions” of styles from these countries: in a musical fusion, a non-Western idiom often ends up subsumed in a Western one, but Ma is interested in pieces that preserve the integrity and individuality of both....
Acts of War The great accomplishment of Ayers’s new memoir, Fugitive Days: On the Run in America, is to make each step coherent. Where he went as a member of the Weather Underground doesn’t appall him, though what he became might. Years later he watched himself in a documentary made at the time, Underground. “I thought the politics…held up remarkably well,” he writes. “I was embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way....
For 41 years–since before the folk revival of the 60s, since before the Old Town School, since before Bob Dylan made a record–the University of Chicago Folklore Society has brought together legendary and unknown harpsichord pluckers, hog callers, step dancers, shape-note singers, and other practitioners of traditional song and dance under the banner of its annual Folk Festival. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The weekend of the festival is almost always one of the winter’s coldest–an easy beginning for stories carried home by acts visiting from the south....
Chicago’s annual literary festival runs October 1 through 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, tours, and children’s activities at bookstores, public libraries, and other venues. Some events feature the city’s “One Book, One Chicago” selection, Tim O’Brien’s National Book Award-winning novel The Things They Carried. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-747-4300, see www....
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has had some powerfully idiosyncratic mentors; after learning the austere Nordic style at the Sibelius Academy in the late 70s, she studied with British composer Brian Ferneyhough, an advocate of intricate, even brutal complexity, then in the early 80s began a meticulous exploration of tonal colors and textural patterns at IRCAM, Pierre Boulez’s workshop in Paris. But these apprenticeships notwithstanding, she’s developed a distinctive voice of her own, one that hints at each influence without submitting to any of them....
Concentrated Formula Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An investment counselor who also sells art on the Internet, Tabet got sucked in two years ago when sculptor Terrence Karpowicz asked him to build a Web site for the show and then put him on the board. Karpowicz and sculptor Michael Dunbar (head of Illinois’ Art in Architecture program) had cofounded Pier Walk in 1995, initially as a way to exhibit their own work....
Early one morning in late February, David Winner and Virginia Sorrells were sitting in Caribou Coffee on North Broadway, a block and a half from the Jane Addams Center, poring over a two-inch-thick binder. Winner and Sorrells are two of the founding members of Friends of Jane Addams Center, and the binder was the Hull House Association’s just-released Request for Proposals packet, official information about the center compiled for prospective buyers....
Boris Eifman returns to Chicago for the fourth consecutive year with an evening-length ballet that’s a departure for him: the two main characters in Who’s Who are not the larger-than-life historical or literary figures so well suited to his larger-than-life choreography. Where other Eifman dances have featured Hamlet, Tchaikovsky, Don Juan, Moliere, and famous ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, this one focuses on two regular guys, Alex and Max, former dancers with the Russian Imperial Theater who leave the mother country after the revolution of 1917 to find work in the United States....
The casting call is scheduled for 10 AM, but people begin lining up well before then. Joan Philo welcomes them all inside. No point in making them stand around unnecessarily–there’ll be plenty of that if they’re hired. Philo, a freelance film casting director, is rounding up extras for Ali, Michael Mann’s $105-million biography of Muhammad Ali starring Will Smith as Ali, Jamie Foxx as trainer Drew “Bundini” Brown, Mario Van Peebles as Malcolm X, and Jon Voight as Howard Cosell....
I’ve always hated the term world music, not least because it’s an even stupider euphemism than urban music (which is stupid for related reasons): anything that represented the music of the world (as opposed to a particular country, city, ethnic group, or artist) would have to be a hopeless mishmash. Or so I thought, until I heard Detroit’s Immigrant Suns, who don’t so much mash their influences together as roll around in them like an ecstatic mutt, picking up ideas like cockleburs....
From the outside, Adrian Tann’s store, Saiote, looks isolated on its stretch of Milwaukee Avenue. Though it’s just a few blocks north of the fancy boutiques and trendy restaurants near the intersection of North and Damen, it might as well be a world away. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s how Tann hopes you’ll feel when you visit Saiote, the name of which is a variation, he says, on the name of a friend, Masai writer Tepilit Ole Saitoti....
I was reunited with an estranged friend as a result of the 9/11 tragedy. I met Jeanette in 1992; we were both models at the time and we became good friends. We used to club all over the city–especially here, because we liked to reggae. Jeanette moved back to New York in ’95. I visited her there quite often; she had an office in the World Trade Center. Then we had a disagreement and went our separate ways....
On June 21, 1966, 18-year-old Susan Pile and a group of friends lied to their parents, saying they were going out to a sock hop. Instead the Elmhurst teens drove to Poor Richard’s in Old Town, where Andy Warhol’s traveling psychedelic revue, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was beginning a weeklong run. Amid dizzying strobe lights and projections of Warhol’s films and slides, Pile and her pals gyrated to the sounds of the Velvet Underground....
Quang Hong escaped from Vietnam by boat with his family in 1978, when he was four, and studied art at the University of California in Santa Cruz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » before moving to Chicago a few years ago. Today he occasionally sells his paintings on the street or makes sidewalk drawings. He traces his interest in art to the chance discovery of Leonardo da Vinci in a library when he was eight; another major influence was comic books....
