Rock, Pop, etc. BEACH BOYS Sat 9/14, 7 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay and Lake Cook Rds., Highland Park. 847-266-5100. CHICAGO LABOR & ARTS FESTIVAL CONCERT Music and poetry on two stages with Amoreys, Bucky Halker & the Complete Unknowns, Home Cookin’, Brenda Cardenas & Sonido Ink (Quieto), Michael Watson, Common Taters, Carlos Cortez, Jimmy Keane & Bohola, Bill Adelman, Ellen Rosner, Kevin Coval/Low End Summit, Kent Foreman, Mars Gamba-Adisa Caulton & others....
Von Freeman’s tenor saxophone sound is one of the glories of Chicago. His style is smartly deceptive: a first-time listener might chalk up his froggy attack, quavery tone, and tendency to lag way behind the beat to imperfect control, but he’s just building suspense. Freeman, now 79, will wander so far from the pulse or key you’d think he can’t possibly find his way home, only to sprint back through the thicket like a gazelle as the clock counts down to zero....
Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My objection is toward the headline on the October 10 issue. In big bold letters the newspaper screamed, “What’s Urdu for ‘We’re Screwed’?” Urdu being my native language, I was drawn to read what was below the headline–“One protection against terrorism is understanding the terrorists. We’ve got a long way to go.” I think such a title was uncalled for, in bad taste, and detrimental to the social harmony in the U....
No meat is allowed in Udupi Palace, a Hindu restaurant on Devon Avenue. But forget about a sense of abstinence or self-denial–Udupi Palace offers food up as a celebration. There are simmering curries, giant rice crepes filled with sumptuous vegetables, and puffy fried bread accompanied by jubilant chickpeas. Clearly something joyous of the culinary kind is transpiring amid the long rows of tables, the unobtrusive opulence of the marble wall tiles, and the shimmering yet discreet chandeliers....
Debbie Dee’s been in the exotic- entertainment industry for 25 years. She knows there’s risk involved. “That’s business,” she says. “There’s no guarantee you’ll make money.” But when Dee, an owner of the south-suburban Club O, got involved with the All American Exotic Dancer Awards, she didn’t think her reputation would be on the line as well. It looked like a golden opportunity–an idea so great it could become an annual event....
If someone wanted to send you a postcard from hell, Patrick Welch would be the best living candidate to paint it. But it might make you want to visit. Welch’s hell is goofy, cryptic, fairly self-aggrandizing, and inviting. In his new show of nearly 100 tiny acrylic paintings, cute little science fiction nightmares drift across wistful reddish skies at dusk; scenes of pulp horror, medical illustrations, and sedate bits of clip art float across backgrounds of cool blues and browns....
Scene: Intersection of Damen, Milwaukee, and North avenues, 1:57 on the morning of Saturday, April 21. The sidewalks are packed with clubgoers. The streets are wet and gleaming from an earlier shower. Three couples, plus or minus a person, stand on the corner in front of the Starbucks coffee shop entertained by one of their number, a WELL-DRESSED MAN who speaks in a loud voice. Two blond masked BANDITS huddle in a doorway between Starbucks and Estelle’s....
I woke up on Sunday morning with one hairless armpit, the result of a lost wager made the night before in a drunken haze. And that wasn’t even the low point of the weekend. That honor goes to the fashion and art show I attended Saturday night at Acme Art Works, the Near Northwest Arts Council’s gallery. The event inaugurated Fusion Projects, a group whose PR calls it “an organization of many artists and fashion designers drawn together into a tight-knit community....
Over the past decade, jazz guitarist and producer Bill Frisell has developed a distinctive take on Americana–one that envelops folk, blues, country, and brass-band music, Stephen Foster, Aaron Copland, and John Hiatt–and pastoral improvisations of his early work on ECM have morphed into a precisely layered pastel twang. On his 1995 album Nashville, Frisell ditched his longtime jazz trio to work with some of country music’s finest pickers, among them dobro master Jerry Douglas and bassist Viktor Krauss....
George Ryan wasn’t the first. University of Chicago law professor Albert Alschuler notes in the University of Chicago Chronicle (January 23): “Governors Alfred E. Smith and Herbert H. Lehman of New York commuted every case where at least one justice of the Court of Appeals had dissented from the court’s affirmation of the death sentence.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mission creep. On January 27 the Illinois Older Worker Information Clearinghouse, a government-funded job-counseling operation based in far downstate Harrisburg, issued a press release heralding its new definition of older workers: “between the ages of 16 and 83....
On a clear, balmy spring afternoon, I called the Park District office to make sure the Burnham Skate Park was open. They said it was, so I loaded Skyler, my 15-year-old son, who was visiting from Wisconsin, into the car and headed into the city. We found about a dozen skateboarders already there. One of them looked like Vin Diesel, only younger and with tattoos. The gate was locked, but the skaters had jumped over it....
As a subculture, stand-up comics are a lot like boxers–highly competitive but united by their love of the art–and this superlative documentary by Christian Charles delves into the world of stand-up with a seriousness and attention to detail matched only by Phil Berger’s book The Last Laugh. After wrapping up his phenomenally successful sitcom and retiring his old act on an HBO special, Jerry Seinfeld went back to the clubs to come up with an hour of new material, a grinding and emotionally draining process that took about a year and taught him that the goodwill accorded him as a beloved TV figure expires after about five minutes onstage....
Confounded by Conflict Benjamin was riding high back then. He’d made his name as a populist crusading for property tax reform. Did Biesen champion him? “Yeah, sure,” says a former Times reporter who, like almost everyone else from the Times I talked to, didn’t want to be named. “The whole paper did. It wasn’t just Robin. It was this whole crusade for tax reform, and the broader theme of fighting the machine, the political establishment....
In recent years the hyperactive reedist David Murray has become increasingly interested in fusing his own postfreedom jazz with exotic and relatively hidden folk traditions from Africa and its diaspora. His 1997 disc Fo Deuk Revue matched his dervishlike improvisations with a grab bag of Senegalese musical styles; 1998’s Creole documented Murray’s visits to Guadeloupe, and featured notable contributions from Guadeloupean drummer Klod Kiavue. On last year’s Yonn-De (all three albums are on the Canadian label Justin Time), Murray returned to this music, called gwo-ka, working again with Kiavue and with vocalist Guy Konket, whose throaty chanting conveys a dry but intrepid passion....
Head Poison Plasticene, which specializes in physical theater, has always waged war on cliches, defying conventions and dashing expectations. Their first piece, the 1995 Doorslam, upended a device that’s launched a thousand comedy routines: opening and closing doors onstage. That show totally frustrated a friend of mine who’s a circus clown: he was shocked that Plasticene didn’t exploit any of the set’s comic potential–there were no doors slammed on hands, no people knocked off their feet when a door unexpectedly opened out....
EDDIE PALMIERI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although it’s hardly a recording for the ages, like the classics Justicia, Sentido, or Palmas, last year’s casual Live! (RMM) is a nice jaunt through the phases of Eddie Palmieri’s career as a Latin-jazz avatar. Born to Puerto Rican parents in Spanish Harlem in 1936, Palmieri initially resisted jazz in favor of salsa, but by the mid-60s, when his group La Perfecta had become a bright light on New York’s salsa scene (it set off a craze for trombone-and-violin-fronted bands, an update of charanga’s trombone-and-flute sound), he’d succumbed to the charms of Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, and Herbie Hancock....
Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I too played euchre while at a midwest college, and I was excited to read Ted Kleine’s take on the card game as played by midwest-college grads in Chicago bars [February 28]. But I found the article’s “farmer’s cards” slant offensive. With all respect to the stoic German farmers who immigrated with the game, euchre as played by my college crowd required more sophistication and acumen than Kleine’s article gives it credit for....
I’m riding to a wedding downstate when I find out about Tony. It’s about 80 degrees outside, and a Louis Jordan CD is on: “Caledonia! Caledonia! What makes your big head so hard?” My friend Dan is driving, and Tony is in the back. It’s pretty quiet in the car. I don’t know Tony that well, but I’ve heard he knows a lot about music, so I idly ask him if Martha and the Vandellas ever had a top-ten hit besides “Nowhere to Run....
Jhumpa Lahiri made a splash in 2000 with her debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, winning that year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but with her first novel, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin), she’s managed to avoid the sophomore jinx. The book examines the marriage of Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli, a young couple from Calcutta trying to make a life in Cambridge, where Ashoke is a doctoral student at MIT. Not only are they far from home and family, more than a little lost and lonely, they’re awaiting the birth of their first child....
Judy in Disguise (With Glasses), Chemically Imbalanced Productions at Frankie J’s MethaDome Theatre. The concept is overflowing with possibilities: best-selling author Judy McClure (Angela Farruggia) keynotes at a conference for writers with low self-esteem, using her own struggles (presented in flashbacks) to illustrate how one can succeed in spite of an unhappy childhood. Farruggia, also the playwright, has produced a comically lost soul with a sweet vulnerability that follows her from youth (practicing dance steps in the mirror, keeping overdeveloped boobs in check) to adulthood (contemplating suicide by an overdose of Denny’s coffee)....
