Rock, Pop, etc. CHICAGO MUSIC AWARDS 20th annual awards ceremony with performances by Faze 4, Casper, La Juanta X-Man, Kwiet Storm, Gypsi Fari, Susie Dobbs, Devon Brown, Patty Jo Timmons, and others. Sat 2/10, 8 PM, Congress Hotel, 520 S. Michigan. 312-427-0266 or 312-559-1212. FOREVER PLAID SING-ALONG Audience members are invited to sing along during a performance of the musical Forever Plaid. Sun 2/4, 7 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N....
Oneri Fleita noticed something odd on his first visit to the Cubs’ spring training camp. During his seven years as a minor-league player, coach, and manager in the Baltimore Orioles organization, Fleita had become accustomed to a multitude of Spanish-speaking ballplayers. Indeed, the most talented kid on the field often came from Latin America. So in 1995, after taking a job in the Cubs system, he was confused by the club’s Mesa, Arizona, complex....
A New Animal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The area was already undergoing a contentious transformation, with artists leading the first wave of newcomers looking for large spaces, low rent, and fast transportation to downtown. Happy-Delpech’s Around the Coyote festival proved to be a huge, double-edged success that expedited the gentrification. The artists showcased their work and the neighborhood at the same time, reportedly attracting as many as 150,000 visitors, some of them shopping for apartments....
A Woman’s Place Is on the Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend the results are on display: Estrojam is a four-day nonprofit event combining performances by female or female-fronted acts with female-focused film and video screenings and workshops. If it sounds similar to Ladyfest, Cresswell was hoping you’d notice: “Ladyfest resurrected,” proclaims a flyer for the event, and a page on its Web site calls Estrojam a “sequel” to Ladyfest....
Professors are always late. If there’s one lesson I should have learned during my abortive attempt at graduate school, or from my chronically tardy academic friends, that should have been it. I trace the circumference of the Thompson Center in the drizzle, wondering why I can’t find anybody. Were the organizers too depressed to show up at their own event? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Well, it’s against everything,” Gould deadpans....
Beyond the Pale Alexander says he’s taken that idea to all the Second City theaters: Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, and, opening next month, Las Vegas. (Yet another theater is planned for Cleveland later this year.) The Detroit cast is about 60 percent African-American, and the Vegas spot will feature Detroit’s “best-of” show. But it’s Toronto’s ensemble–a cross section of Asians, Latinos, blacks, and whites–that Alexander sees as a template for the future....
During a quiet moment on Ghost’s new album, Hypnotic Underworld (Drag City), you can clearly hear the sound of pages turning. It’s easy to imagine them as leaves of vellum bound into a massive, dusty, leather-covered tome full of arcane secrets; this Tokyo-based collective, founded by singer and guitarist Masaki Batoh in the mid-80s, makes its home in 60s acid folk and psychedelia, and its sound is always steeped in mysticism....
Rockabilly veteran Matt Lucas, born in Memphis in 1935, grew up in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and while still in grade school began hanging out in jukes and learning the rudiments of blues and jazz drumming. In his early teens he tried to run away from home in a cement mixer he’d stolen, a trip that ended with a 14-month stay in the Missouri Training School for Boys–after which he hit the road in earnest, playing both white and black venues from Watts to East Saint Louis to Calumet City....
Stephen Lapthisophon has always noticed the brown Plexiglas wheelchair lift on the stairs in the entryway to UIC’s Gallery 400. “It’s an awkward, dusty, overlooked structure that goes up three or four steps and is kind of stuck there,” he says. “It struck me that a lot of things that are made for the disabled are often an afterthought, and they end up not being integrated into the whole fabric of the building....
Steve Kordek fished through his desk drawers, looking for a picture of his daughter. “‘Twas here, ‘taint here,” he muttered. “‘Twas here, ‘taint here no more.” Aside from the golf trophies, there were few personal items in his office at Williams Electronics Games, at the corner of Roscoe and California. It looked like an archive of pinball history, with promotional flyers for almost every pin game manufactured since 1932. Outside his window the Chicago River snaked past, and Com Ed transformers loomed overhead....
These two 1999 nature documentaries show a respect for their subjects rare in the genre. Rats documents the power that the rodents wield in New York City, where we see a family abandon its home to them. Director Mark Lewis (Cane Toads) incorporates quirky, telling details–New Yorkers bite each other more frequently than they are bitten by rats–and makes startling use of rat’s-eye-view shots to give the other side’s perspective on the ongoing interspecies war....
Peter Doig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre (2002), the exhibition’s largest painting, at 117 inches wide, can be seen as a commentary on the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In many Friedrichs two figures stand with their backs to us, looking toward a magical city or a distant sunset and leading the viewer’s eye toward a sublime elsewhere. In Doig’s painting two figures face us, and the walkway behind them leads us toward a seemingly infinite waterway and star-studded sky, then curves off to the right, away from that vastness....
“I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,” Walt Whitman wrote. In his solo show Body Blows, Tim Miller dotes on himself too, sharing intimate stories about his adventures as a gay man coming of age in 70s California (land of theme parks and tar pits) and 80s New York (a gritty place overwhelmed by what Miller calls the bloody “deluge” of AIDS). One sweet vignette recounts his first–and only–date with a boy during high school, an evening that climaxed in a traffic accident....
Rock, Pop, Etc. ALANDA COON with pianist Alan Bukowiecki. Fri 5/30, 11 PM, Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont. 773-327-5252. FOO FIGHTERS, CHEVELLE, JEALOUS SOUND Sun 5/25, 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion, 1150 W. Harrison. 312-413-5740 or 312-559-1212. JON LANGFORD & THE ONE-DAY BAND performs at a live taping of This American Life entitled “Lost in America.” Sat 5/31, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-902-1500. MATTER Free in-store performance....
The Difficult Hour Not only was naturalistic theater gray and lifeless in Lagerkvist’s estimation, it was fundamentally hypocritical: actors did a most unnatural thing in ignoring an audience gathered to watch them all evening. Directors expended equal energy trying to make the stage disappear, efforts that reduced Lagerkvist to derisive laughter. “One sits in one of these magnificent, gilded, pleasantly ingenuous playhouses where one really feels the genuine mood and festive anticipation of the theater, and then suddenly the curtain rises, revealing a narrow, brownish, dirty interior on which the director has worked and slaved…to make as exact and natural as possible with rugs on the floor, tables, chairs, fauteuil, chaise lounge, and with people who move slowly and thoughtfully across the stage, carefully and minutely unmasking each other....
It’s 11 on a Wednesday night at Wrigleyville’s Underground Lounge, and the emcee calls Garrett Brown onstage. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t like regular karaoke,” says Scott Shell, who organizes the Underground Lounge’s weekly Rock ‘n’ Roll Karaoke evening. But he says this is something different. “It’s an extreme karaoke night. You’re not singing with a machine; you’re singing with a live band, so the energy is more intense....
Billy Joe Shaver, the guy who wrote every tune on Waylon Jennings’s 1973 classic Honky Tonk Heroes, came back strong in the early 90s with albums like Tramp on Your Street (Zoo). But it’s hard to imagine this key figure in the Texas outlaw movement making that resurgence without the support of his son Eddy’s guitar work. Eddy Shaver had played on just about all of his dad’s records from the early 80s on, but his gritty solos really started landing punches on the later discs, where he added some modern flash to Billy Joe’s country-folk ruminations on drinking, playing, and loving hard....
Friday 11/15 – Thursday 11/21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dancers Nicole LeGette and Becca Hopson interact with more than 100 limes in their butoh-influenced performance piece Constant Constraint. The limes, says LeGette, “stand in for things that are lost or regained.” The piece is featured in a program called What Is Lost, which also includes a new work by Hopson for two dancers and LeGette’s solo performance with a cello....
Friday 2/14 – Thursday 2/20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 15 SATURDAY Over 80 local organizations, ranging from the American Friends Service Committee to Weekly News Pakistan, are sponsoring today’s antiwar march–Chicago’s contribution to the international day of protest against war on Iraq. In addition to mobilizing opposition to the war, the event’s designed to protest and publicize the February 21 deadline imposed by the INS for the registration and fingerprinting of males over 16 from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan....
Cries From the Pit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem is “front fill” speakers. They’re hung on the lip of the stage so audience members in the front can hear the singers and actors even over the sound of the orchestra. But trombonist and former TMA national president Art Linsner (who’s now playing for The Lion King, where it hasn’t been an issue) says they have an escalating effect: “When those front fill speakers get turned up, you unavoidably start playing louder so you can hear yourself over them....
