“If I watch a game on Sunday and there’s a serious injury, I know the phone’s going to ring,” says Darryl Stingley, at home in his downtown condo. It rang this year when Seattle receiver Darrell Jackson suffered seizures after an on-field collision. It rang again when Pittsburgh quarterback Tommy Maddox was temporarily paralyzed by a hit he can’t remember. “Reporters say, ‘Let’s ask somebody who’s been over the middle,’” says Stingley....
Below the Belt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story is slight: an experienced “checker” at an anonymous factory compound, Hanrahan, is joined by a novice, Dobbitt. But this isn’t your standard kid-assigned-to-a-grizzled-veteran plot: these two have been isolated from their families for an indefinite period of time and share a cell whose beds offer the choice of boiling or freezing and whose typewriter has a defective Y (“Why?...
KAZEM AL SAHER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iraqi singer Kazem Al Saher is one of the most popular vocalists in the Arab world, but while most of his contemporaries, like Egypt’s Amr Diab and Syria’s Mayada El Hennawy, have embraced the heavily synthesized sound of the Cairo hit factory, he’s remained true to the roots of Arabic pop, recording and touring with a real orchestra....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May the Archives of Sexual Behavior published an article by New York University researchers stating that women who abstain from sex or whose partners wear condoms were more frequently depressed and speculating that hormones in semen may enter the bloodstream and make women peppier. Compelling Explanations Claudia Huntey, who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, filed a federal lawsuit in Denver this past April after she was evicted from the Torrey Pines apartment complex....
Mike Magnuson, author, professor, and Wisconsin native, spends nights out drinking Molson in the Cellar in Carbondale, Illinois, his new home. He says it’s the only tavern in town he can stand. One Saturday around ten, students from his classes at Southern Illinois University straggled in and camped around his table. The guys did tequila shots with him; the girls pretended to hate him, then had a few beers and named him the greatest creative writing teacher on earth....
In Genevieve Coleman’s documentary Monday Night at the Rock ‘n Bowl, Diversey River Bowl co-owner Gary Secrest boasts that his lanes were specifically designed to accommodate sloppy drinkers–unlike other alleys that discourage boozing in such proximity to the lane approaches. That advancement in lane technology is just one of the lucky circumstances that led to the evolution of punk rock night at the Rock ‘n’ Bowl, now a raucous but amiable weekly convocation of around 150 kegling punks and their balls....
Decision 2002 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few months ago I responded to a letter from a woman complaining about her boyfriend’s taste in underpants. He wore only tighty whities, and she insisted that they were a major turnoff. I disagreed. On the right man–a slim, boyish, hairless man–TWs are about the sexiest damn thing that can happen to a guy outside of Ashton Kutcher’s mouth....
Schadenfreude, at Wing & Groove Theatre, and the acquaintances, at Wing & Groove Theatre. Amidst a bevy of late-night sketch-comedy revues, Schadenfreude’s latest offering is refreshing. While other troupes are preoccupied with sex, drugs, and bodily functions, this high-caliber company shows there’s more to life to laugh about, presenting an hour-long show that hilariously combines smart satire, cynical observation, and originality. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Acquaintances’ 50-minute sketch-comedy revue precedes Schadenfreude’s at the same venue....
LES CLAYPOOL FROG BRIGADE 7/11, The VIC You might expect a bassist fronting a side project to take the slappin’ and poppin’ approach, showcasing the wanker tendencies that have traditionally made the bass solo an even better time than the drum solo to go to the can. But Primus’s Les Claypool goes another route on his band’s studio debut, Purple Onion (Prawn Song), using the bass’s power to keep a sinister but swinging bottom end on the noodly prog-funk proceedings....
AIR 6/30, THE VIC These French guys were doing well enough with their trippy, campy Moon Safari before their sound track for The Virgin Suicides made them de rigueur at every lava lamp-lit lounge and chain store point-of-purchase display in the country. The kick is that they deserve it: on their new 10,000 Hz Legend (Astralwerks), they move far, far beyond new bachelor-pad chic into their own expansive sound world. They’re unabashedly fond of both Serge Gainsbourg and Kraftwerk, but they float artfully between those sensual and mechanical extremes....
What is New Year’s without the waltz? Throughout Europe, the entire holiday season seems to sway in 3/4 time–especially in Vienna, where the Strausses raised the genre to its artistic and popular zenith in the late 1800s–and the tradition is now being imported here on a massive scale. Building on the success of his previous holiday concerts, Toronto impresario Attila Glatz is presenting “Salute to Vienna” concerts in 33 North American cities over the course of a single week (including 14 performances on New Year’s Day)....
A few thoughts about Tyler Cole’s “We Were Only Freshmen” [June 7], on suicide and the University of Chicago, from an alumna of that college: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curious about what the U. of C. has to say about this phenomenon, I learned in the April 25, 2002, Chicago Weekly News, a campus newspaper, that “guidelines [on handling suicides by students] were being drawn up by the administration under the title ‘When a Student Dies....
With all the news over the past decade about priests sexually abusing young boys, the climactic admission in Ronan Noone’s play is unsurprising. And as we’re waiting for the situation’s full ugliness to be revealed, an uneven cast dulls the drama of discovering the long-term consequences of a priest’s offenses against a classroom of Irish schoolchildren. And yet Michael S. Pieper’s production can be entertaining and affecting. Anthony Cummins and Ehren Fournier are particularly credible as two of the classmates, one a righteous victim seeking justice, or at least acknowledgment, and the other a more broken-down man who wants the past left buried....
Director Paul Leni, whose career was cut short by his death from blood poisoning in 1929, is best remembered for his creaky, campy haunted-house movie The Cat and the Canary, but this elegant Victor Hugo adaptation (1928) gives a much better sense of his considerable dramatic and pictorial talents. Conrad Veidt (the sleepwalking killer in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) plays an English noble who was kidnapped and mutilated by Gypsy slavers as a child and has grown to manhood with his lips carved into a hideous grin....
Toy Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ToyMaker is set up to manufacture souvenir tops with gyroscopes inside. “The main idea was for you to walk away with a personalized Gravitron–with your name on it, the color you want [orange, green, or purple], and today’s date,” McDonald says. The tops are assembled behind glass at 14 stations connected by conveyor belts. Visitors pay $3, log in with a name and color choice, and are assigned a numbered pallet they can follow as the parts are fetched, joined, and welded and the finished product is laser engraved, quality tested, and packaged....
Rock, Pop, Etc. SANDY ANDINA Free in-store performance. Sat 6/28, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 15160 S. La Grange Rd., Orland Park. 708-460-7566. NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS, SHANNON WRIGHT, CHRIS BAILEY See Critic’s Choice. Sat 6/21, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-902-1500. DIGITAL KILL, PSYCHO SCAPEGOAT, SAYLA, DAKOTA/DAKOTA, FETOR, NIX, DEAD RACCOONS and When She Falls, Tragic Vitality, Orefisaurus & Belladonna perform as part of the Music With Meaning series....
Some Irish-Catholic families (like mine) indulge in miniroasts, hilariously recounting the foibles and misdemeanors of each person at the table. Mind you, these are not no-holds-barred sessions. No one ever jokes about the great lapses, this cousin’s unwed pregnancy, that one’s alcoholism–those are saved for much bloodier get-togethers. But the stories do both clear the air and reinforce a sense of family history. It’s the kind of storytelling that monologuist Antonio Sacre, a good Catholic boy, excels at, though he’s also experimented with other forms....
Chicago’s Next Dance Festival For the last 15 years or so, Chicago’s modern dance community has had its own means of social reproduction. A series of programs at the MoMing Dance & Arts Center, starting with the “Dance for $1.98” series, gave brand-new choreographers the opportunity to show their work. When MoMing folded in 1989, Jan Bartoszek of Hedwig Dances took on the task of incubating modern dance talent, producing a series of choreographers’ showcases....
Paul McComas founded Rock Against Depression in 1995, hoping “to both honor the work and legacy of Kurt Cobain and educate his young fans about how to avoid his outcome.” McComas, a writer, performance artist, and musician, and his band–which had until then specialized in punk originals and covers of old X songs–learned a bunch of Nirvana tunes, rechristened themselves “Lithium,” and booked a midwest tour of community centers and other all-ages venues at which McComas, who has himself struggled with depression, talked to the crowd about depression and suicide in between renditions of “Rape Me” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit....
With four completed features and 20 shorts, James Fotopoulos may be the most prolific independent Chicago filmmaker still in his 20s. His best works might be called philosophical horror films; in many of them women’s bodies seem trapped in celluloid prisons, a notion not inappropriate to our image-glutted age. In Growth (1999) two nudes are intercut with rapidly flickering black-and-white frames, and one’s body is outlined by scratches on the film....
