Rock, Pop, etc. BURT BACHARACH Sat 3/10, 8 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie. 847-673-6300. RICHARD BUCKNER, CALIFONE Sat 3/17, 7 and 10 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. 773-728-6000. DJ SIENKIEWICZ with video artist Peter Style; free concert. Sat 3/10, 10 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. TIM HORT Free in-store performance. Sat 3/17, 3:30 PM, Record Emporium, 3346 N....
“Everybody makes it out to be some kind of superhuman feat, and it’s not,” says Randy Neufeld, who has ridden his bike to work all winter, even on the snowiest and coldest days. He’s the executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, so it’s his job to persuade more commuters that bicycle transportation is a safe, nonpolluting, even fun alternative to cars. He only grudgingly admits to having taken a few minor falls or to being cut off and yelled at by angry motorists....
The Mothman Prophecies With Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing, Lucinda Jenney, and Alan Bates. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film is based on John A. Keel’s 1975 book of the same title, about nocturnal sightings of a winged, red-eyed, humanoid being in the vicinity of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, that began November 15, 1966, and ended after the town’s Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing 46 people, on December 15, 1967....
When the Music in the Loft chamber series started a decade ago in the West Loop home of music lover Fredda Hyman, the fledgling Ying Quartet was its very first booking. This weekend, a reunion of sorts will take place, with both the quartet and the series now far better known. The Yings (three brothers and one sister from the North Shore) formed their foursome in 1991. Within three years, they’d nabbed the prestigious Naumburg Award....
For several years, it seems the City of Chicago has been turning itself inside out to create cultural facilities on the south side. It’s provided tax-increment financing for the Beverly Arts Center, quick-take eminent domain authority on behalf of Second City Bronzeville, and support to ETA Creative Arts for a complex on South Chicago Avenue. Yet here’s Dan Peterman operating a south-side arts center, and he can’t even get a building permit....
For seven years southwest-siders have been trying to persuade CTA officials to restore weekend and late-night service on the Douglas branch of the Blue Line. But until recently only one of the four local aldermen was willing to speak up on their behalf. Now, embarrassed by Congressman Luis Gutierrez, they’re all suddenly talking tough–at least for the moment. In the aftermath of the cuts, activists, social service groups, block clubs, and chambers of commerce formed the Blue Line Transit Taskforce....
Though Warren Sonbert was given retrospectives in several cities before dying of AIDS in 1995, his films have rarely screened in Chicago; in fact, this silent, meditative 61-minute odyssey, perhaps his greatest work, may never have been shown here. Completed in 1971, it marked a major shift from his hyperactive, improvisational portraits of friends, intercutting locales from around the world in an extraordinary display of sensual and contrasting imagery–dense fields of flowers, crisp blue skies, warm interiors, the liquid grays of rainy days....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Symphony Orchestra always seems to perk up when its principal guest conductor, Pierre Boulez, comes to town. The maestro has the cleanest baton technique anywhere, and his intimate knowledge of the atonal contemporary works he’s so fond of has helped put the CSO’s most recalcitrant members at ease. Under his exacting hand the ensemble has even transcended the orthodox interpretations of Mahler’s symphonies, emphasizing lucidity and intelligence over lushness and sentiment....
Remember when poor neighborhoods were crowded? Geographer Deborah Popper, writing in the Chicago-based Planning (July): “Population loss in the Northeast, Midwest, and South has meant more open space within cities, often disconcertingly so. Long-term decline has often led to neighborhoods filled with abandoned buildings and overgrown, litter-filled empty lots, where public health hazards and crime flourish….University of Pennsylvania urbanist Witold Rybczynski has argued that we should seek to concentrate the population of seriously declining cities in the most salvageable neighborhoods....
Which city has the most fragmented government? Not Chicago. In American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality Minnesota state senator and polymath Myron Orfield tabulates census data to show that the metropolitan area with the most county, municipality, and township governments per 100,000 residents is Pittsburgh, with 17.7. Chicago places ninth, with only 6.6. Least fragmented, by this measurement, are San Diego (0.7) and Los Angeles and Phoenix (both 1.2). Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Fake ID Lands Trib in Hot Water The story led the July 17 edition of Exito, the Tribune Company’s Spanish-language weekly in Chicago. A much shorter version ran the same day in the Tribune’s Metro section. The subject was the matricula consular, a plastic-coated ID card that the Mexican government, through its consulates in the U.S., issues to Mexican immigrants, including those who are otherwise undocumented. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
San Francisco experimental electronic composer Thomas Day has a master’s from Mills College, has won recognition from Meet the Composer and the American Composers Forum, has written for the Berkeley Symphony, and is currently the sound director for Capacitor, an award-winning “group of interdisciplinary movement artists.” But he’s also collaborated with no-wave vet Arto Lindsay, the New York “illbient” DJ collective Soundlab, and Day-Glo noise folkies Caroliner–and for those times when he really wants to step out of character, he’s created a German alter ego by the name of Hans Grusel....
Twenty years ago London’s Sunday Times said of British poet James Fenton that his uniqueness lay in “having so much to write about,” words that also apply to his Irish contemporary Paul Muldoon. Fenton worked for years as a foreign correspondent for London newspapers, notably in Southeast Asia and Germany; Muldoon spent more than a dozen years as a BBC radio and television producer in Belfast. Both men have worked on opera librettos....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November 2001 police charged 43-year-old Daniel W. Searfoss with using a tiny lens in his shoe, attached to a video camera he carried in a bag, to photograph underneath women’s skirts at a flea market in Brandon, Florida. He’d just finished probation for a similar incident at a Wal-Mart, and after scanning 45 videotapes from his home, police charged him with another incident at a church in Plant City....
Lead Stories In January literature professor James Miller of the University of Western Ontario testified at the child pornography trial of John Robin Sharpe in Vancouver, British Columbia, arguing that Sharpe’s self-published writings were comparable to the work of Dante and Charles Dickens. Miller described Sharpe’s book Sam Paloc’s Boyabuse: Flogging, Fun and Fortitude as “transgressive literature” that “celebrates, in a ritual way, alternative visions of culture” and “reveals the seismic ironies in the new world order associated with globalization....
I came over here from Rostock, Germany, in May of 2002 to learn English. I didn’t know anybody in the city, but after four days I found this bar and they hired me as a bartender. I started that night and quickly learned that all men in this country are desperate for a date. Next to every tip was a business card with a phone number. The only one who didn’t try to pick me up was a regular named Mickey....
Hapgood As physicist Niels Bohr and a cadre of other adventurous quantum physicists postulated in the early part of the 20th century, uncertainty is the foundation of the subatomic world. According to the best known branch of quantum theory, the Copenhagen Interpretation, subatomic entities will behave like particles or waves depending on how they’re measured. In this school of thought, the act of observation is what gives subatomic entities their place in the world; electrons have no position or momentum except when those properties are being observed....
House was born in Chicago, but most of the electronic music produced in town, from T.V. Pow’s laptop improv to Warmdesk’s glitchery, has been experimental–the polar opposite of the old four on the floor. In recent years less abstract sounds have reentered the local mix, courtesy of acts like Telefon Tel Aviv (melodic IDM) and Magas (neoelectro), and now Pulseprogramming. On their recently released second album, Tulsa for One Second (Aesthetics), the duo of Joel Kriske and Marc Hellner (with help from a slew of multimedia assistants) smooth over their skittering beats and electronic flickers with serene synth melodies....
Though it seems like lots of first albums go on record as their creators’ best, I think most bands worth their salt take significantly longer to peak. But if this west-coast group–whose recent A Promise (5 Rue Christine) is only their second full-length–have much higher to climb to reach the top of their game, I’m scared. From the beginning, they’ve expertly set off front man Jamie Stewart’s on-the-edge emotional desperation with jarringly playful sonic experiments, constructing environments where his tremulous whispers and fluttery mutterings can feel, however briefly, cathartic....
Queens rapper 50 Cent rhymes on two of the summer’s biggest hits–Lil’ Kim’s “Magic Stick” and his own “21 Questions”–and if you listen to the songs together you’ll hear the dilemma facing today’s superstar MCs. On “Magic Stick,” 50 invokes his dick’s mesmeric power, claiming “I know if I can hit once, I can hit twice” (though this is overshadowed by Kim’s boast that she can fellate a can of Sprite)....
