In his article on Margo Guryan [“Scared of Her Own Voice,” May 3] J.R. Jones hazily characterizes Spanky & Our Gang as “one of the coed vocal groups following the Mamas & the Papas on the west coast.” In reality, the group’s sunny sound evolved from working with producers based in New York and Philadelphia. Not insignificantly, Spanky and friends formed and got signed while playing on the folk-club scene in Chicago....
Arms flailing and legs kicking, poet Khari B. can leap from stages and flip from chairs without skipping a beat. “It took a long time for me to realize I did that,” says Khari, who claims he’s often so immersed in his verse that he completely zones out. One night, performing at the now defunct Rituals, he allegedly started spitting, kicked over a table, threw the mike, and kept spitting after the mike went dead....
Presented by IsraFest Foundation, Inc., the Israel Film Festival runs Saturday through Thursday, May 4 through 9, at Landmark’s Century Centre and Renaissance Place, 1850 Second, Highland Park. Tickets for most programs are $9, $6 for seniors and children under 11; weekday shows before 6 are $6. Festival passes, good for five screenings, not including special events, are $36. For more information call 877-966-5566. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in Hebrew with subtitles; films marked with an * are highly recommended....
In 1999 C.C. Carter took top honors at the Guild Complex’s Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Awards with a performance of her signature poem “The Herstory of My Hips,” a loud ‘n’ proud celebration of her full figure and multicultural background. “These hips are for you to snuggle / for you to cuddle,” it runs. “For you to sink into and dream / for you to get lost in all your fantasies / wrap yourself around and let me squeeze you hips / lock you in and yell ‘si mama’ hips....
To open its 50th season the Lyric chose Don Giovanni, that rare unclassifiable opera from its time: equal parts comedy, drama, and tragedy. The philandering don and his story appealed to Mozart, who loved dirty wordplay, but he gave equal attention to his portraits of the other characters: the long-suffering servant Leporello, the wronged women, the peasants. The Lyric spent five years assembling this high-octane cast and production. The versatile Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel is Don Giovanni; he’s been both Giovanni and Leporello, which undoubtedly gives him extra insight into the characters’ relationship....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this month prosecutors in Greenbelt, Maryland, finally charged 55-year-old Josephine Gray with the murders of her first and second husbands, in 1974 and 1990. Law-enforcement officials have long been stymied by witnesses who disappeared or recanted, claiming that Gray would use voodoo on them. One relative of Gray’s second husband said that Gray could control the man as long as he was eating her cooking but that he returned to “his old self” when he ate elsewhere....
Off With the Heads! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The project includes a brief history of the last 30 years of local arts management by Michael Wakeford, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, who conducted interviews with ten established arts leaders. Among them is Nick Rabkin, executive director of the Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, who notes that the city’s oldest institutions were founded by businessmen with deep pockets, while the “second wave,” those organizations founded since the 1960s, tended to be launched by artists with more passion than money....
University of Chicago composer Ralph Shapey, who died last June at age 81, wrote music that elicited strong reactions–positive and negative. Shapey abandoned the early 20th century’s rigid formalism for something more grand and romantic, leading others to label him a “radical traditionalist” and an “abstract expressionist”–both terms he thought appropriate. He was fond of making statements such as “Great art is a miracle” and “Great music is not for the masses,” and he often compared himself to Beethoven....
Living in the south generally means keeping one foot in the past and one watchful eye on the future: the racist dogma of the old south and the economic prosperity of the new butt heads magnificently in every city below the Mason-Dixon Line. Laurie Jo Reynolds’s exhaustive look at two of the often overlooked keystones of Atlanta’s cultural heritage–Helen Keller and the Coca-Cola corporation–reveals equal measures of guilt and optimism. Saving Face illuminates some of the sordid details that tour guides might be inclined to gloss over in Keller’s childhood home or the World of Coca-Cola exhibit: Keller’s socialist stance, Coca-Cola’s cutthroat corporate practices, and the political entanglements of both household names....
As a kid Maia Rosenfeld was always too much: too loud, too flashy, too developed (her first bra, at age 11, was a 36B). No surprise, then, that she spent her adolescent years as an uncool freak. Since then she’s tried to mold herself into something average and “acceptable”–but most recently, as actress Maia Madison, her brash personality has garnered some high-paying acting gigs: when she auditioned for a one-line walk-on in the 2001 sitcom What About Joan, the writers liked her so much they expanded the part into a five-episode recurring character....
In January 2001 a meeting was held in a small savings and loan in Little Village that would change the way U.S. banks dealt with undocumented immigrants who wanted to send money home to their families. Being in the country without papers, the immigrants had no social security numbers and therefore couldn’t open bank accounts. So they usually relied on money orders and wire services–which cost $20 or more for every $300 sent home....
Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman Only he hadn’t. The young man and woman were U.S. postal inspectors from the Chicago field office. They’d been dispatched by postal service brass in Washington at the behest of the Norwegian postal authorities, who were disturbed by a stamp on a letter Thompson had asked a friend to mail him from Oslo. It was a reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting The Origin of the World and featured, says Thompson, “a frank depiction of the female genitalia....
Friday 3/15 – Thursday 3/21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 16 SATURDAY In 1831, Ohio-born Elsie Armstrong left her drunken husband and took her eight sons to live in Deer Park, Illinois, near Ottawa. Her sons grew up to work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal and to found the town of Morris, and in 1957 their mother’s story inspired Keith Clark to compose “The Ballad of Elsie Armstrong....
The Chicago appellate judge you don’t want to face in your free-speech appeal. Seventh Circuit judge and prolific author Richard Posner stunned a roomful of ardent libertarians with his after-dinner remarks at a March 28 Cato Institute meeting at the Ritz-Carlton: “Civil liberties have an accordion-like structure, expanding and contracting according to the degree of safety….As perceptions of danger change, the scope of civil liberties must change.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
CONJUNTO CESPEDES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Its back story can’t compare to Ibrahim Ferrer’s, but more than a decade before the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon made traditional Afro-Cuban music the next big thing, the Bay Area group Conjunto Cespedes was playing the best trad Cuban repertoire you could hear north of Miami. The band mixes standards by Beny More, Elio Reve, and Celina Gonzalez with strong original tunes and performs them all with an infectious energy, injecting terse rumba and brassy son with the same elegance and modernist flair....
Now in its eighth year, the First Nations festival runs November 15 through 21 at venues around the city and suburbs, presenting “works of Native American film and video that break racial stereotypes and promote awareness of Native American issues.” This week’s schedule includes a talk by Chris Eyre, director of Smoke Signals, on the subject of “reinventing Indians on screen.” (Wed 11/17, 6 PM, Columbia College Hokin Center, 623 S....
Alto saxophonist Greg Osby has spent his career looking forward. In the late 80s he was a key player in Brooklyn’s M-BASE crew, a group that combined jazz improvisation with other African-American forms, from hip-hop to funk to soul. On his own he sought to collaborate more directly with hip-hop artists, and while I don’t think those fusion experiments ultimately succeeded, it’s hard to argue with where they’ve led him: Osby hit his stride in the late 90s, and few jazzmen since have covered so much ground and sounded so confident doing it....
Mark Brown on Mark Brown Brown considered himself an investigative reporter, but three years ago the Sun-Times had called off its hounds and shipped him to the sports department. “Some people thought I was being wasted back there, but I thought it was a good change-up for me at that point.” A column sounded like an even better change, and Brown told Cooke and Cruickshank he was interested. “It came together pretty quickly,” he says....
This is my new neighborhood bar. I’ve become friendly with the owner, who is Romanian, which reminds me of this story. One year I had to go from Aspen to Bucharest, all in less than 24 hours. The Neo-Futurists–I’m a member–had gotten an invitation to appear at a theater festival. So I get on a plane and I fly into Chicago, spend the night, get on another plane, fly to Paris, get on another plane, and fly to Bucharest....
The Matrix Reloaded, Terminator 3, Dumb and Dumberer, and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts’ The Executioner’s Last Songs Vol. 2 and 3 (Bloodshot); it’s summertime, and even in music the sequel is king. Fortunately this set, which has a higher hit-to-miss ratio than its 2002 predecessor, violates the law of diminishing returns that usually applies. Welsh-born workaholic Jon Langford (Mekons, Waco Brothers, Skull Orchard, Three Johns, and does anybody remember the Jelly Bishops?...
