War (What Is It Good For?) The selection of pieces for each show is forgivably arbitrary: it’s easy to imagine moving them around. Chris Burden’s massive The Other Vietnam Memorial (1991), which bears three million invented Vietnamese names etched in a dozen huge copper tablets hung from a freestanding Rolodex-like structure, belongs in “War (What Is It Good For?)” but is found in the more spacious territory allotted to “Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain....
THE ROSE TATTOO –Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Serafina’s brush with madness is precipitated by the death of her husband, a truck driver named Rosario killed while smuggling for an Italian crime family. The unfaithful but beautiful Rosario–“Valentino with a mustache,” one character calls him–bore on his chest the tattoo of a rose, which magically transferred to Serafina’s breast one night as a sign that she’d conceived....
Although Tori Marlan has already replied to Tom Doody’s letter (March 8) criticizing the cause of homeless advocate Mark Weinberg, I am compelled to write. Mr. Doody, as a city dweller I am also familiar with the various tactics of panhandlers and beggars. I have encountered countless numbers of beggars whose methods have ranged from pitifully passive to nearly violent. I agree with you in that I would rather not have to deal with their requests to “spare some change....
It’s easy to get distracted by all the gore in writer-director Arik Martin’s nightmarish black comedy. The first time I saw Bad-Ass & the Devil, in July of 2000, I left the theater shaken and queasy. The second time–a year later for a weekend revival–I became anesthetized to the ritualistic bloodletting and began to really hear Martin’s ironic dialogue. (“Stabbing,” remarks one character, “well, it’s not an exact science.”) This time, I started noticing how much attention Martin pays to atmospherics....
We often say we’re seized by regret, but in choreographer Cindy Brandle’s vision, remorse cradles and caresses us. Or else the duos embracing and supporting each other in Regret represent love lost, perhaps through our own stupid mistakes. Either way, this new piece for ten dancers makes plain that our losses and self-reproaches make us who we are, that we hug them to us and think them over obsessively. Dressed in rich, velvety red costumes by Brandle and Atalee Judy, the dancers perform to Brandle and Esch Marie’s original score and a voice-over of texts by Brandle and the dancers, expressing among other things the hopeless wish to “do it all over again....
Chicago Puppetry Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one can accuse Theater Dank of following a well-trod path. This Chicago puppet troupe not only produces enigmatic fantasies that defy conventional narrative approaches but often works in the midst of self-imposed bedlam. In 1998 they premiered Smell of Roses during a huge spaghetti dinner in a Logan Square church gymnasium, complete with balloons and live accordion music....
MAY In 1998, Windy City Hemp Development Board founder Caren Thomas took over a lawsuit filed by late activist Robert MacDonald against the Chicago Park District. MacDonald was denied a permit to stage a march in Grant Park against the war on drugs; his suit claimed the CPD’s permit process could prevent Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » citizens from exercising their First Amendment rights in public places....
ELIANE ELIAS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Brazilian-born polymath pianist and sometime singer Eliane Elias named her most recent record Everything I Love (Blue Note), she wasn’t kidding. The core of the album consists of selections from the Great American Songbook (Berlin, Gershwin, Porter), but Elias also offers tunes by Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus; a song of her own in memory of Bud Powell; and on several tracks, semicomposed “introductions” that demonstrate her respect for Keith Jarrett....
GOURDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Austin’s Gourds have often been compared to the Band, and their recordings, including last year’s Bolsa de Agua, do reflect that rare ability to fuse numerous strains of American roots music into a single distinctive sound. But the Gourds exist here and now–and they don’t try to pretend otherwise. They’re undoubtedly the only act on the roots-oriented Sugar Hill label to have covered a Snoop Dogg tune (“Gin and Juice,” which they transform into a desert outlaw anthem), and though they’re obviously obsessed with the gospel, their treatment of it is hardly reverent: “Jesus Christ With Signs Following” wonders if being “hell-bent on heaven bound” isn’t a tad bit soul sapping, while the murkier “Hallelujah Shine” advises Christians to “…meet the Buddha / And kill him on the road to glory....
Every five years Joe Rueve, a Chicago hairdresser, likes to have a heart-to-heart with his female clients. But last year Rueve sold the place to John Vaillancourt, a stylist from New York with a flair for color. Vaillancourt ran a different kind of ship–more businesslike, he’d say; more despotic, others would say. Rueve worked for Vaillancourt awhile, then left. And Vaillancourt filed a $2.5 million lawsuit that accuses Rueve of trying to defraud him and steal his customers....
K-Pax With Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Mary McCormack, Alfre Woodard, David Patrick Kelly, Peter Gerety, Saul Williams, and Celia Weston. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on a novel by Gene Brewer and written by Charles Leavitt, I can’t discount the undeniable pleasure of watching Spacey and Bridges act up a storm, but a lot of what makes this movie watchable and compelling is precisely what’s bogus about it: it gives in to a desire to generalize about people who are mentally ill–a group that doesn’t necessarily include Prot–and to feel satisfied and astute about those generalizations....
There were moments in the second quarter of the Bulls’ season opener at the United Center when I thought this might be the worst team in the history of the franchise. Considering where the Bulls have already gone since Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Phil Jackson went their separate ways in 1998, that’s saying something. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet in keeping with last year’s motto, “Everything can change in the blink of an eye”–subtly if irritatingly echoed by Hilary Duff’s “Fly” in the pregame music blasted over the PA system–the Bulls suddenly began to show promise....
Cherished by record collectors today but loved by only dozens in its prime, Metal Urbain is one of the few memorable French bands of the late 70s. While most of their fellow avant-gardists were imitating British punk, these guys were off on their own trip, incorporating homemade synths and drum machines–newfangled contraptions at the time–into their rickety punk rock. Though historically significant as the Real Shit (one of their singles was the inaugural release on Rough Trade) they’re a little dull in retrospect, thanks largely to the recent resurgence of postpunk....
Last Friday at Primitive Art Works, a gallery in River North, well-dressed people chatted and nursed their drinks in the outdoor sculpture garden, standing among stone animals and totems, statues of Buddha and Ganesa, and reflecting pools stocked with lazy koi. Despite the price tags dangling from the artifacts, the people weren’t there to buy Eastern art; they’d come to be blessed by nine Tibetan monks with shaved heads and red-and-gold robes, who sat at a small round table under an oriental gazebo....
“Like most people, I’ve just stumbled into things,” says local filmmaker Russ Forster, whose most recent project, the tribute-band documentary Tributary, just came out on DVD. Before stumbling into filmmaking, he played music, ran a label, and published a popular zine. Throughout all these endeavors, Forster, who turns 40 this week, has stubbornly planted himself as far outside mainstream consumer culture as he can manage. In 2000 he pulled the plug on what was arguably his best-known project, 8-Track Mind, a decade-old zine dedicated to eight-track tapes–it had become too successful, he says....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August in Saint Louis, Missouri, school board member Rochell Moore sent Mayor Francis Slay an open letter, criticizing school closings and management reforms she believed he’d orchestrated and advising him that she’d placed a curse on him. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Moore’s curse paraphrased Deuteronomy 28:21, in which Moses warns the Israelites of what will happen if they stray from God....
Nick Warren’s Reykjavik #024 is the latest two-disc volume in the seemingly unending series of bland trance and progressive-house mixes churned out by London’s Global Underground imprint. But Warren, a Massive Attack associate and leading member of club hit makers Way Out West, diverges from the label’s tired formula. Most of #024 is midtempo and driven by breakbeats; Warren pairs Ulrich Schnauss’s “Nobody’s Home” with Shuffle Heads’ “Roll Call” to create an electro-lullaby in which a cascade of keyboard plinks crinkles and then begins to glide over a dusty-sounding groove....
About five of us were at a private club one night for a scotch-tasting seminar. They had a man there, I think from Scotland, named Martin. He put on this presentation where he showed us a film of Scotland and the different regions where the different whiskeys are produced. He was dressed head to toe in native attire: the kilt, the high stockings, the shoes, the little purse thing that hangs down in front, the little tam with the puffball on front, and he had the brogue....
Long before Baryshnikov or Nureyev, Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) defined the Russian male dancer at his most dramatic and charismatic–the artist as superstar sex symbol. Tragically, he also epitomized the link between genius and madness, spending most of his life in a mental institution after a brief but blazing turn in the spotlight. Today we know Nijinsky mostly from photographs, wearing the exotic costumes of Michel Fokine’s Le spectre de la rose, Sheherazade, and Petrushka and his own shocker L’apres-midi d’un faune, appearing strange and magical but also odd and archaic....
Director Richard Kwietniowski follows up his impressive debut feature, Love and Death on Long Island, with this equally absorbing study of a compulsive personality, based on Gary Ross’s nonfiction book Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony. Philip Seymour Hoffman, indie cinema’s patron saint of sweaty need, plays an inscrutable young assistant manager at a Toronto bank whose gambling addiction sweeps him into a vortex of lies, embezzlement, and high-stakes casino betting....
