Film Music of Akira Kurosawa: The Complete Edition Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Kurosawa retrospective at the Music Box, continuing through November 14, covers the director’s richest period, from 1948 to 1965. The sound tracks of eight of the eleven films being shown are included in the first two installments of the ambitious multibox release Film Music of Akira Kurosawa: The Complete Edition....
As the temperature rose and the March 19 primary approached, election posters bloomed like spring flowers in the fighting 47th Ward. In the front yards and on the porches along the quiet side streets of Ravenswood and Lincoln Square, Kaszaks and Emanuels, Madigans and Schmidts, Claypools and Lechowiczes jostled for precious sunlight. Amid this fierce competition one sign faced no opponent, one dominated the landscape like a sunflower–the large white sign for Fifth District congressman and Democratic candidate for governor Rod Blagojevich....
The Reverend Dwayne R. Mason says he was appreciative when Erwin Helfer came up to him after a 9/11 memorial performance last year and complimented his piano playing–he’d accompanied a gospel choir–but didn’t think much about it. Helfer is one of the city’s most knowledgeable and skilled students of prewar piano styles, and a compliment from him is nothing to sneeze at, but Mason didn’t know who Helfer was. A month later Helfer called him at home; again he expressed his admiration and mentioned that he’d told Steven Dolins, who runs the Highland Park label The Sirens, about Mason and that Dolins might want to put out an album by him....
Liam Hayes looks more than a little like Bob Dylan–specifically Dylan circa Blonde on Blonde, after a shopping spree on Carnaby Street–and fans and supporters will attest to the magnitude of Hayes’s vision almost as fervently as Dylan’s did his. Yet in the past 12 years his band Plush has released just two singles and–as of February, when Fed came out on the Japanese label After Hours–two albums. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
“Myth, Truth, and Lies” is the theme of the U. of C.’s 25th annual humanities and arts open house, which offers lectures, tours, and musical performances by faculty and staff. Presentations take place on Saturday, October 23; all are free, but advance registration is required (limited day-of-event registration will be available at Swift Hall, 1025 E. 58th). Call 773-702-3175 or visit humanities.uchicago.edu/openhouse for more. From (Pseudo-)Seneca to Operatic Seneca: Teaching Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” by Robert Kendrick (music chair)....
A tip o’ the hat to the unapologetically antagonistic Mr. Velocity Hopkins (aka Pete Larson) on the ten-year anniversary of having the guts and good taste to release music people didn’t know they wanted to hear until years after the fact. Larson cofounded the Bulb label with Jim Magas in Ann Arbor in 1993, and together they released the early works of Andrew W.K. (in the band Pterodactyls) and themselves (in Couch and Prehensile Monkeytailed Skink)....
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival runs Friday, April 19, through Friday, April 26. Screenings will be at Women in the Director’s Chair Theater, 941 W. Lawrence, and Univ. of Chicago Biological Sciences Learning Center, 924 E. 57th St. All screenings are free and unless otherwise noted are in English and/or Arabic with subtitles; for more information call 312-560-6661. Following is the schedule for April 19 through 25; a complete festival schedule is available on-line at www....
Be Aggressive Annie Weisman’s deliciously dark, sassy comedy about teenage girls on the road at first seems to have little in common with such classics of doomed feminism as Thelma & Louise. But beneath the play’s firecracker dialogue and somewhat shopworn satire of west-coast suburban ennui is a relentlessly truthful portrait of how teenage girls work the system–and each other–to gain a sense of self. Moreover, Weisman never succumbs to the seemingly irresistible temptation to punish her rebellious characters with rape, disfigurement, or death....
In this sly mockumentary, Zak Penn persuades German filmmaker Werner Herzog to direct a documentary on the Loch Ness monster. Herzog explains that he’s less interested in the monster than in the human need to believe, but Penn, acting as his producer, is more consumed by the human need to sell tickets, and behind Herzog’s back he begins shooting faked scenes of the monster and interviews with a bikini-clad model posing as a sonar expert....
Laura Doherty had just been ordered to pay $570 in parking tickets and fines–on a license plate some jerk stole off her car more than a year ago. The worst part was, the city knew this, and yet was still demanding that she foot the bill. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doherty bolted the new plates onto her car and went on with her life....
Local singer Kelly Hogan always seems to come at me from left field. Beneath the Country Underdog (2000), her Bloodshot Records debut, put me off with its high-gloss finish (courtesy of producer Jon Langford), but after a while I was mesmerized by Hogan’s brilliantly intuitive readings of other people’s songs. Because It Feel Good (Bloodshot), produced by Hogan and former Sugar bassist David Barbe, is rougher around the edges, but this time I was stymied by the bizarre reverb that drenched Hogan’s voice....
To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six billion of us down here, and half still live on less than two dollars a day, 50 million children starve every year, warring nations insist on first strike, Hitler, Genghis Khan–oops, that’s us, too. Religion? How many wars, how many innocent victims? How about that 20th century? I saw the new play Galileo Galilei last night and wondered if we had advanced in learning in the five centuries since he went to the stake....
Though the title suggests a send-up of the quasi journalism that’s so often been the story in ’04, this sketch revue is more standard-issue than that, a Capitol Steps-like survey of the political system’s eternal hypocrisies inflected with a stiff dose of Republiphobia. As in a lot of this fall’s left-leaning humor, the joke often comes down to the unbelievability of our situation: though the picture the show paints of our current masters may seem like a Weimar-era Dada grotesque, it’s actually a naturalistic portrait....
Through the first half of the season, the White Sox seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in jerking their fans around. Just when the Sox were encouraging hope and affection, they’d quash them with abysmal play; just when a fan was prepared to give up entirely, the Sox would run off an impressive stretch. The face of Sox fandom could have been epitomized by the frowning Silvio on The Sopranos quoting Michael Corleone: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in....
LOS STRAITJACKETS CHRISTMAS PAGEANT 12/19, ABBEY PUB; 12/20, FITZGERALD’S Other than experimental music–stuff that’s freed from traditional melodic and rhythmic concerns–it’s hard to find a genre that emphasizes pure sound as much as instrumental surf rock. Straightforward and infectious as the Ventures’ melodies were, how far could they have gone without that perfect, crisp, reverby tone? The time-honored combination isn’t quite enough to put butts in the seats nowadays, though–hence the choreography and Mexican wrestling masks of Los Straitjackets, who just finished touring behind their new Supersonic Guitars in 3-D and are now dusting off the repertoire from last year’s ‘Tis the Season for Los Straitjackets (which contains the only version of “Jingle Bell Rock” I’ve ever liked)....
When they started out in the mid-90s, Stars of the Lid used the most basic equipment–guitars, effects pedals, and a four-track cassette recorder–in their Austin living rooms to create gorgeously textured drones. Since then Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie have accumulated more gear, but they’ve also moved to separate cities; they recorded last year’s epic double CD/triple LP, The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (Kranky), by mailing DATs back and forth between Chicago and Brussels....
The Beard of Avon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years some 80 names have been put forward as the “true” Shakespeare. Perhaps the best candidate to unseat Shakspere is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Although he died of plague in 1604, years before Shakespeare’s last plays are thought to have been written, even the staunchest Stratfordian will admit that dating Shakespeare’s scripts is largely conjecture....
Would like some enlightenment on the following: (1) Which is the mountain depicted in the logo of Paramount Pictures? (2) Why do women laugh hysterically? –Rajeev Balakrishnan, Hyderabad, India “Now, Jill,” I said, “millions rely on the Straight Dope as their primary information resource. We mustn’t settle for the cheap laugh. Are you sure you’ve thoroughly explored these answers?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One despairs....
Friday 1 FU MANCHU, ROLLING BLACKOUTS Stoner-rock mainstays Fu Manchu bring a streak of slick metallic alloy to their new Start the Machine (DRT), and on their Web site they seem more excited about contributing music to a Discovery Channel documentary on motorcycles–a parking-lot burnout’s dream of flame-painted glory–than anything else. California’s Rolling Blackouts, recently kicked off the Warped tour for inappropriate urination, pursue a crude banging-your-head-against-the-wall repetitiveness on their 60s-influenced garage distillation Black Is Beautiful (Record Collection), like a band that loves the Stooges but can’t master the riffs....
THOMAS AND BEULAH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hardly anybody has really taken on the challenge of updating the art song. Academic composers seem willing to let the conventions of the 19th century govern the setting of poetry or prose to music, and whether in a salon or on the big stage, the roles seem set in stone: the singer sings the text, the pianist accompanies, colors, frames, supports....
