Rock, Pop, etc. AMBER, AUBREY, FIORI, GEORGIE PORGIE, IAN VAN DAHL, LASOO, LUCRE PARTA, SHERRIE LEA perform at Energy Blast 2002. Sat 8/24, 8 PM, Odeum, 1033 N. Villa, Villa Park. 630-941-9292 or 312-559-1212. CAKE, FLAMING LIPS, DE LA SOUL, MODEST MOUSE, KINKY, HACKENSAW BOYS All-ages show. Fri 8/30, 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence. 773-561-9500 or 312-559-1212. GIPSY KINGS Sat 8/24, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-559-1212....
The big news about this year’s World Music Festival is that it’s smaller–reduced by half in both duration and number of performers–thanks to the weakened economy. It’s laudable that organizer Mike Orlove was able to keep the festival going at all (some at the Department of Cultural Affairs thought it would be better to cancel this year and bounce back in 2004), but the current edition seems a bit lackluster after the diverse sprawl of 2002....
Ryan stands at the garage door and watches his father cut open the belly of a deer. The deer hangs from the rafters, its legs trussed. Ryan’s father has laid down an old blanket to catch the blood, which rushes out in a panic, steaming as it hits the cold fall air. Ryan’s father reaches in between the soft white flaps of stomach and pulls out a kidney, a liver, a heart....
When poet Naomi Shihab Nye stepped onstage at a Poetry Center of Chicago reading last year, she brought along an intricate and brightly colored box, handwoven on a loom from paper, broom straw, pieces of maps, and silk thread. Laced through the side panels were strips of paper bearing the words of her poem “The Man Who Makes Brooms.” “This is what happens,” Nye said as she held up the box, “to poems that get lucky....
If time machines existed, says Los Angeles-based artist and provacateur Dame Darcy, she’d be back in the Victorian era in a flash. In this day and age, she says, “I’m a specialty item.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best known for her 12-year-old comic, Meat Cake–in which she heaps melodramatic quantities of violence, romance, and supernatural confrontation on cads, cards, princesses, waifs, wenches, and helpless animals–and her frilly, morbid illustrations for magazines and record labels, Darcy also handcrafts tiny ceramic dolls with real hair, plays the singing saw and banjo, reads palms, and acts in silent films....
Be There or Be Square Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1998 Chinese feature by Feng Xiaogang plays like an updated screwball comedy, with unlikely romantic leads Ge You (Farewell My Concubine, To Live) and Xu Fan striking sparks as two Beijing emigrants trying to survive in Los Angeles. Through their misadventures they come to realize that America is more complicated and less friendly than the “gold mountain” they imagined, but in true Tracy-Hepburn fashion their verbal jousting eventually leads them into each other’s arms....
Captured at www.hightimes.com/ht/news/content.php?bid=278&aid=4 HELP, I’M STONED, WHO SHOULD I VOTE FOR? Short Answer: John Kerry Long Answer: If you like the job George W. Bush is doing as President, you should go ahead and vote for him. But if you ask HIGH TIMES, that’s a bad idea. We think he lied about Iraq being a […] From www.bordersunion.org The Borders Books Employees Union Web Site Borders Union Forum Index » Workplace Issues » Borders Books Unfit for Command takahashi Posted: Aug 23, 2004 – 12:30 PM We’re “finding” that most of the few copies we’re getting are damaged and need to be sent back, so sad....
Sydney Bild, an 80-year-old retired doctor who’s been lobbying for a national health care plan for more than 50 years, was recently invited to a luncheon held in the Loop as part of Cover the Uninsured Week. He says the publicist in charge of the event, which was sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, asked him not even to mention the idea of a national plan. “She told me the event’s limited to information about the plight of the uninsured,” he says....
Some issues at the Chicago Public Library [“Reading Is Incidental,” November 15] deserving of wider public recognition: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The policy (unstated) at the Chicago Public Library is to feature largely identical collections throughout the city. Whether a branch be located in Humboldt Park, Edgebrook, or Back of the Yards, the book and magazine collections will be almost uniformly alike. Ordering books and other materials “outside the box” in response to special community needs or interests is frowned upon, if not prohibited outright, by the administration....
This much is well-known: Detectives under the direction of Commander Jon Burge used torture–or, in the words of the city of Chicago’s own lawyers, “savage torture”–to get confessions from suspects. The pattern of complaints indicates that the method was first deployed in 1973. The last alleged incident was in 1991. Ninety people are known to have complained of abuse, their charges including electric shock, suffocation, burnings, attacks on the genitals, severe beating, and mock executions....
Alcatraz Few wars have been as mystifying to Americans as the ones that dismembered Yugoslavia during the 1990s. We don’t have to think very hard to figure out Iraq, Afghanistan, or Israel: religious fanaticism notwithstanding, they’re all comprehensible in terms of familiar geopolitical motivators like energy, land, and security. Even the horrific convulsions of African states often refer back to oil or diamonds. But Yugoslavia? It just seemed to come apart–spitting out eccentric little entities called Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia that promptly began to attack one another with a staggering belligerence....
Money Talks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Valkanas, executive director of the Illinois Arts Alliance, had been held up by something dear to the heart of everyone in the room: the just-released details of Governor Blagojevich’s proposed budget. In spite of Illinois’ deficit of almost $5 billion, IAA lobbied to maintain or increase arts spending, which last year amounted to $1.50 for every resident of the state....
This dazzling Chicago premiere of an award-winning play raises fascinating questions about the use of African-American music by white people–and doesn’t attempt to answer them, leaving that task to the audience. Perhaps playwrights Patty Lynch and Kent Stephens knew they already had a full plate with their dense, compact, thoughtful drama about a high school music teacher’s love affair with one of her students, an affair whose medium is the archetypal music of the misunderstood....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Things People Believe In February in Bridgeview, Illinois, Brian J. Samdahl allegedly used a can opener to stab a stranger 15 times at a Wal-Mart, then explained to police that his government-implanted computer chip was malfunctioning. In February in Athens, Alabama, Jesus Santana (charged with marijuana possession) told arresting officers that “God got y’all to get me”–Santana had been using pages torn from a Bible as rolling papers for joints....
Michelle Merrifield and Abby Lopez, both 22 and wearing lime green baseball caps bearing the legend “Roadtrip Nation,” are sitting on a red couch in front of a lime green RV parked on the University of Illinois lot on South Halsted. It’s a perfect day for recruiting: Indian summer is in full swing, and students passing by are inclined to dawdle, talk, and peruse the promotional materials on display. Merrifield, an outgoing, slender blond with a broad Australian accent, hails a couple of guys on their way to class....
Chicago’s greatest unknown writer is waiting for me at the only occupied booth at Jerry’s Snack Shop on the northwest side. It’s a Thursday afternoon deep in Polish territory, though a flyer posted outside seeks a lost cat in Spanish as well as English and Polish. The greatest unknown writer sits with a soft drink and a library copy of Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, wearing a bright blue T-shirt from last year’s Chicago Public Library program Reading Is Art-Rageous....
ELMHURST SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Composer Frank Ferko has a talent for revitalizing and transforming centuries-old, little-trafficked genres, from a cappella sacred music to solo organ pieces. One of his more impressive projects of the the past decade is his research on 12th-century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen. He’s composed the ten-movement Hildegard Organ Cycle, based on her hymns, as well as a collection of choral motets set to her writings....
Ever Your Own, Edgar and The Yellow Wallpaper, Adler Danztheatre Project, at the Belle Plaine Studios, through May 17. These works combining text and dance end up doing justice to neither. The first, based on writings by Edgar Allan Poe, sets him adrift among stereotyped muses, harpies, and martyrs intended to represent the women in his life. A few danced encounters are erotic, but in an obvious, stylized, overly polite way....
Revenge: The Miniature Hate Paintings of Patrick W. Welch Patrick W. Welch in his 95 small paintings at Gescheidle denies the transcendence aimed for by artists from Giotto to Rothko, in which colors seem disconnected from the material world and objects float mysteriously in space. Instead Welch’s colors and shapes are strangely static, his objects fixed or frozen in both form and meaning–an effect enhanced by the frequent inclusion of limiting texts....
Tape With Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of what’s off-putting about Linklater’s live-action Tape is how different it is from his animated Waking Life, which was released a few weeks ago. Both are talky, but Tape lacks the humanist aspect we generally expect from Linklater, insofar as none of the film’s three characters is particularly sympathetic....
