On Knife Play (5 Rue Christine), the debut album by the San Jose quartet Xiu Xiu (pronounced “shoo-shoo”), Jamie Stewart’s shrill caterwaul contains more than a trace of Robert Smith’s signature whine. He’s cited Joy Division and the Smiths as key influences, and he recently told a Portland paper, “There was a time when we were trying to have some feeling of relief [in the music], but the world is such a fucking disaster that seems really stupid....
Big Questions at a Small Paper The source of president Warrick Carter’s troubles was a letter he E-mailed Thursday morning, January 11, from New York to a Georgia mortgage company. The letter seems to have been Carter’s attempt to explain away blemishes on his credit report. He copied the letter to his own E-mail address at the college, and somehow–glitch or blunder–Carter’s faculty and staff all got it too. This was triply regrettable....
Lifeline Theatre has added a wonderful new puppet to the revival of its adaptation of Deborah and James Howe’s children’s book, first produced in 1999. Harold the dog and Chester the cat must adjust to the new baby–oops! pet–a furry intruder called Bunnicula, named after bunnies and Count Dracula. Bunnicula’s odd eating habits (don’t worry–rabbits are vegetarians) cause some consternation in the house, and how everyone deals with the new arrival makes for a fast-paced, ultimately heartwarming 45 minutes....
“Every time I see a group of workers, it seems their wages are falling,” writes local labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan in Illinois Issues (February). “Case one: A big trucking company closed terminals all over the Midwest and started up again under a new name. The company with the new name signed a new contract with the union, then hired entirely different drivers. Entirely. In each terminal, all the old workers are gone....
On Saturday, July 20, residents of the Irving Park neighborhood will gather in the vast vacant lot at Kimball and Addison to protest the Home Depot that’s supposed to be built there in the next few months. They also plan to protest what they call the “sorry state of planning in the age of Mayor Daley.” Over the last few years countless neighborhood meetings have been held to discuss the issue....
Highbrow and Mighty Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Wilmette native who wanted to be a broadcaster from the age of six (insert your own background music here, something like the New Trier rouser), Lifson spent a long “formative” period knocking around art and architecture schools and Europe before coming back to Chicago, where he started freelancing for NPR. He filed his first piece in 1988 and was soon working for the network full-time from his hometown....
“Everybody knows my name,” sings Megan Mullally, interpreting Randy Newman’s “Lonely at the Top,” one of 11 well-chosen tunes on her recent CD Big as a Berry (Varese/Sarabande). Mullally is indeed famous, thanks to her hilarious portrayal of the shrill and slutty Karen Walker on NBC’s Will & Grace, but those who know her only as a sitcom comedienne may be surprised to learn that she’s also a gifted singer and an accomplished stage actress....
Lead Stories According to a December lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, Mark Nutritionals Inc. of San Antonio, Texas, earned $190 million in four years selling a solution that would supposedly help customers to permanently lose up to 40 pounds, even if they ate lots of pizza, beer, tacos, and doughnuts and didn’t exercise. And at a December press conference in Boise, Idaho, spokespeople from Genesis World Energy introduced the Edison Device, which they claim can convert a bathtub full of water into enough electricity to last an average household 20 years....
Being a big fan of your book Skipping Towards Gomorrah, I was delighted to read about William J. Bennett’s gambling “problem.” America’s number one moral crusader lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas casinos. I realize it’s not cool to laugh at the misfortunes of others…but I’m willing to make an exception for Bennett. So Republicans like Rick Santorum would have us believe that it’s not OK for two queers to fuck in the privacy of their own home, but it’s just dandy for Bennett to blow eight million bucks in Sin City?...
A few weeks back I invited readers to share their most horrifying true stories of desperate and/or depressing holiday sex. As promised, the author of the best horrifying true story–as determined by me–wins a $75 Toys in Babeland gift certificate. See if you can spot the winner before you get to the end of the column… I moved away from my friends and family last year to Seattle. As I left work on Christmas Eve, some homeless people were having a trash-can-fire, plastic-bottle-liquor hoedown on University Ave....
Soiree Dada: Goat Pushing Clown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like the scraggly band of caustic performers who’ll be thrashing about in WNEP’s tiny, amenity-free theater for the next month, the original dadaists huddled together in a cramped space during a time of war. On February 5, 1916, Hugo Ball, a young German conscientious objector who’d made his way to Zurich with forged papers and an assumed name, rented out a bar from a retired Dutch sailor and inaugurated a nightly performance melee dubbed Cabaret Voltaire....
As the White Sox awaited this weekend’s series with the Cubs, the two teams’ latest role reversal looked almost complete. The Sox, who figured to repeat as American League Central Division champs this season, entered the workweek in third, seven games under .500, a distant twelve games behind the second-place Cleveland Indians and an extra half game behind the Minnesota Twins. The Cubs, who figured to be also-rans–if improved also-rans–in the National League Central, entered the week in first; on the heels of a 12-game winning streak, they were two and a half games ahead of the Saint Louis Cardinals....
The Future is Now Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Early Modulations: Vintage Volts (Caipirinha) the makers of the concise 1998 electronica documentary Modulations have compiled a wonderful, if disjointed, overview of early electronic music. Max Mathews’s 1961 voice-synthesis experiment “Bicycle Built for Two” anticipates Kraftwerk’s man-machine vocals, while “Etude aux chemins de fer” (“Railway Study”), a 1948 piece by Pierre Schaeffer, anticipates Pro Tools: he painstakingly spliced tapes of huffing, puffing locomotives into a cogent, imaginative, musical composition that decontextualizes the source material, a little trick he decided to call “musique concrete....
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Theatre School, DePaul University, Barat Campus. Possibly the Bard’s earliest comedy, this play about two best friends seeking love and fortune lacks the intricacies and passion of later masterpieces. Still, it delivers a digestible story and some of the first instances of Shakespeare’s trademark conventions: girl in drag, wisecracking servants, even the tongue-in-your-tail repartee made famous in The Taming of the Shrew. Director Karla Koskinen and her cast seem determined to keep everything sunny; even the play’s one darkish moment–when Proteus threatens to force himself on Silvia–has a “quit it, you knucklehead” tone....
Rock, Pop, etc. GREG BOERNER Free in-store performance. Sat 11/16, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park. 708-386-6927. ANI DiFRANCO Sold out. Sat 11/16, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-559-1212. GUNS N’ ROSES, CKY, MIXMASTER MIKE See Critic’s Choice. Mon 11/18, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, 6920 Mannheim, Rosemont. 847-635-6601 or 312-559-1212. BEN KWELLER, ADAM GREEN, TROUBLED HUBBLE Thu 11/21, 7 PM, Duke Ellington Ballroom, Holmes Student Center, Northern Illinois University, 425 W....
Rock, Pop, etc. BUCKINGHAMS, IDES OF MARCH, CRYAN’ SHAMES Sun 10/6, 3 PM, Orchestra Hall, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan. 312-294-3000 or 800-223-7114. CATIE CURTIS, ELLEN ROSNER Fri 10/11, 7:30 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. 773-728-6000. EVE Fri 10/11, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-559-1212. HIP FETISH Free in-store performance. Fri 10/11, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1500 16th, Oak Brook....
Two years ago the reconstituted Wire faced American audiences for the first time in a decade, and those faces stared back with a mixture of worship and trepidation: would these raving iconoclasts still be capable of generating revelations, or would they turn out to be another human jukebox dispensing desiccated memories for quarters? (While not all reunion tours are automatically artistically doomed, I’ve got to say that the refusal of the surviving three-quarters of Led Zeppelin to stage one is looking nobler and nobler all the time....
You’ve got the red vinyl booths as you walk in, a terrazzo floor that could survive an earthquake, a tin ceiling in a pattern that is no longer made,” says Guido Nardini of Club Lago, the 14-table Italian restaurant he runs with his brother, GianCarlo, in River North. Club Lago was founded by the Nardini brothers’ grandfather 50 years ago this month. And while the neighborhood has been almost completely transformed in the intervening decades, the restaurant remains virtually unchanged....
Multimedia artist Duncan R. Anderson wears a cowboy hat, calls his friends “boss,” and addresses women as either Miss or Missus. He grew up and went to college in Johnson City, an Appalachian town in eastern Tennessee that he says resembles “Evanston with a great deal of Twin Peaks mixed in.” Even the punk kids went to church, he claims, and much of the population honestly believed “that Satan put dinosaur bones in the ground just to confuse us....
Calexico used to be a sideline for unrepentant instrumentaholics John Convertino and Joey Burns, but eight years down the road it’s their main gig. Who can blame them? The band affords them the chance to play whatever they want, both instrumentally–Convertino plays drums, vibes, guitar, piano, and accordion, while vocalist Burns can make anything with strings sound good–and stylistically. Feast of Wire (Quarterstick), the duo’s latest release, broadens their established blend of twangy, noirish rock narratives, Latin rhythms, and mariachi horns to include a plaintive piano-and-cello interlude, some grimy electronic beats, and a convincing stab at slick cop-show jazz....
