Band to Watch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Guarrine got a lucky break when he escorted a college girlfriend, a big Blur fan, to Detroit to see the Britpop icons in 1995, and she persuaded him to slip guitarist Graham Coxon a mix tape. (A roadie pal of hers introduced them to the musician.) Guarrine began corresponding with Coxon; eventually he passed along a tape of his band, and Coxon was impressed....
Captured at www.girlfriendstealer.com Finding a Girlfriend to Steal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It has been brought to my attention (of course it’s never happened to me) that sometimes a girl will lie to a guy and tell him that she has a boyfriend as a “nice” way of rejecting him. This is very annoying for us and much time can be wasted on a girl before one realizes that she doesn’t really have a boyfriend after all....
CeDell Davis was born in Helena, Arkansas, in 1929 and began to play music at an early age. But he contracted polio when he was nine years old and had to relearn the guitar: strumming with his left hand and clutching the knife he now used as a makeshift slide in his gnarled right. Davis’s new style was dissonant but produced some interesting harmonies, and his tone could take on unexpected delicacy....
The sixth annual Festival of New French Cinema, presented by Facets Multimedia Center and French Cultural Services in Chicago, runs Friday through Thursday, December 6 through 12, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton. Unless otherwise noted, films are in French with subtitles. Tickets are $7, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-4114. An Outgoing Woman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A woman in a provincial town (Agnes Jaoui, from Un air de famille) learns of her husband’s adultery and angrily discards her disciplined, middle-class facade for a volatile, dangerous life of club hopping, one-night stands, and sexual experimentation....
For the last two decades, Bob Hercules, co-owner of Chicago’s Media Process Group, has worked in commercial television so that he could afford to make documentaries like Did They Buy It?, a study of American media coverage of Nicaragua’s 1990 elections that won the Chicago International Film Festival’s 1991 Gold Plaque. Hercules, who lives in Evanston, will show a clip from it at Reeltime’s retrospective of his work this week. Also on the program: Stoney Does Houston, his guerrilla portrait of the 1992 Republican National Convention (partially censored before it was shown by PBS); a 30-minute clip from The Democratic Promise, his prizewinning film biography of community organizer Saul Alinsky (narrated by Alec Baldwin); Briefcases and Bomb Shelters, an early 13-minute personal essay; and his newest work, The Last Frontier, a 22-minute high-definition-video satire....
Lead Stories Because jellyfish genes contain a phosphorescent protein, scientists have used them frequently in genetic modification. In June, scientists at Scottish Agricultural College introduced the gene into a potato, causing the spud to glow when it needs water. Scientists at England’s Hertfordshire University have proposed splicing the genes into a Douglas fir to create Christmas trees with glowing needles. Firefly genes, which were also proposed for the Douglas fir project, are now being spliced into zebra fish at the University of Cincinnati to produce fish that light up when they detect certain water pollutants....
Native Son But in Native Son, published in 1940, Richard Wright makes every character revert to type: all of us are as society has shaped us. Starting with the title–“native” meaning “natural” or “primitive” as well as “suitable to the environment” and “in his element”–Wright argues that injury and conflict lay bare the self. Bigger Thomas’s half-latent violence becomes patent when he finds himself nearly trapped in the bedroom of his employer’s daughter, Mary....
On the main floor of the Museum of Science and Industry, directly under the Boeing 727 and around the corner from the chick hatchery, Chicago’s skyscrapers soar above the shores of Lake Michigan as multiple trains carry commuters, haul coal and corn, and weave their way across the continent from Chicago to Seattle and back again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the late 1990s, however, the railroad “was in shambles,” he says....
The festival continues November 12 through 21 at the Beverly Arts Center, the Copernicus Center, and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $9, $7 for documentaries; a festival pass, good for five admissions, is $40. For more information call 773-486-9612; a complete schedule appears online at www.pffamerica.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The festival programming shifts toward video documentary this week, but there are still some challenging fiction films....
McHenry, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The biggest party of the year is Fiesta Days, a ten-day mid-July blowout featuring antique auto and boat shows, sidewalk sales, concerts, an arts and crafts fair, a Jaycees barbeque, and a parade complete with three-wheeling Shriners. Throughout the celebration, a Dixieland band makes the rounds of funnel-cake-munching locals; during the parade and sidewalk sale, crowds belly up to a makeshift bar behind the Foxhole Tap & Pizzeria (3308 W....
This third annual festival of solo performance, featuring more than 30 pieces, runs through 10/10 at the Athenaeum Theatre, third-floor studio, 2936 N. Southport. Tickets are $15 per show; “all access” passes cost $90. Tickets can be purchased through Ticketmaster by calling 312-902-1500 or logging on to www.ticketmaster.com; single-show tickets are also available at the door. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For more information call 312-371-4476 or see www....
So far nobody knows what the 28-inch scapula Rob Peterson found in South Dakota belongs to. Three years ago the Clarendon Hills native spotted a tiny bit of bone poking out of a claylike deposit at the bottom of a hill in Harding County. It was the first day of the digging season, his second summer guiding fossil hunters for Paleo Prospectors, a commercial outfit that takes amateur paleontologists to privately owned properties out west to look for dinosaur bones and other fossils....
Choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s credits range from Broadway (Chess) and Hollywood (Footloose) to the serious dance world (American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet)–and her varied experience shows in this carefully crafted, technically precise concept revue, which she also directed under the guidance of “production supervisor” (whatever that means) Jerry Zaks. This genial, entertaining evening of song and dance evokes the swing era of the 30s and 40s but gives it a contemporary sensibility....
High Life Azusa Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MacDougall spares no terrifying detail in drawing the portraits of four drug addicts trying to pull off a rather complicated bank heist. In one horrifying scene, ringleader Dick and his psychopathic second, Bug, shoot up, searching for unscarred veins after a lifetime of IV drug use. (Whoever did the makeup for Brian Pudil as Dick and Joe Forbrich as Bug has created repulsively realistic bruises and scars on their arms and legs....
“Holidays are somehow not fashionable, and yet they are celebrated by all–whether the celebrants take them seriously or claim not to,” writes School of the Art Institute prof Maud Lavin in The Business of Holidays (Monacelli Press), an examination of the culture and commercialism of our annual observances. And we spend billions of dollars on them every year, seriously or not. Lavin assembled a team of writers, artists, and designers (many of whom know each other from SAIC, giving the book plenty of local flavor) to explore the reasons....
If nuclear fallout takes thousands of years to dissipate, how did the Japanese return to Hiroshima and Nagasaki three months after the nuclear bombs exploded? Doesn’t the area stay radioactive and uninhabitable for thousands of years? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Atom bombs like the ones dropped on Japan produce two types of radiation: initial and residual. (I’m getting this from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, an exhaustive Japanese study, published in English in 1981....
The last time Dean Milano turned up in the paper, nearly two years ago, he was worried about his collection of vintage model cars and toys. About to be married, he was moving from his own house–stuffed with his lifetime hoard of over 4,000 car kits, play sets, dioramas, store displays, and more–to his betrothed’s cottage. The collection wasn’t slated to follow. He thought a museum for his treasures (Americana manufactured by Marx, Remco, Superior, Ideal, and others between 1930 and 1969) would be a great solution, but at that point it was only a dream....
Allison Moorer has never fit in with Wal-Mart fembots like Shania Twain and Faith Hill, but she did give it the old college try on two albums for MCA, baiting country radio with mushy romantic lyrics and soft-rock production touches. The programmers didn’t bite, and now Moorer seems to have taken their disinterest as a license to follow her own path. Her new album, Miss Fortune, is on Universal South, an outsider-country label launched by MCA Nashville honcho Tony Brown–apparently inspired by the success Mercury’s Lost Highway imprint has had with the likes of Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, and the O, Brother sound track....
A friend and colleague, critic and teacher Nicole Brenez, says that the best film criticism consists of films critiquing one another. This may sound a mite abstract, but two very different masterpieces by the great, neglected Jean Gremillon, Lumiere d’ete and Le ciel est a vous, seem to offer a concrete example of this, as a critique of Jean-Luc Godard’s In Praise of Love, which I wrote about last week. Both are showing this week as part of an invaluable retrospective at Facets Cinematheque (how rare screenings of both are is apparent from the lack of translated titles; the first means “summer light,” the second “the sky is yours”)....
Two shows get squeezed into one lumpy mess in this Chemically Imbalanced Comedy late-night offering. Creator Chris Churchill describes it in press materials as “a kid’s show for…angry grown-ups.” This translates into occasional attempts at clumsy quasi-political commentary delivered by four pajama-clad adults, who also spout irritating non sequiturs and insult one another–their relationships feel like overextended improv riffs. In Tony Mendoza’s meandering staging, it’s hard to tell what the overarching political message is, other than that George W....
