There are those who argue that if Charlie Parker had lived to a decent age (he never saw 35) he’d have ended up sounding something like Frank Morgan. I usually shy away from such speculation, but this notion’s worth a second look. When Morgan came up as a talented teenager in LA in the 40s, he reputedly had Parker’s style down cold; but like Parker, he developed a severe heroin addiction....
Chicagoan Deborah Stratman, who specializes in experimental documentaries, spent four months with tightrope walker Adil Hoxur–cited in the Guinness Book of World Records and the latest descendant of a family of tightrope performers over many centuries–as he and his troupe toured Chinese Turkestan and performed nightly in small villages. Among his biggest fans are fellow Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy. Stratman emphasizes the everyday over the exotic, a consistently fresh and personal way of relating to the material; she trusts viewers to make many of the right connections but never comes across as esoteric....
Over the last few years Peter Orner’s come home to write about Rogers Park, the neighborhood he never lived in. The results are several melancholy and moving tales in Esther Stories, his recently published collection of short stories that capture the spirit of a north-side Jewish neighborhood that’s long gone. So in 1999 he enrolled at the writers workshop at the University of Iowa and earned an MFA in creative fiction....
Tick, Tick…Boom! –Shakespeare, Cymbeline Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jonathan is living on borrowed time too. He doesn’t realize it–but we do, because he’s the alter ego of Jonathan Larson, the creator of this autobiographical musical. When Larson penned the one-man show that evolved into Tick, Tick…Boom!, he didn’t know that he would indeed go on to write “the Hair of the 90s”: Rent, the Broadway hit about Lower East Side artists coping with drugs, AIDS, and homelessness....
Ron Sexsmith has been reinvigorated by love–or so he suggests in the liner notes to his new album, Cobblestone Runway (Nettwerk), where he thanks one Colleen Hixenbaugh for “taking my heart by surprise.” Too bad this newfound happiness seems to have defanged him as a lyricist. In “Former Glory” he promises, “Though the cold north wind may blow / It’s all sound and fury / And the summer will return in its former glory,” and in “God Loves Everyone” he claims just that....
My fiancee is having trouble going down on me. She can usually last five minutes before her jaw starts hurting. It’s big–what can I do? When we try, she has me lie down on my back while she kneels between my legs. Is there another position that might work better and not cause her jaw to hurt? I’m about to marry this woman, and I don’t want to go the rest of my life without blow jobs....
The Skokie Public Library is bustling this weekend. On Saturday, August 17, the library, which has just added a third floor and is in the midst of a major renovation, will auction off desks, shelves, light fixtures, file cabinets, and other furnishings and fixtures that won’t be used in the new quarters. The goodies include 26 Mies van der Rohe-designed steel-and-leather chairs and several huge oak-and-marble service desks, but no books....
More Beat poet than beat junkie, Bay Area rapper Sole has a tendency to stuff twice as many words into every line as should reasonably fit, which makes his vocal delivery a little overwhelming–he doesn’t flow, he floods. He’s also more philosophical than your average MC: “My whole perspective relies solely on questions that can’t have answers,” he notes on “Respect Pt. 3,” from the new Selling Live Water (Anticon). He doesn’t sound like he’s boasting about it–just acknowledging the cross he’s chosen to bear....
Where Do You Get a Bat Like That? Sometimes reporters ask why when readers are wondering how. Oblivious to what intrigues the hoi polloi, the scriveners have had more to say about sin, penance, and redemption than Milton and Dostoyevsky did. Just this Tuesday morning, Greg Couch reported in the Sun-Times that “several experts” are of the conviction that “if Sosa wants his old life to return, it will be important to live on as the old Sammy....
1 BJORK Vespertine (Elektra) The most consistently daring pop artist of our time raises the bar again with an album that’s at once delicate and substantive. Gorgeous but restrained orchestrations of strings, harp, and music box glide over layers of tiny, glitchy electronic sounds–handled by experts like Matmos and Matthew Herbert–creating an intimate space for Bjork’s songs of carnal rapture and emotional ardor. Her vocal idiosyncrasies once seemed like limiting quirks, but she keeps finding new emotions to express through her deep catalog of swoops, curlicues, and cries....
On Kentucky Derby Day, Terry Bjork stood staring at a bank of television screens in a room at the back of the grandstand at Great Lakes Downs, a minor-league racetrack next to a freeway in Muskegon, Michigan. He held a program in one hand, a $2 cup of beer in the other. His faded jeans were covered with tiny holes, and his brushy gray hair swept out from under a Breeders’ Cup baseball cap....
A billboard that just went up near the corner of Western and Ohio shows a photographic image of a hand, thumb and index finger extended, pointing at a pair of hands held up defensively. “Can You Argue With a Gun?” the sign says in black letters. “Don’t Think So!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Engelstad, who divides her time between Dallas and Chicago, has been in town since January coordinating Peace Signs, which is part of a larger antigun art project, Visualizing Violence, that she started in San Francisco three years ago with follow-ups in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D....
On the rainy Wednesday night of February 20, a lone motorcycle sat parked outside Montclare Leyden VFW Post 1284, at 6940 W. Diversey. But inside, Rebel Knights, American Knights, Blitzkriegs, and Outlaws packed the smoky bar. The Chicago chapter of the national motorcyclists’ association ABATE meets here every month. On this particular evening, Illinois’ Republican and Democratic gubernatorial candidates had been invited to come by for a debate. ABATE of Illinois–the acronym stands for “A Brotherhood Aimed Toward Education”–is a 14,000-member PAC whose rallying cry is “Freedom isn’t free....
Gulliver is most often remembered as a skyscraping giant among the Lilliputians, but he also spent time as the puny guest of the Brobdingnagians, a race of titans “as tall as an ordinary spire steeple” with voices “many degrees louder than a speaking-trumpet.” This year he has run in Berlin, Rotterdam, and Salt Lake City, but his base is a spare bedroom in the home of his agent, Bruce Meyer. Kahugu sleeps on a sofa bed and lives out of a gym bag containing his Adidas, his running shorts, some warm-up clothes, a Bible, a few Kenyan gospel tapes, and the good breakfast tea he can find only in Africa....
Attention, Sports Authority shoppers: Don’t mind those kindergartners doing jumping jacks in front of the treadmill display. They’re on a field trip. In water sports, Batchelor asks the kids if they’ve ever been on a boat or gone water-skiing. He tells them it’s important to wear a flotation device at all times in these situations, then bends down to strap a child into a bright orange life vest. They move on to backpacks....
Playing with whoever turns up as their rhythm section, sister and brother Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger (New Yorkers who grew up in Oak Park) survey the widest imaginable swath of American music without sounding like fussy anthropologists or ironic hijackers. The songs on their debut, Gallowsbird’s Bark (Rough Trade), are natural distillations of a century of sound, recombining elements of rural blues, old-time folk, garage rock, punk, and new wave into combinations at once odd and organically right....
This Brooklyn slow-noise duo, recently decamped from Olympia, makes bedfellows of New Agey crystal-monger music and crushing doom metal by ratcheting them both up to the same irresponsible volume. (Growing rarely plays rooms much bigger than the Empty Bottle, but in a video on their label’s Web site, guitarist Joe Denardo and guitarist-bassist Kevin Doria say they use six 300-watt amps.) The band’s new album for the local Kranky label is called The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, and it’s as blissed-out as you’d expect given a title like that–at least at first....
Downtown Detroit’s elaborate Michigan Theatre movie house was built in the 1920s on the site where Henry Ford had created his first car. Attached to a larger building, the theater thrived through World War II, but–like the rest of Detroit–it fell on hard times in the 60s and 70s, becoming a porn theater, a supper club, and a concert hall in quick succession. “The owner tried to demolish it but couldn’t, because it was structurally interdependent with the office tower,” says Charles Waldheim, director of graduate studies at UIC’s School of Architecture and coeditor of the new book Stalking Detroit....
I’ve been bartending for six years; been here since August. This story took place at a bar I used to work at. One night a gentleman got quite intoxicated and hit on me, which happens quite a lot. A lot of people flirt with the bartender. It’s not necessary that you even be cute–you’re just the one they’re talking too. Anyway, he’s doing shots of vodka and he’s getting loaded and the guys next to him are saying, “Don’t give him any more....
The 19th annual Printers Row Book Fair will gather nearly 200 exhibitors, including booksellers, publishers, and literary arts organizations, outdoors on Dearborn between Congress and Polk. In addition to the new, used, and collectible offerings, the fair features dozens of readings and book signings by local and national authors, panel discussions, performances, and children’s activies; some exhibitors will host author signings as well. Events will be held at the Arts & Entertainment Stage, 600 block of Dearborn; Burnham Reading Room, Printers Row Hyatt, 500 S....
