The night before the Tournament of Destruction championship, Elmer Fandrey didn’t plan to get loaded. There were windows to smash out in the ’76 Thunderbird he’d be racing, a gas tank to puncture, and the monstrous black body of the car to be sprayed a bright Smurfy shade of blue. But there was no way he was going to miss Sammy Hagar at Loopfest–he’d been holding skybox tickets at the Tweeter Center for months....
The Detroit Grand Pubahs are big fans of the good old-fashioned booty hump–it’s mentioned in almost every song on their most recent CD, Funk All Y’all (Jive Electro). “Sandwiches,” the single that electro DJs played nearly incessantly last year, is the same sort of infectious, sleazy, astoundingly simple techno-funk as Cajmere’s “Coffee Pot (It’s Time for the Percolator),” with high-pitched perv-o-tronic lyrics: “You can be the bun / And I can be the burger, girl / I know you wanna do it…....
By Michael Miner Gleason is reminiscing at my invitation because he just called it quits after 40 years as a Chicago sports columnist, the last 15 of them at the Daily Southtown. For 12 years he was also a TV celebrity, one of the garrulous sages of The Sportswriters. Asked to remember the war, he doesn’t brood. Instead, he digs up his Silver Star citation. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Kate’s change of heart in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has always been a sticking point: how does the shrewish bitch become a loving wife? I was curious how choreographer John Cranko might approach the problem–and thrilled at the prospect of a flesh-and-blood ballet heroine instead of a sylph, ghost, swan, or waifish peasant girl betrayed and abandoned. Watching a tape of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago performing Cranko’s 1969 work (first revived here in the spring of 2001), I was not disappointed....
Leaving Lill Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cohen eventually moved on; he’s now executive director of the Citizens Utility Board. Robbins became Lill Street’s longtime executive director. He sold the clay company in 1986 and bought out the two outside investors in the building ten years ago. Under him the Lill Street Art Center, as it’s now called, has grown to house three gallery spaces, ten classrooms, and 40 artists in a warren of 25 studios....
Marian McPartland has a great story. Born in England, raised in a good middle-class home, she scandalized her parents by joining a four-keyboard vaudeville act–Billy Mayerl & His Claviers–during World War II. She adopted jazz when she married cornetist Jimmy McPartland, famed ringleader of Chicago’s trad-jazz scool (she fell for him when he pulled some strings to surprise her with a top-notch piano in the middle of war-torn Europe). She followed him back to the States, played the trad-jazz circuit, then took a two-week trio gig at the Hickory House that ended up lasting ten years, establishing her on the New York scene....
Nearly 50 years after Mort Sahl revolutionized stand-up comedy, his brand of irreverent social satire is all around us, from Bill Maher, Al Franken, and Dennis Miller to The Daily Show and the Onion. Among his early admirers were Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, and George Carlin, each of whom struck out in his own direction after Sahl’s canny, looping monologues proved that a comedian could mine modern life for material instead of tossing off gags from a joke file....
The lecture wasn’t supposed to begin until 3:30, but by 2:30 on Friday, November 1, half of the 400 seats in Loyola University’s Galvin Auditorium were already full. College students and faculty from all around Chicago and as far away as Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin filtered in steadily, tossing their coats over large swaths of seating to save room for friends who had yet to arrive. Around three o’clock there were even a few seat-saving skirmishes down near stage left....
Robert Novak’s Not Talking A “fight for the soul of America”? So what was that Bush-Kerry 15-rounder that just had us all whooping and hollering? The undercard? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, “if disgruntled government workers cannot pass along evidence…the entire system collapses.” You might suppose from this distress call that gallant government workers in a high state of disgruntlement gave Novak evidence of perfidy at the highest levels, and now ruthless satraps demanding names have lashed him to the rack and are twisting, twisting....
Melody A.M. (Wall of Sound/Astralwerks), the debut album from Norwegian producers Torbjorn Brundtland and Svein Berge–aka Royksopp–was issued in Europe in October 2001. But it wasn’t until the album’s gorgeous first single, “Eple” (“Apple”), showed up on the great 2 Many DJ’s mix CD As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2 (where it was memorably segued out from Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”) that anyone in the States paid them much attention....
Social estrangement and loss of identity are the central concerns of this gently warped tale about a bloodthirsty Transylvanian veterinarian, his captive subjects, and an itinerant freak show. Writer-director Bob Fisher claims the Universal horror films of the 1950s as his biggest inspiration–par for the course when it comes to his work with the Mammals, the company he created three years ago to explore and expound upon some of the fixations of his youth....
To a hot-blooded 18-year-old American male, facing life in a wheelchair has to look like the trump card of troubles. But Vic Chesnutt, who released the slaphappily bleak album Drunk in 1993, was already spending his nights legless back when he could walk, and he’s been navigating the same muddy artistic waters all along, before and since the 1983 car wreck that broke his neck. Like R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe–the fellow Georgia boy who “discovered” him in the legendary Athens scene of the 80s–Chesnutt’s had the uncomfortable but interesting task of reconciling his rural upbringing with his bohemian pretensions....
First Impressions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomboy proprietor Jody Andre has teamed up with chef Gil Langlois (Technicolor Kitchen, Pepper Lounge) to debut THE ROOM, an Edgewater eatery serving Langlois’ eclectic contemporary American cuisine. They’ve transformed a corner storefront into a large, stylish dining room with amber faux-weathered floors, salmon leather banquettes, exposed brick walls, and graceful floor-to-ceiling silk curtains dividing the bar from the tables....
The Chicago Jazz Festival turns 25 this year, and to celebrate it’s spending an evening at Symphony Center. For the first time, you’ll have to buy a ticket to get into the opening-night event–a concert starring Branford Marsalis’s quartet followed by an homage to Art Blakey featuring Marsalis and other Blakey alums. Though it’s nice to see the programmers experiment a bit, and plenty of people over the years have advocated moving some fest performances indoors, this is hardly what anyone had in mind: Symphony Center’s acoustics have always made jazz sound muddy, and the gain in intimacy is minimal....
Bettye LaVette first hit the soul charts in 1962 with the sassy “My Man–He’s a Lovin’ Man,” which, at 16, she vamped through like Lolita. She struck again in 1965 with the smoldering “Let Me Down Easy,” but despite a few subsequent hits and slots on major soul revues, she never attained real stardom. In 1978 her disco-style “Doin’ the Best I Can” became one of the east coast’s hottest club hits, selling a reported 100,000 copies in New York City alone; in 1982 she achieved moderate success with “Right in the Middle (Of Falling in Love)” on Motown....
Friday 9/5 – Thursday 9/11 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that it’s a mere 35 million miles from Earth and fully illuminated by the sun, Mars can be seen with the naked eye–even here in the city. But getting a good look at its polar ice caps and other surface features requires a good telescope. Tonight from 9 to midnight the Adler Planetarium will set up several on its south lawn and open its observatory for free tours and public viewing as part of an event it’s calling Mars Madness....
English percussionist Chris Cutler has covered a lot of ground during his 30-year career. He’s played art rock with Henry Cow and Pere Ubu, improvised with guitar-slinging fellow Cow-boy Fred Frith, run the experimental record label ReR, and written about music for various publications. But the fluently conversational player had never performed alone until the late 90s, when Frith and Canadian guitarist Rene Lussier talked him into playing a solo concert in Japan....
Eric Stotik Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One dreamlike work depicts three women seated at a round table set for a meal, with wine in a few glasses but plates, cups, and saucers empty. One woman holds a baby; behind them a fourth adjusts her hair in a mirror. In the left background, heads seem to be pressing into the room’s shallow space. Eight faces are clearly visible, but only the baby looks unmistakably at another person: it seems that, for Stotik, the adult world is characterized by disconnection....
Lightning Bolt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are people who make art because they want to and there are people who can’t do anything but. Lightning Bolt fall into the latter category. Drummer and artist Brian Chippendale, the mangy dog of the duo, looks like he cuts his own hair without a mirror and randomly selects his wardrobe from the trash. His rough-edged comics depict chaotic fragments of life in make-believe lands–kingdoms where the little guy puts up an admirable fight before inevitably “failing”–and he helps maintain a homemade screen-printing press in order to circulate his drawings....
On its ninth album, Sleep/Holiday (Sanctuary), the Welsh group Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci does little to advance its sound, and that’s fine by me. Over the years the band has polished every facet of its gorgeous music–a sunny mixture of the Kinks, British folk, the Beach Boys, and the strummy side of the Velvet Underground. There’s not much to a song like “The South of France,” a fragile fantasy about restoring a troubled relationship with a rural getaway–it doesn’t even have a chorus....
