Dear Sir or Madame: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Similarly, Mr. Terkel is now resting comfortably in his spacious air-conditioned condominium, and looking out the window dreaming of his socialist messianic kingdom, which, to his consternation, has not yet arrived. But, Mr. Terkel believes, if only the Jews and the Israelis in particular would act like saints, then the messianic kingdom would be here....
How Big Can a Trio Get? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “This is what we’ve always wanted,” Skiba told me a few days before the Metro shows. “I’m really psyched that so many people are paying attention to us, and I’d be lying if I said we didn’t want to see how big our band could get.” With the Trio’s first video in production, negotiations under way to release their records in Europe through Epitaph, and constant touring planned through the fall–including a short stint next month with the Top 40 pop-punk band Blink-182–it would seem he’s about to find out....
The 19th annual Israel Film Festival continues Saturday through Thursday, May 10 through 15. Screenings will be at the Esquire and Highland Park, 445 Central, Highland Park. Tickets are $9, $6 for seniors and children aged ten and younger; a festival pass, good for five admissions, is $36. For more information call 877-966-5566. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. Aviv Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Moledet (65 min....
Before anyone heard of Richard Florida or The Rise of the Creative Class, before any local universities had cultural policy centers like the ones humming along now at the University of Chicago and Columbia College, former actor and producer Tom Tresser was waging a war on dark forces that had come out of nowhere to enslave the soul of American art. Like the comic-book superhero named after him, Tresser leaped into the fray when the likes of Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson were attacking artists and the NEA and made it his business “to understand who these people were and what they were doing,” he says....
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, European Repertory Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Tom Stoppard secured his place on the theatrical map in 1967 with this wordy curiosity, a highly philosophical but stage-smart play crafted by a gamesome wordsmith enamored of the power of language. It’s a work that shows no signs of aging, especially in the European Repertory’s engaging, efficient production, starring Dale Goulding and Yasen Peyankov as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the minor characters in Hamlet who play key roles here....
On more than one occasion I’ve been grabbed by the hair and pulled up for a big postcunnilingus kiss, but my face is dripping wet and I feel uncomfortable just laying a sloppy one on the girl without first wiping my face off on the sheet. Nothing was said by the girls, but I felt a little guilty. I had a girlfriend who would rush off and brush her teeth after giving head and it really bothered me....
Elizabeth Barret was an Appalachian kid in 1967 when one of the locals killed a documentary filmmaker who’d ventured onto his property carrying a camera. He got off with only a year in prison; Barret grew up to be a documentarian herself and was haunted by the incident. In her 62-minute film, Stranger With a Camera, she revisits the scene of the crime, using it to examine the issues of privacy and exploitation that are the messy underbelly of almost any documentary project....
Any long-lived band, if it is to remain vital, must evolve from its original purpose, but the on-again, off-again jazz quartet Sphere has moved further than most owing to the narrowness of its initial focus. Sphere was formed in 1979 by two longtime members of Thelonious Monk’s group, the wonderfully idiosyncratic saxophonist Charlie Rouse and drummer Ben Riley, plus two stellar players a generation younger, pianist Kenny Barron and bassist Buster Williams....
Over the last two weekends, Chicago has been the center of the sports universe. Only one of those weekends, however, met expectations. The New York Yankees came to town to face the Cubs in an interleague series two weeks ago, an event rife with talk of the 1938 World Series and Babe Ruth’s “called shot” off Charlie Root in the ’32 Series–the only times the teams had met previously in official games....
GIL SCOTT-HERON 6/2, HOTHOUSE Still best known for his 1970 classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” polymath Gil Scott-Heron is a living link between the mid-20th-century black nationalist movement and hip-hop. Mos Def has said he’s “as important to American letters and song as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Bob Dylan,” yet he’s a long way from that kind of canonization. Since 1994 or so, TVT Records has been doing its part to remedy this omission, and Scott-Heron is currently touring in support of the two most recent reissues in the label’s ongoing series: It’s Your World, recorded live at a Boston jazz club in 1976, and The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron, a 1978 anthology with a 1990 bonus track featuring, incredibly, Paul Weller on keyboards....
Did John Dillinger really die outside the Biograph movie theater in Chicago in 1934? And does his allegedly prodigious pecker really reside pickled in a secluded corner of the Smithsonian or some other hallowed ground? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bank robber John Dillinger, declared Public Enemy Number One by the U.S. attorney general, was the most notorious of the violent criminals whose exploits fascinated America during the Depression....
Tom Harrell Quintet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 1980s, while the jazz public crowded around Wynton Marsalis, veteran musicians had the name of another trumpeter on their lips: Tom Harrell. He created a cool excitement with the architecture of his solos and the slightly shaded, backlit glow of his timbre, which to this day recalls the diffident calm of Chet Baker. His improvisations seem to arrive fully formed, unusually coherent and balanced–they often sound as if he’d written them out beforehand, which is no small compliment given his talent as a composer....
ZENI GEVA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before Japanese rock was fashionable, before metal was respectable, Zeni Geva combined math, metal, and psychedelia with such ferocious abandon and deadly precision that they commanded a devoted following in the Chicago underground–Steve Albini collaborated with them on All Right, You Little Bastards (1995) and Jim O’Rourke recorded with founding member KK Null around that time as well....
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga follow up their masterful Amores perros with another complex drama of disparate characters whose lives are linked by fateful misfortune–not nearly as panoramic or rewarding as the earlier film, but just as intimate and deeply felt. Naomi Watts is excellent as a woman whose husband (Danny Huston) and two daughters are killed by a hit-and-run driver; the haunted culprit (Benicio Del Toro), an ex-con and hard-core Christian, agonizes over whether to turn himself in, while the man who receives a transplant of the husband’s heart (Sean Penn) goes in search of the wife to give thanks....
Leningrad Shnurov’s reply to most questions about his political leanings is “Ask Khodorkovsky”–meaning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oil tycoon awaiting trial on charges of fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement. Many Russians believe Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment was, at least to some extent, a product of his anti-Putin activism. Watching Putin on TV, Shnurov says, is the equivalent of watching a disappointing porn movie. “The scene starts and the people meet,” he says, “but then with Putin, the action is always in the shadows....
Sweet Smell of Success Shubert Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lehman’s piece set insiders’ tongues wagging throughout the midtown Manhattan world that all-powerful gossip columnist Walter Winchell dubbed “Cafake Society.” It was widely assumed that the vindictive, paranoid J.J. was modeled on Winchell (also known as W.W.), and certainly J.J.’s vendetta against Dallas recalled Winchell’s campaign to break up an affair between his daughter, Walda, and would-be producer Billy Cahn....
True Guru That image captured the nature of the evening: East meets West. This fusion of styles and genres of music and dance was produced under curator Janet Schmid’s directive: “Let it have a thread of India.” Dancers Schmid, Shanti Kumari Johnson, and Pranita Jain and members of her troupe, Kalapriya, joined musicians Ben Harbert, Scott Rosenburg, and Universe Neo to create pieces that can’t be categorized–at least not yet. This kind of effort represents a brand-new genre in need of a name: fusion art, perhaps....
Friday 6/14 – Thursday 6/20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Genevieve, the bitch behind Memoirs of a Papillon: The Canine Guide to Living With Humans Without Going Mad, argues that doorbells on television commercials should be banned, as they cause dogs to run to the front door and “bark their heads off,” and goes on to explain such things as the best way to ride in cars–on the driver’s lap....
Version>02 Several videos by members of the Guerrilla News Network echo the antiestablishment politics of the late-60s counterculture video pioneers. GNN’s cofounders, Stephen Marshall and Josh Shore, who met while working for MTV, state their aesthetic on their Web site: “Guerrilla News Videos are music videos for people who think.” Their minidocumentaries “aim to rock as hard as they inform, shock and inspire.” Talking heads in various GNN works offer sound bites such as “Information is the ultimate weapon” and “Wars are not won in the battlefield; they’re won in the minds of people....
In a shady hollow next to the parking lot of a West Chicago True Value Hardware, pineapples dangle from the trees and women in stretch pants bless themselves. At five o’clock on a recent Sunday evening dozens of people mill around the clearing. Many have come because they believe the Virgin of Guadalupe has appeared here, in the bark of the ash trees. They’ve also come because a mariachi band is supposed to perform at six....
