No man is an island, entire of itself, not even Brian Urlacher. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though they weren’t as good going into this season as last year’s 13-3 record suggested–their one-and-out playoff appearance showed that–they also weren’t as awful as their four straight losses this season now suggest. Only against the Green Bay Packers, unfortunately in a Monday night game broadcast nationally on ABC, did the Bears seem overmatched....
ELF POWER 9/27, ABBEY PUB These Athens art-pop wags have always displayed their influences proudly, but their sixth full-length is a bona fide covers album, Nothing’s Going to Happen (Orange Twin). Though the wide stylistic range gives the disc a jumbled, jukebox quality, the band salutes expected and unexpected influences alike with puckish verve and occasional fidelity. The work of fellow space cadets like T. Rex (“Hot Love”) and Roky Erickson (“I Walked With the Zombie,” “Unforced Peace,” and “I Love the Living You”) comes more naturally than Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” or Sonic Youth’s “Cotton Crown....
In mid-September, a consortium of news organizations announced that it was postponing its analysis of the ballots that were cast but not counted in Florida during the mess that was the 2000 presidential election. The decision didn’t sit well with those who were eagerly awaiting proof that George W. Bush had stolen the election. Word quickly traveled the Internet that Al Gore had won and won big, and that the media had spiked the story to avoid undermining the legitimacy of a suddenly popular president who was leading the nation to war....
Though not directed by an auteurist-approved figure (Mark Robson has never attracted any cult to my knowledge), this is the greatest of producer Val Lewton’s justly celebrated low-budget chillers–a beautifully wrought story about the discovery of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village that fully lives up to the morbid John Donne quote framing the action. Intricately plotted over its 71 minutes, by screenwriters Charles O’Neal, De Witt Bodeen, and an uncredited Lewton, so that what begins rationally winds up as something far weirder than a thriller plot, this 1943 tale of a young woman (Kim Hunter in her first screen role) searching for her troubled sister (Jean Brooks) exudes a distilled poetry of doom that extends to all the characters as well as to the noirish bohemian atmosphere....
Charles LeDray That eclecticism is revealed in one of the show’s earliest pieces, Workworkworkworkwork (1991), consisting of 588 objects arrayed on the floor against one wall. Most are small items of clothing and even smaller replicas of books and magazines–everything is proportioned to a miniature people. Some publications have real titles, like Time; there are also items of gay porn and some odd titles LeDray invented (“Sleaziest,” “News…and Sex”). Though visitors aren’t intended to turn the pages, each magazine in fact has insides (made of cut-up magazines)....
You Gets on Stage, You Takes Your Chances Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No bravo to “A Chicago Theater Artist” (Letters, June 29). This anonymous writer’s letter is proof that a critic is no more capable of “recklessly and ignorantly slamming Chicago theater artists” than an artist is of recklessly and ignorantly slamming Chicago theater critics in an overly general and unproductive manner. Aside from disagreeing with much of the language used and many of the specific complaints issued in this person’s letter, I am tired of reading theater artists’ complaints about critics’ reviews....
As Jared Diamond demonstrates in Guns, Germs, and Steel, when Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spanish soldiers defeated Atahuallpa’s army of 80,000 Incas at Cajamarca in 1532, the decisive factor was the Spaniards’ ability to read and write. Because while it may seem as though civilizations master each other with avionics and blunderbusses, viruses and Tomahawk missiles, really we do it with books. (Relative levels of book learning are a function of the shape of the continent you hail from, believe it or not, but that’s a whole other discussion....
A plot twist and a scene featuring prayers performed in a made-up sign language almost save this predictable comedy–but not quite. Josh Levine’s one-act about a gay Jewish man coming out to his family while concealing that his longtime lover is not Jewish steals shamelessly from every Abie’s Irish Rose comedy in history, with particular overuse of clashing iconography (eggnog versus Chinese food, wreath versus dreidel). Here we also get a leather harness, jokes about pornography, and a topical reference to gay marriage, but it’s still the same old same old: Jewish women are overbearing, Jewish men are henpecked, Jewish families are tiresome....
In its early years, the Around the Coyote festival received vociferous complaints about its role in Wicker Park gentrification. But now that the neighborhood has gone about as far as it can go in terms of pricey housing and trendy boites, those attacks seem downright quaint. At the same time, this year’s lineup features at least two original, passionate, witty works that confront the conundrums of transformation. Four of the Sweat Girls’ seven members reprise their hit from last spring, Cirque du Sweat, a humorous, poignant collection of monologues and scenes dealing with body image, baby fever, and the erosion of youthful ideals in the face of middle-aged realities....
BADENYA–LES FRERES COULIBALY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Legend has it that an American country bluesman could go to a crossroads at midnight and sell his soul to the devil, in return for which he’d receive supernatural musical talent. More recently, African musicians like Youssou N’Dour and Salif Keita have been going to North America or Europe in pursuit of international stardom–and the bargains they strike there are no less Faustian....
No one has done more to link the improvised-music communities of Vienna and Chicago than saxophonist and computer musician Boris Hauf. True, his countrymen in the group Polwechsel are no strangers to town: since 1997 they’ve played Chicago both as a unit and in mix-and-match collaborations masterminded by local bass clarinetist Gene Coleman, and Polwechsel guitarist and composer Burkhard Stangl staged the third part of his opera Venusmond here in 2000....
Stan Brakhage, who died last March, was the greatest of experimental filmmakers, but many of his films have yet to be screened here. The centerpiece of this program of local premieres, “Trilogy” (1995), consists of three gorgeously sensual handmade films. By painting and scratching directly on celluloid strips and then duplicating each image for two or more frames, Brakhage produced a flickering cycle of abstract shapes that bespeak the restlessness of his own character and sensibility; the titles of the segments (which Brakhage also intended to function as freestanding films) further emphasize his rejection of collective thinking in favor of personal vision....
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but in the six months that I’ve been a client coordinator at my yoga studio, I haven’t exactly been keeping up my practice. Then he shows me how. He says it wouldn’t be cost-efficient to print a whole new batch and draws careful lines on five flyers. I know this is just the way Dex is; he’s a perfectionist, which obviously has something to do with his being such a success....
Looking for sex and violence? Check out the Eifman Ballet’s Russian Hamlet: The Son of Catherine the Great. There’s nothing polite or pretty about artistic director Boris Eifman’s treatment of Czar Paul I’s life, which bears some resemblance to Hamlet’s: domineering mother, aided by her “favorite” (i.e., illicit lover), has father killed; son can’t manage to take revenge. Love has nothing to do with Eifman’s horrifying vision of domestic life; instead almost every image expresses hierarchy or domination....
Last summer multimedia artist Christine LoFaso began to canvass people about their attitudes toward their bodies via an informal E-mail to friends and colleagues and a temporary Web site. She asked people what they liked about their bodies and whether their feelings on the subject had changed over time, and received about 100 anonymous answers from people ranging in age from 20 to 70. “I was amazed at their honesty and poignancy,” says LoFaso, who has been exploring this subject in her art for about a decade....
I interviewed John Kartje in early September in his office at Saint Ben’s on West Irving Park Road. The photo is a digital montage by Paul L. Merideth. Another thing I would point to, when I started high school was the year that Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos was launched. I actually lived in his dorm at the University of Chicago; that’s where he was a college student. Not by choice–I mean it was just coincidence....
As his parents tell the story, Anthony Fett was one of those lucky people who know what they want to do with their lives almost from the day they’re born. Jerry Fett, Anthony’s father, says, “From the time he could talk he was ready to sing a show tune.” Every gathering was an audience, every new home a stage. He sang for family and friends at weddings and birthday parties. “My grandfather on my mother’s side, Thomas Vitale, was a music teacher in the public schools,” says Fett....
For years John Dall had been mystified by a recurring vision. He didn’t know whether it was a childhood incident, a story he’d been told long ago, or an illusion. During the day it seemed like a memory playing out in disconnected fragments. At night it came as a dream, more vivid but less real. He was a small boy standing alone in a shallow gully, surrounded by a vast burning field....
With his noisy, hyperactive 1999 debut, Don’t Sweat the Technics, Kid606, aka Oakland’s Miguel Depedro, ushered in the new wave of electronic music: brash, obnoxious, and with an undeniable personality. Artists like Cex, Lesser, and Blectum From Blechdom, all of whom have recorded for his Tigerbeat6 label, have followed his lead, charting out their own paths with abrasive charm and charming irreverence. Nothing is sacred in this camp, and that ethos is more than evident on the Kid’s latest offering, The Action Packed Mentallist Brings You the Fucking Jams....
Allen Ross, who cofounded Chicago Filmmakers in the early 1970s, vanished mysteriously in 1995, two years after he surprised his friends by suddenly marrying alleged cult leader Linda Greene and leaving Chicago. German filmmaker Christian Bauer says that for both of them filmmaking was a “way of understanding the world,” and his 2001 documentary tries to unravel the story behind Ross’s disappearance. Documentaries about failed quests are commonplace, but Bauer encircles his subject with a poetic structure based on gaps and disjunctions, presences and absences (Allen’s camera is found in storage, but where is he?...
