I read in the New Yorker that George W. Bush’s grandfather and great-grandfather worked for Brown Brothers Harriman, and had clients who funded the building of the Nazi regime. I searched the Net and found hundreds of sites giving volumes of details and listing sources like the New York Times and the Library of Congress. Conspiracy theories aside, what’s the truth about our president’s family? Best of Chicago voting is live now....
On a recent reading tour Janet Desaulniers wowed audiences by telling them how she sold the first story she ever sent out–a semiautobiographical shortie about a college grad who moves back in with her mom–to the New Yorker when she was 25. Then she really shocked them by telling them how long it took for her first book to get into print. First contracted by Alfred A. Knopf about 20 years ago, her story collection What You’ve Been Missing was just published by the University of Iowa Press in October....
The house at 4758 S. Princeton, just west of the Dan Ryan, was old and needed renovating, but it was the only major asset LuBertha Ridley had. Then the county let someone take it away from her. The annual taxes on her property, which she owned outright, weren’t high–about $21 a year. But for some reason she missed a payment in 1996. The county sent her a form letter informing her of the delinquency and warning that if she didn’t pay the bill she could lose her property....
Rock, Pop, etc. BREATHE: EMERGING POETS AND MUSICIANS Open mike and jam session for poets and musicians. Tue 2/13, 8 PM, Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. 773-227-6117. BUCKET KIDS, MAC JORDAN, BLACK EARTH ENSEMBLE, HOODOO HOEDOWN perform as part of “Voices of a New Black Millennium” music and poetry concert hosted by Marvin Tate. Free admission. Sat 2/17, 7 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. 773-728-6000....
Amos Gitai began shooting movies while in a helicopter rescue unit in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, using a Super-8 camera his mother had given him. While this 1997 video in which he interviews his fellow soldiers may be looser and more open-ended than Kippur (2000), the powerful fiction feature that re-creates his war experience, it’s a thoughtful meditation on the nature of war, memory, and imagery. Gitai’s Super-8 footage has a raw, eerie power–in one sequence, indistinct flight suits hang outdoors, filling the frame like looming ghosts–and he links past and present by superimposing the war images over his interviews....
After a 20-year famine, the Chicago Reader, over the New Year’s weekend, has broken with its own tradition and treated us to a feast of some 16-odd short pieces of original fiction. Without warning or so much as an editorial comment, we have been left on our own to make what we will of this compilation of work. We are given the name of the author of each piece but no hint as to the writer’s background or how it came to be that a story was selected....
Fannypack “Cameltoe” is not just a novelty record because it’s a joke. It’s one of those records, like “Loser” or “My Name Is,” that’s unmistakably new, that makes you stop whatever you’re doing when you first hear it. That’s because Fannypack MCs Jessibel Suthiwong and Belinda Lovell are the rawest you’ve ever heard on commercial radio. They have zero showbiz affect; they’re American anti-idols, unmitigated Brooklyn, from a block like Jenny hasn’t seen in years....
This up-close avian travelogue from producer Jacques Perrin (Microcosmos, Himalaya) is the most astounding cinematic testament to flock mentality since Hitchcock’s The Birds. With a team that included 12 cinematographers, Perrin traversed the globe between 1998 and 2001, filming dozens of bird species (red-crowned cranes, flamingos, bald eagles) on their arduous annual migrations. Shots from gliders, helicopters, and ultralight motorized aircraft simulate not only a bird’s-eye view but the exhilaration of traveling in a flying V....
Wolves at the Door The construction is done for today, but it will start up again tomorrow, and it’s projected to continue for at least another three years. His neighborhood on the near south side has become newly desirable–even Mayor Daley lives there–and a housing explosion is saturating the blocks nearby with high-end condos and town houses. Magnus, who owns a 117-year-old relic of Chicago’s Gilded Age, can’t help feeling besieged by the new forces in the neighborhood, where he used to be nearly all alone....
Shannon Bartlett’s knee started aching after the first mile. As she pushed farther into the AIDS Run/Walk Chicago, the pain migrated to the outside of the joint, then arrowed up her thigh. Bartlett persisted, though. She was running for a cause she desperately wants to promote: the defeat of George W. Bush. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When he was in Iraq it was absolutely brutal,” Bartlett said....
Actors Seeking Influence Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The performing arts center had been touted as one reason to go with Arthur Hill over another developer, Adler says, but apparently neither the city nor the developer was serious about it: “It just died.” To the scattered members of Evanston’s performing arts community, it was another sign that their craft is slighted in a town that prides itself on cultural vibrancy but, says producer and director Linda Solotaire, “tends to focus on the visual arts....
The curtain should have fallen long ago on the debate over opera supertitles. No one’s forced to gaze above the stage, so why not let others look where they will? But they came up again at last Saturday’s Lyric Opera seminar on A Wedding, when New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini asked if we’ll ever have an American opera without the projected cheat sheets. Lyric general manager William Mason replied that “the audience wants and appreciates those titles”—and got a round of applause fit for a diva....
Friday 2/21 – Thursday 2/27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Much of the contemporary dance presenting that’s going on right now in the U.S. is dominated by work from New York and abroad,” says Phil Reynolds, executive director of the Dance Center of Columbia College. “But there is in fact a wealth of very interesting new work coming out of the west coast, and San Francisco is the hub of that....
EL HADJ N’DIAYE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » El Hadj N’Diaye is a successful actor as well as a singer in his native Senegal, and appropriately he seems utterly invested in both his most ardent love song (“Ragajuma”) and his most strident political anthem (“Xale Bi,” about the youngest victims of civil war). His majestic voice is coiled like a snake, ready to spring into a piercing upper register at just the right moment, and whether he’s accompanied by his own acoustic guitar or a full complement of percussion and stringed instruments, it remains the focal point of his music....
Steve Hudson: Heterology at Peter Miller, through March 16 Pamela Murphy at Melanee Cooper, through March 23 Michael Dinges: Essential Artifacts, Re-Presenting Everyday Objects at Aron Packer, through March 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The viewer bounces between noticing details–the delicacy and near transparency of baby toes, for example–and the overall mix of solidity, luminosity, and chaos. There’s a disturbing tension between idealized forms and their apparent dissolution, as if lineaments borrowed from a classic Madonna and Child painting had undergone a dramatic and mysterious transformation....
When Jim Carrane moved out of his parents’ Kenilworth home at age 28, he didn’t realize just how small Chicago could be. In search of cheap rent, he spent the next six years living in an apartment designed for dwarfs. Now Carrane, 36, looks back at that time and laughs. As a performer on the local improv comedy scene, he’s honed his storytelling skills in three one-man shows about his life....
Elizabeth, who doesn’t like last names, is a Santeria priestess. But while neither that–nor paranormal investigation, Russian Gypsy card reading, or “candle magic”–really pays the bills, her last stab at a straight job, in the sales department of her father’s electrical parts distribution company, didn’t quite work out either. “I constantly got into trouble because I could never keep my big mouth shut,” she says. “My father would call me into the office and say, ‘I don’t want to hear about ghosts and ghost hunting....
On her 1994 debut, The Pendulum Vibe, and its never-released follow-up, Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome, Atlanta soul singer Joi Gilliam Gipp delivered a wild strain of funked-up rock ‘n’ soul that positioned her as an outsize freak channeling the intense spirit of 70s soul-funk diva Betty Davis. This certainly differentiated her from the pack, but she also sounded like she was trying too hard: though the music had a unique flavor, the instrumental tracks were often harsh or hollow, or badly mismatched with her singing....
Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner, the marrieds who are Mates of State, cram just about as much music into each moment as two humans with only four lungs and two instruments can. The duo’s interactions are so precise they sound charted, yet so supple they feel improvised. Gardner reels off baroque fingering exercises and carnival swirls on Yamaha organ (and occasionally piano) as drummer Hammel shifts rhythms with a willful restlessness....
It’s noon on Friday, and Z’s Fish & Shrimp on Lincoln near Belden is packed to the gills. Hospital workers in scrubs and kids from Lincoln Park High School wait for takeout. A lone salesman sits in the window eating fried jumbo shrimp. Next to him, Audrey Starks and her daughter Gwen eat fried chicken and split a plate of hush puppies. And in the back, 85-year-old Ples Farrow is deveining shrimp....
