Posts

Germany’s auteur of angst, Doris Dorrie (Am I Beautiful?, Men…), directed this poignant 2000 social comedy about two frustrated middle-aged brothers from Munich who embark on a pilgrimage to a Buddhist monastery near Tokyo. One is a selfish appliance salesman whose wife has deserted him (Uwe Ochsenknecht), the other a meek feng shui consultant aspiring to a Zen serenity (Gustav Peter Wohler), and they’re slowly stripped of their worldly belongings as they journey through the electronic chaos of Tokyo to the calm oasis of the monastery....

Choreographer Deborah Hay is a true original, the kind of person who looks so deeply into the origins of her art that she can sound a little unhinged. Chicago dancer Robbie Cook, who performs her solo Music as part of this concert, says Hay describes the work as “an exploration of form and formlessness on a cellular level.” A member of the Judson Church movement in New York–she participated in the first concert there, in 1962, with a piece called Rain Fur (Yvonne Rainer recalled her “hobbling around with something around her knees”)–Hay has for the last 40 years eschewed the usual dance structures and focus on technique....

If ever there was a bleak valentine, Holy Body Tattoo’s Circa is it: romance here is dark, bloody, and campy, more Edgar Allan Poe than Hallmark. Choreographed and performed by Vancouver-based Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras, who’ve been dancing together since 1987, this hour-long piece is set in a shadowy room lined with red curtains and reflects the simultaneous tenderness and violence of the tango, its subject and medium alike. Divided into multiple sections, Circa is accompanied by live music (most of it original) by the Tiger Lillies, whose tango renditions of “Send in the Clowns” and “I Could Have Danced All Night,” sung in falsetto, come across as ironic counterpoints to Gagnon and Gingras’s more traditional takes on ballroom dance....

These days most jet-setting electro artists seem more concerned with showing off their designer clothes than creating new sounds, but Dutchman Danny Wolfers (aka Legowelt) still puts his music ahead of his image. His Web site includes a geeked-out list of everything in his studio with a brief description of each piece of gear (“sometimes nothing beats the warmth of tape saturation”)–a symptom of his dorky dedication to the details of his craft....

It’s a little early for most people to start worrying about filing their income taxes, but the staff at the Center for Economic Progress is already gearing up. The center, a statewide nonprofit organization that provides free tax counseling to low-income people, is trying to line up volunteers to help poor and working-class taxpayers with their forms, especially the forms that let them take advantage of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit program....

Northwestern University’s school of music recently revamped its contemporary music activities, and one of its major changes is the addition of “New Music Northwestern,” a series of concerts by graduate students in its Contemporary Music Ensemble and local pros, organized by composer Amy Williams. The daughter of a Buffalo-based percussionist fond of the avant-garde, Williams grew up listening to John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow and studied piano with Yvar Mikhashoff and Alan Feinberg, both avid champions of the new....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The London Daily Telegraph reported last month that Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda who reportedly ordered some 100,000 murders and occasionally cannibalized his enemies, is said to be encouraging his 48 children around the world to restore the family home in the village of Aura as a monument. (Amin was deposed in 1979 and is not expected to return from exile in Saudi Arabia....

City of Fools: Chicago’s Clown Theater Festival Danzig is also the mastermind behind the first “City of Fools: Chicago’s Clown Theater Festival,” a three-weekend event that’s at least as risky as anything he does in 500 Clown Macbeth. But sitting through this year’s offerings it was hard not to wish every performer shared Danzig’s devotion and perfectionism. Of the four pieces I saw, only 500 Clown Macbeth felt fully formed and rehearsed....

Jon Langford has a band for every occasion, and in the past he’s used the Pine Valley Cosmonauts as a vehicle to pay homage to country greats Johnny Cash and Bob Wills. On 1998’s The Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills he enlisted a raft of guest vocalists–including Robbie Fulks, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Alejandro Escovedo, and Neko Case–to sing the old bandleader’s tunes, transforming the Cosmonauts into a sort of spirited and flexible session band....

Between the ages of 13 and 16 I engaged in bestiality with our household pets. I was a horny kid, and I guess kind of a freak. It never went beyond oral copulation, and I eventually curtailed the whole thing due to guilt and shame. I am now a 21-year-old woman who is moving toward a healthy human sex life and trying to get over what a sick kid I used to be....

Like many 40-year-old guys, I’m attracted to the girl at my morning coffee place. She’s a biker, pierced, tattooed, dark-haired, beautiful, and intelligent. However, I am pretty sure she likes girls. She’s always nice, but maybe just because I am a customer? I spend way too much time thinking about exploding my rocket all over her. I would have no problem sharing her with another girl. Do I respect her right to do her job and be left alone, or do I tell her what I’m thinking?...

Solex Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyone with decent command of a mouse and keyboard these days can create seamless sample-based music, so when Elisabeth Esselink, aka Solex, lets her stitches hang out, it’s clearly intentional. The 15 tunes on her new Low Kick and Hard Bop (Matador), composed of samples culled primarily from unsellable CDs and old vinyl at her Amsterdam record store, sound stubbornly homemade....

The baseball season is a long, smooth-flowing river. That’s its great beauty and also its inherent advantage over other sports. There’s little doubt the teams that have risen to the top by the end of the regular season deserve to be there; the teams have all been tested over a great distance, and their ups and downs have evened out. The Cubs and Cards played a set of home-and-home series the last two weekends, and the games were marked by high tension and feverish fan involvement....

Friday, October 8 Director Simon Staho’s film, set almost entirely in an SUV, follows the vehicle’s morose owner (Mikael Persbrandt) over the course of a day as he picks up various friends, family members, and strangers in an attempt to settle personal accounts before following through with his suicide plan. If this sounds familiar it’s because Staho (who also cowrote the script) lifted the conceit straight from Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry....

Geoffrey Bent won’t tell just anyone how many novels he’s written. “If you tell people you’ve written one or two novels they’ll give you a friendly expression,” he says. “But anything beyond four novels, they start to think something is basically wrong with you. It’s one of those things like masturbation. Why are you doing this, they wonder. What is your problem?” He sent each of his first three novels to at least 40 publishers, to no avail....

Rock, Pop, etc. CHRIS GILMARTIN Free concert. Fri 1/10, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. TEDDY PENDERGRASS, WHISPERS Fri 1/17, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-263-1138 or 312-902-1500. SHAKIRA, PAY THE GIRL Sat 1/18, 7:30 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison. 312-455-4500 or 312-559-1212. clubs ALUMNI CLUB 871 E. Algonquin, Schaumburg: Music at 5:30 PM. Fridays, DJ Speed, DJ Smurf, DJ M-Pulse. Saturdays, DJ M-Pulse....

A New Way of Keeping Scores Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sitrick, who was at the rehearsal with a video cam and two members of his staff, is a cofounder and former owner of Arena Football, but the eStand is a product more in line with his own diverse interests. A Niles East High School graduate who played the guitar well enough to be offered a contract by Nashville’s vaunted Tree Publishing when he was 15 (it was vetoed by his mother), he started his professional life as an engineer for Ford....

For a city with such a vibrant music scene, Chicago has surprisingly little to offer the metal fan–Milwaukee Metalfest seems to be as close as many influential or up-and-coming acts get–so seeing this bill listed at Metro was particularly startling and refreshing. Then again, this German quartet is startling and refreshing in its own right: it has evolved slowly and contentiously from a fairly straightforward power-metal band into a more formidable progressive unit, at last reaching its current state of absolute fearlessness, incorporating choruses, keyboards, and multilayered guitar complexities....

Chicago’s annual literary festival, formerly known as Chicago Book Week, is now a monthlong event. This year’s edition runs through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, and children’s activities at locations throughout the city. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-747-4300, see www.chicagopubliclibrary.org, or contact the hosting venues. “The Virtuoso: Ideals and Realities of Italian Renaissance Art”...

Fluke and Maximum Party Zone Are Go!, ImprovOlympic. Prop comedy may be single-handedly responsible for the decline of Western civilization. It’s certainly the bane of sketch comedy, where it shifts focus away from genuine human connection toward funny hats and gorilla suits. Maximum Party Zone–Bill Arnett, Danny Mora, and Bobby Mort of the ImprovOlympic house team People of Earth–takes prop comedy to dangerously toxic levels in its latest revue. Maximum Party Zone Are Go!...