Hot Chocolate Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although many fans now identify it as a Ninja Tune creation, the groundbreaking collection was originally released by a tiny year-old Miami label called Chocolate Industries, run by a 20-year-old named Seven. “I hate to say it was my ‘idea,’” Seven says now. “It’s just what I was always into. I wasn’t trying to fuse anything. I would just play this and then I’d play that....
Todd Slaughter: Protected Comforts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Todd Slaughter addresses our futile hope for permanence in many of his 25 mordantly witty sculptures and installations at the Chicago Cultural Center. Four accordion files mounted on the same wall are cast of such substances as salt and paprika; the drooping slots of Salt Archive, October 1993 heighten the impression of dissolution over time....
Making an evening-length abstract dance must be like setting out to sea without a compass or a map. But Mad Shak artistic director Molly Shanahan finds her way in The Days of Pandora, a 50-minute piece for seven dancers set to a score by company member Kevin O’Donnell. Using touchstones from her own life–the story of Pandora, read during a crucial summer when she was eight, and the image of bare trees against subtly shifting winter skies–Shanahan creates a work with a strong emotional arc and lots of kinetic texture but no story whatsoever....
Matt Wilson Quartet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clever and exuberant drummer Matt Wilson has made an effortless transition from quirky sideman–with Dewey Redman, the Either/Orchestra, and Manhattan Transfer cofounder Janis Siegel–to distinctive bandleader: he brings a world of humor to the bandstand, and each of his albums reaches out to other genres, even spoken word, which collide like tectonic plates in eruptions of ironic juxtaposition....
Last week was our first time here. My friend told me about it. I didn’t even know what movie was playing until I heard people talking on the Blue Line. I’d never seen Some Like It Hot before. I just can’t help but wonder if the women of our day would be so forgiving of Tony Curtis’s antics; he really pulled Marilyn’s strings. Last week we weren’t really prepared. But as luck would have it the people next to us were celebrating a birthday, so we got a piece of cake....
Imagine that you’re driving along an unfamiliar road, alone and exasperated. “Where the fuck am I?” you say. “Fuck yeah I would!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We never wanted to be a gaming company,” says company president Amanda Lannert. Yet Jellyvision–which began its corporate life in 1989 as a company named Learn Television, producing educational films such as The Mind’s Treasure Chest–was a crazy success as a gaming company....
Women are excluded from the inner sanctums of many religions–the all-male priesthood of the Catholic Church comes to mind. But I’ve heard there’s a monastery in Greece so misogynistic it excludes female animals. Can this be true? What’s the deal? Do they really think femaleness in any form will defile the joint, or are they just concerned that the monks will get, you know, lonely? Best of Chicago voting is live now....
It has been over ten years since the U.S. government mandated that all cars be equipped with a “center high-mounted stop lamp” or “CHMSL,” as it is referred to in my vehicle’s shop manual. The CHMSL, of course, is the little red brake light that is mounted in the rear window of a car to catch the attention of drivers who might not notice your side-mounted brake lights. Has this invention reduced the incidence of rear-end collisions?...
When I first went to see Timothy Blum’s re-creations of familiar objects and icons I expected an overt critique of our material surroundings. Instead his meanings were opaque–but that allowed me to feel a sense of wonder. Eye of the Needle is a life-size rendition of R.J. Reynolds’s cigarette-box camel, with a skin made of dried tobacco leaves. You could spend all day debating the conceptual undertones, but standing close to the camel’s neck I could hear the tobacco leaves crackle....
Nina Nastasia Nina Nastasia’s debut album, Dogs, charts a girl’s uncertain course from childhood to high school drama and on to the shaky heights and murky dregs of bohemia. It’s a trip plenty of others have taken. From Janis Ian to Liz Phair, the innermost thoughts of young women have been well chronicled, sometimes excruciatingly so. But Nastasia’s record resonates not just within her own little life, within her circle of Manhattan friends, among people of her gender and age....
You can still hear the scrappy street band in the Amsterdam jazz sextet Available Jelly, an offshoot of a Utah performance troupe that went to Europe in the 70s to play open-air festivals and stuck around. Working out a new composition or arrangement, each member typically devises his own lead or supporting part in the orchestration. That may be one reason they play Ellington tunes such as “The Feeling of Jazz” so well; this band, like Ellington’s, comprises individual voices free to be themselves....
Mickle Maher remembers the day he became a full-time theater anarchist. It was 1984, and he was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, sitting in his Ann Arbor apartment, staring at two piles of paper on his kitchen table. One was a paper due for class the next morning. The other was an unfinished play called King Cow and His Helpers. Everyone sat down, ostensibly to give notes to one another....
When it comes to the history of the striptease, Chicago has more to show for itself than any other city in America. Rachel Shteir, the head of dramaturgy at DePaul’s Theatre School, dates the American striptease back to 1893 when the famed World’s Columbian exhibitionist, “Little Egypt,” originated the Hootchy Cootch. Little Egypt, who wowed millions of fairgoers on the Midway, was arguably the first mass-entertainment erotic star. Clad in vaguely Middle Eastern harem garb, the performer, Shteir says, was the first to import another loose arabesque: “belly dancing,” borrowed in fact from Paris, where orientalism was all the rage....
SEPTEMBER Last fall the city of Aurora decided to make itself a center of literary activity. Mike O’Kelley of the Aurora Economic Development Commission says the long-term plan includes building a cultural campus where “people can come to be immersed in the ideas and feel of midwest literature.” They’re getting a head start with this weekend’s Midwest Literary Festival, which features lectures, workshops, and panel discussions by about 130 authors and illustrators–though not all are from the midwest....
The Theatre of Western Springs is nearly as old as Norman Thayer, the curmudgeon at the center of On Golden Pond, and just as unique, so perhaps it’s appropriate that for the start of its 75th season the theater’s staging Ernest Thompson’s tale of love that triumphs over generations of bad parenting and the onset of Alzheimer’s. Started by Mary Cattell in 1929, TWS grew out of a play-reading group to become one of the country’s strongest and oldest community theaters and one of the few to have its own permanent venue (acquired in 1961)....
In England in the early 90s, a handful of bedroom-bound four-trackers–among them Flying Saucer Attack, Crescent, and Hood–rejected the giddy, hedonistic dance pop of “Madchester” scenesters like the Happy Mondays, instead making alienated, inward-looking music that reflected the grim landscapes, grimmer weather, and bleak economic prospects they’d grown up with in the country’s postindustrial north. Hood was founded in 1990 by Chris Adams (voice, guitar) and his brother Richard (bass), two teenagers in the small town of Wetherby; they’ve remained the quartet’s core members through countless lineup changes and a move to nearby Leeds....
It’s hard to describe Lucky Pierre’s work, which is uniquely heady, playful, and perplexing. Like their previous collective efforts, their newest piece–How to Manage Fear–is based on a tiny slice of pop culture. Yet somehow the group extracts from the car chase in the 1968 film Bullitt enough material to make this show’s 70 minutes seem to encompass the history of Western civilization. With trademark deadpan candor, the five performers spend the first third of the piece alternately scouring their memories for highway adventures–memories that continually morph into cinematic tropes–and chanting enthusiastic litanies of obscenities like doltish frat boys....
It’s 8 PM on a Friday and people–mostly white, mostly in pairs–are trickling into Rhythm, a dark, elegant Randolph Street bar devoted to all things percussive. After paying the $5 cover, they order beer and martinis at the long, curved bar, which is dominated by a large brass gong and overlooks “the pit”–a sunken circle 14 feet across with three rings of cushioned bench seating around it. Rhythm caters to all types of drummers, but the djembe is an easy way in for beginners, says Doug’s brother, Rob, who handles the bar’s finances....
This Alexander Sokurov feature (2002) is one of the most staggering technical achievements in the history of cinema–a single shot lasting 95 minutes while moving through 33 rooms in the world’s largest museum, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg (which also encompasses the Winter Palace). Part pageant and museum tour, part theme-park ride and historical meditation, it traverses two centuries of czarist Russia as smoothly as it crosses the Hermitage, with the offscreen Sokurov engaged in an ongoing dialogue with an on-screen 19th-century French diplomat (apparently suggested by Adolphe, marquis de Custine)....
Adele Bethel and David Gow, founders of Sons and Daughters, first played together as part of Arab Strap’s touring band, but their new group’s songs bear little resemblance to their old employers’ miserable dirges. In fact, Bethel and bandmate Scott Paterson sound positively thrilled to be pissed off when they harmonize on “Blood,” from Sons and Daughters’ debut EP, Love the Cup (Domino), and throughout the record their terse, twangy guitars seethe with barely restrained tension....
