Posts

Old-school reporters count the big shots they’ve met on one finger. The cosmopolitan Ranan Lurie studied at a different school. This helps explain why there’s a major new journalism prize in his honor–and why the proles of his trade say it’s ridiculous. But this group is no more unlikely than Lurie himself. An Israeli by birth and a New Yorker by destiny, he’s recognized twice in the Guinness Book of Records: (1) as “the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world”–appearing in more than 1,000 papers in more than 100 countries; and (2) for a lineage that has been traced back 30 centuries to the house of David and that identifies as his kinsmen Freud, Marx, Mendelssohn, and the prophet Isaiah....

This annual showcase, now in its 13th year, has held plenty of “legacy” concerts revealing the influence of one tap dancer on another–or on lots of others. So it’s only natural it should go off and explore a larger universe this year, specifically the world of Latin-influenced percussive dance, in a series of concerts called “Ritmo–The Latin Beat.” Headlining the opening weekend is Valeria Pinheiro’s Vata Tap, based in Brazil, performing excerpts from Bagaceira (“Sugar Cane Pulp”)....

In 1966 Wu Hung, who teaches art history at the University of Chicago, was himself just an art student. He was attending a state-sponsored exhibit of “reactionary” paintings in Beijing when a group of Red Army guards, incensed by a set of cartoon portraits of Mao, dragged the artist into the room with a leather belt around his neck. They forced him to kneel in front of his paintings and demanded that he confess to making the works with criminal intent, savagely beating and kicking him....

Daft Punk Mixed Live Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As with a “real” band, a DJ’s live performance has a lot to do with his synergy with an audience. A band can respond to a crowd by improvising, holding the mike out over the masses for a chorus, maybe varying the tempo–all things you can capture on tape. But most dance sets tick to a specific tempo to keep people on the floor–drastically speeding up or slowing down tends to kill the vibe....

Pumpkin With Christina Ricci, Hank Harris, Brenda Blethyn, Dominique Swain, Marisa Coughlan, Sam Ball, Harry Lennix, and Nina Foch. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Little did I realize that this pessimism would remain in the culture while the German films heralding it would be forgotten even faster than the earlier French ones. I have to admit that I was won over by the sarcasm of at least one Fassbinder movie, Martha (1973), a parody of bourgeois marriage and Douglas Sirkean Hollywood melodrama that tells the horrific story of a virgin librarian marrying a sadist and remaining a dutiful hausfrau until she winds up in a wheelchair....

If, like me, you’ve been wondering how Terry Zwigoff, the brilliant documentary filmmaker who made Crumb, would negotiate his shift to fiction filmmaking, here’s your answer: brilliantly. Ghost World, a very personal adaptation of the Daniel Clowes comic book that Zwigoff wrote with Clowes, either captures with uncanny precision what it’s like to be a teenage girl in this country at this moment or fooled me utterly into thinking it does....

NATALIE MacMASTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fiddle music of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island gets its character from the Scottish immigrants who settled the area in the late 18th and early 19th centuries–in fact, many traditions that have all but disappeared in Scotland are still vital there. The Cape Breton style evolved at community functions like parties and weddings, and the island’s fiddlers still prefer a driving, danceable, strongly rhythmic approach–stuttering grace notes, punchy double-stops, and piercing, unorthodox tunings–over the showstopping high-velocity displays currently popular among Celtic folk revivalists....

Released in 1975, near the end of Arthur Penn’s most productive period (which began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde), this haunting psychological thriller ambitiously sets out to unpack post-Watergate burnout in American life. Gene Hackman plays an LA detective tracking a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith in her screen debut) to the Florida Keys while evading various problems of his own involving his father and his wife. The labyrinthine mystery plot and pessimistic mood suggest Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, and like them screenwriter Alan Sharp has more than conventional mystery mechanics on his mind....

I’ve been here seven years. I’ve got 40 years in the world of organ marketing–as in musical instrument as opposed to kidneys. That’s at every level: wholesale, manufacturing. I have been coming here since 1970 and began working here in February of ’95. I can look through the crowd and see 30 minutes’ worth of tunes because I know what they want to hear. I enjoy Duke Ellington, show tunes, songs associated with singers–Sinatra, Bennett, Nat King Cole....

Patti Austin’s 2003 Grammy nomination raised a few eyebrows, not because she lacks skill or power as a vocalist but because it came in the jazz category–and Austin has had a successful career as a Motown-influenced pop singer, best known for the 1981 hit “Baby Come to Me.” Perhaps the only unraised eyebrows belonged to those who’d already been shocked by the nominated album itself. On For Ella (Playboy), Austin’s wholly satisfying tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, she honors the singer in the best way possible: on nearly a dozen of the tunes most associated with Fitzgerald, Austin convincingly conveys the legend’s influence while for the most part avoiding imitation....

Over 170 booksellers will display their wares on five tented blocks at the Printers Row Book Fair’s 18th annual “celebration of the written word.” In addition to the new, used, and antiquarian offerings, the fair features dozens of readings, panel discussions, and children’s activities. Events will be held at the Burnham Reading Room, Printers Row Hyatt, 500 S. Dearborn; the Children’s Tent, Dearborn and Polk; Dearborn Station, 47 W. Polk; Grace Place, 637 S....

On December 1, Rick Goldschmidt got home just in time to catch the 40th-anniversary broadcast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Facing a two-hour commute from the north-side SBC office where he works to his apartment in southwest-suburban Worth, he’d flown out the door as soon as the clock struck five. For Goldschmidt, missing the special, produced in 1964 by the team of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, would have been unthinkable....

Benoit Jacquot’s 2000 feature about the 18th-century libertine and pornographer opened in France three months before Philip Kaufman’s Quills hit theaters in the U.S., and it’s superior in every way. Each film is partly fictionalized, using Sade’s incarcerations to explore his ideas about personal freedom, and each presents a classically Sadean tale of a pure young woman tempted by forbidden passions. Yet the operatic Quills, set in the asylum where Sade finished out his days, makes a fairly conventional argument against censorship; Sade takes place a decade earlier, during the Reign of Terror, and it neatly juxtaposes Sade’s notions about pain and pleasure with the wanton cruelty of the age....

You’ve often come to the aid of many a sick, demented fetishist, which has inspired me, a 23-year-old overweight brown-skinned dude who has never gotten laid, or for that matter even achieved the least intimacy with a lady, sexy or otherwise, to beg your help in locating some kindly lady who might be willing, so to speak, to ignore a poor psychologically castrated fellow’s faults and instruct him in the ways of physical love....

Sure, there are plenty of reasons to be snarky about Bailiwick Repertory’s warhorse musical, currently receiving its tenth annual production (if the show were a child, it would be in fourth grade). Half the songs are superfluous, the set appears to have mothball dust on it, and director David Zak seems to have phoned in the blocking. And yet, maybe I’m a sucker, but by the time John Reeger and Julie Shannon’s story–about a man determined to cross stormy Lake Michigan to bring Christmas trees to Chicago in the 1880s–reached the end of the first act, I understood why families return to the show year after year....

Cuban pitching legend Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez uses an electric razor to keep his head shaven, but that doesn’t prevent his paying a visit to Maria Xiques’s downtown barbershop whenever he comes to Chicago. A trip to Upper Cuts, on the third floor of 333 N. Michigan, is practically mandatory for Cuban VIPs visiting Chicago: other notable pilgrims to the three-chair shop include Barbarito Torres and Juan De Marcos from the Buena Vista Social Club band and Pedro Calvo, a longtime vocalist for the Cuban dance band Los Van Van and now a solo performer....

By Linda Lutton But you probably haven’t. That’s where Wade comes in. The elections were big: there were 17,000 people running for 5,400 seats on the new councils, with about three candidates for every parent seat, four candidates for every community seat, and two candidates for every teacher seat. More than 312,000 people came out to vote. Deanes was elected to two councils in ’89. “Prior to that, we were trying to get African-centered curriculum at Prosser [high school],” he says....

The Usual Dearth of Wisdom Which brings me to this year’s Golden BAT. Normally I grade the writers by toting up the number of division champions and wild-card teams correctly predicted. But I decided that any sportswriter wise and bold enough to predict that the glamourless, low-budget Anaheim Angels would come from nowhere to win the 2002 World Series would perforce receive the BAT–and it didn’t matter if every other prediction was wrong....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Miner’s essay “Tribune, Explain Yourself” (12 November) rests on a huge assumption that most perceptive readers do not see in the Tribune editorials in recent years–that at its core there is some sort of intellectual honesty on the Tribune editorial board. For the last four years it is most apparent that the editorial board is making decisions that are not correlated with Republican values and beliefs, but are correlated with merely supporting Republicans because of who they are....

Microhouse–a genre the Village Voice rightly described as minimal techno disguised as house music–has gotten a lot less micro of late. The most common adjustment has been to plant microhouse’s subtle beats and incrementally shifting textures underneath songs that are already popular. Sometimes this tactic fails–Superpitcher released a god-awful cover of “Fever” earlier this year. But other times it works surprisingly well, and that’s true of the versions of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” and Everything but the Girl’s “Each and Everyone” crafted by Cologne DJ-producer Michaela Dippel, aka Ada, on her debut full-length, Blondie (Areal)....