In an effort to dispel classical music’s elitist aura and secure an audience for the future, big cultural institutions like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera, and the Ravinia Festival have launched outreach programs that send musicians into the neighborhoods. The Icarus Quartet was formed three years ago by the CSO to take the classics into Pilsen and Little Village; its membership has been fluid but for one constant: violist Max Raimi....
Just a couple years after the Beatles raised eyebrows with a single sitar, this Scottish combo made two of the most fearlessly and promiscuously eclectic folk albums of all time. The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion (1967) and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968) burst at the seams with far-flung influences: Balkan, Indian, and North African rhythms and tonalities from a trunkful of drums, flutes, and stringed instruments; Bahamian hymns, Dylanesque rants, ragtime, and Delta blues; country-and-western laments, English madrigals, and good old-fashioned music-hall schmaltz; and of course the Celtic jigs and ballads that provide the fabric for the band’s songs....
Dear Chicago Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider Alphaville, one of the titles I’m happy to own. The transfer is excellent for a film of its age. It’s doubtful this film ever looked better in your home. However, it is not presented in its original 1.66:1 theatrical aspect ratio, but rather as an unmatted, full-frame version. There is simply no reason for this....
This revue of satirical political songs has a simple formula: targets are trotted out, some perfunctory identifying patter segues into music, and just as the tune becomes recognizable, the songwriters reveal the atrocious pun that welds the joke to the title–“Clinton’s Libido Loca,” “Putin on the Ritz,” a vague Arafat type’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fatah.” These are routines with early punch lines and long wrap-ups, but the performers’ background makes their shows more than just highbrow Yankovic-ian exercises: all are current or former congressional staffers....
“This is music that almost nobody wants to hear,” says composer and DePaul music professor George Flynn of his solo piano work Trinity. Variously described as “raw and bloody,” “relentlessly dissonant,” and “possibly the most violent piano music ever written,” the 93-minute piece contains three sections: “Wound” (1968), “Kanal” (1976), and “Salvage” (1993). “Wound,” says Flynn, “might be how Osama bin Laden would express his attitude about this country, were he to write new music....
Chris Johanson at Jan Cicero, through February 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some pieces argue that artists are nothing special–that they’re not “the antennae of the race,” as Ezra Pound put it. In number 46, brightly colored curved lines trace the approximate shape of a head and shoulders. The artist’s instructions, written beside the painting, suggest that the viewer take it off the wall and look at its back....
Lead Stories In January a jury in Spokane, Washington, awarded $2.1 million to a 30-year-old autistic man whose doctor, the late neuropsychiatrist Donald Dudley, had tried to erase part of the man’s brain through chemotherapy and turn him into a trained killer….In June a medical board in Ontario found psychiatrist Raymond Danny Leibl guilty of “disgraceful” conduct in his treatment of a 53-year-old woman; a proponent of “reparenting,” Leibl disciplined the woman as if she were a child, gave her sodium amytal with vodka to induce hypnosis, and instructed her to call him “Mommy-Daddy Ray....
NPR Employees Give to Democrats, One Guy Shocked at the Washington Post: “Then what the heck is Post reporter Evelyn Nieves doing giving $500 to Ross Mirkarimi, Green Party candidate for San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors?” Petrelis then shifted his gaze to NPR. He’d read with close interest the column ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin posted November 9 at npr.org. Dvorkin told the tale of Michele Norris, an All Things Considered host who’d been pulled off political stories because her husband was a senior adviser to the John Kerry campaign....
Trumpeter Roy Campbell has been a linchpin of New York’s downtown jazz scene for around 20 years, earning the admiration of younger brass stars like Dave Douglas, but he’s only recently begun to transcend the status of hometown hero. This wider recognition is overdue. Though he projects some of the bugler-gone-bad raggedness of Lester Bowie (minus the escaping-air stage whispers), the Bronx-born Campbell is a brash New Yorker at the core, with a plump, rich tone that’s associated more with hard bop than the avant-garde....
Dear Readers: The resident word freak on PRI’s The Next Big Thing–the lovely and talented Erin McKean–regularly challenges writers to use words that might otherwise disappear into obsolescence. In awe of my success at injecting santorum into the lexicon, McKean invited little ol’ me on the program and asked me to revive four extinct words in this week’s column. See if you can spot ’em. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
I am in a relationship with a man who recently told me about something that he used to do before we met. He is flexible enough to give himself a blow job, he said, and used to do this often to get himself off. I didn’t think it was possible for men to do this, but he showed me–he can still do it! And he swallowed! Is this sort of thing normal for men to do?...
The least valuable criticism we have of Charlie Chaplin maintains that he was a tremendously gifted comic until he started taking himself too seriously. My quarrel starts with the underlying assumption that the greatness of any comic artist can be measured with a laugh meter. I’ll readily grant that there’s more to laugh at in The Circus (1928) than in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), or A King in New York (1957), but that doesn’t make it a better movie....
This hymn to a ham salutes all the stars who never shone. Herbert Bracewell is an 87-year-old thespian whose mind is as cluttered as the memorabilia-strewn attic where he plans his comeback. Sorting through old props, he regales us with anecdotes of theatergoers who imagined him dead because he played Marley’s Ghost so often and occasions when he rose to the occasion as an understudy. In William Pullinsi’s surefire staging of Andrew Johns’s comedy, Bracewell is played with charming confusion by Art Kassul, a performer who’s trod the boards for half a century....
Of the 17 interviews with punk bands and counterculture figures in Todd Taylor’s Born to Rock: Heavy Drinkers and Thinkers (Gorsky Press), none quite strikes Taylor’s characteristic balance of whimsy and gravitas as finely as the first, with Minnesota’s the Dillinger Four, in which Taylor leads the band through a philosophical comparison of monkeys and robots in relation to the French situationists and as contrasting models for artistic production. Culminating with the comment that “robots don’t make decisions but they’re efficient, so people love ’em, but monkeys make a lot of decisions and a lot of them aren’t very good, but damn it, they’re funny,” next thing you know they’re talking about Thomas Paine and his influence on the band....
By Marci Eden Shear Though no proposal has yet been presented to the City Council, the new building might house a Cubs Hall of Fame museum, a multilevel parking garage, stores selling sports-related merchandise, and a food court. It would go up just northwest of the park on the triangle-shaped piece of land that’s currently occupied by a Byron’s hot dog stand, a parking lot, and a car wash. Naturally, it’s the food court that has Bou-Sliman and Giannola most concerned....
Rock, Pop, etc. GREG BOERNER Free in-store performance. Fri 2/8, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1500 W. 16th, Oak Brook. 630-574-0800. CONCRETE BLONDE 18 & over show. Fri 2/8, 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. FLYING LUTTENBACHERS, CHEER-ACCIDENT, MIASIS, DOLOROUS CENTER Fri 2/8, 6:30 PM, room 130, McGaw Hall, DePaul University, 802 W. Belden. 773-687-2000, ext. 4062. LUCID APPLE OPEN MIKE hosted by David Crawford. Wed 2/6, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park....
Hilary Birmingham’s superb first feature screened at a handful of festivals in 2000, but it’s the sort of quiet, intelligent heartland drama that has to fight for a general release–and given this fall’s avalanche of movies, it may not be around for long. The title character, played with understated authority by Anson Mount, is a small-town Nebraska stud whose talent with the ladies can’t conceal the fact that he’s going nowhere fast....
Though Black Dice have never been the type of group to rip off your head and piss down your throat, a few years ago they might’ve scratched your face or busted your lip. In true Providence art-rock fashion, they’d turn the knobs on their amps all the way to the right and have at their instruments, unleashing ear-bloodying squeals and blasts of bowel-rumbling thunder while Eric Copeland shrieked like a soprano in a hardcore band....
Chicago’s annual literary festival, formerly known as Chicago Book Week, is now a monthlong event. This year’s edition runs October 1 through 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, tours, and children’s activities at locations throughout the city. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. See separate listing in Readings & Lectures for “One Book, One Chicago” discussions of Willa Cather’s My Antonia....
DECEMBER Camille Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila was banned in Britain and took 16 years to get produced in his native France–but when it was, it was an instant hit. The production opening tonight at Lyric Opera of Chicago is spectacularly staged, starring hunky Argentine tenor Jose Cura as the strong man. Lyric’s corps of lecturers will be at many suburban libraries this week as part of the company’s community lecture series....
