“I was the solitary plover,” wrote Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker in “Paean to Place.” “A pencil / for a wing-bone / From the secret notes / I must tilt / upon the pressure / execute and adjust / In us sea-air rhythm / ‘We live by the urgent wave / of the verse.’” The spare lines compare the hollowness of bird bones with the pencil, an extension of the poet’s hand–or perhaps a bone filled with lead....
Did 90,000 people in Chicago die of typhoid fever and cholera in 1885? I’m asking because the Chicago Tribune Magazine, which made this claim recently, later published a letter from a reader challenging the story. The Tribune’s reply was remarkably lame, even by their low standards: “If it’s an urban legend, it’s an amazingly pervasive one.” Cecil, I know you can do better than that. What’s the Straight Dope on the typhoid and cholera outbreak of 1885?...
Friday 12 The New York band Varnaline never cracked the same A-list of indiedom, despite some great moments of roiling Crazy Horse energy. Former front man Anders Parker can’t muster anything like that intensity on his first solo album, Tell It to the Dust (Baryon); he piles up layers of electric guitar and studio gloss like it’s really, really heavy lifting, and other than “Doornail (Hats Off to Buster Keaton),” the songs are doleful but rather undistinguished....
The Dining Room at Kendall College As its name suggests, the Almost Famous Chef Competition, sponsored by the sparkling-water company S. Pellegrino, is concerned with more than its contestants’ culinary prowess. They’re also evaluated for “potential star quality,” according to the program overview I received before judging a local round of the contest last month at Kendall College’s School of Culinary Arts in Evanston. The contest winner “will be coached by a public relations team on how to promote and conduct themselves with the media....
Re: Hot Type / “Wise Asses” (July 4, 2003): Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was very observant of you–a heterosexual, I presume–to notice Antonin Scalia’s choice of the phrase “so-called homosexual agenda.” The “gay agenda” is actually a phrase that was coined by the radical religious right to expose homosexuals’ quest for “special rights” (another RRR-coined phrase). Around the time of the 1993 gay march on Washington some right-wing group came out with a video titled The Gay Agenda that purportedly exposed the special privileges we were seeking and how we were infiltrating schools and youth services for recruitment purposes....
Camper Van Beethoven There’s a ton of places you can go from that realization, and Camper found ’em all. “Border Ska,” country, unsentimental roots psych, classic-rock revivalism. A Balkan Van Beethoven folk Black Flag spoof here, a little broke-down roadhouse whimsy there. Covers of Fleetwood Mac, Sonic Youth, “Oh Death,” Ringo Starr. Titles as bright eyed as “Ice Cream Everyday” and as grad-school arch as “(We Workers Do Not Understand) Modern Art....
One day shortly after Tristan Meinecke moved to Chicago he saw a mother and her son walking along the shore. “The kid kept veering off toward the lake, and his mother kept saying, ‘Sherwood, walk straight,’” Meinecke says. The incident inspired a short story, “Sherwood Walks Straight,” which Meinecke wrote in 1943 and revised in ’46. A modernist work influenced by Gertrude Stein, the story resists easy interpretation, but Meinecke appears to use the mother’s command as a metaphor for social control....
And Then There Were Two Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The month-and-a-half-long trip will be the band’s last. In late August, Cohen and his fiancee, Jules Kim, plan to move to London, where he’ll study critical theory at the London Consortium and she’ll be doing postdoctoral work at the Institute of Psychiatry. Cohen and Lenzi knew Saint would be the band’s swan song when they began working on it in February, so instead of trying to recruit permanent band members they took advantage of the flux, using Klos on bass but rotating in five drummers: Roth, Califone associates Ben Massarella, Brian Deck, and Joe Adamik, and ex-We Ragazzi drummer Alianna Kalaba....
“The estate tax is the only tax in Illinois paid by the wealthy but not by low- and moderate-income working families,” according to an April 23 press release from the Chicago-based Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. “Only the wealthiest 2% of Illinois estates, those with an average value of more than $2 million, paid any state or Federal estate taxes in 1999.” CTBA’s conclusion: even if the feds phase out this so-called “death tax,” Illinois should keep it....
There are few sounds on the planet as elegant as fado: its characteristically dramatic vocal style and the sweet, delicate tone of the Portuguese 12-string guitar create a refined feeling of inescapable longing and sadness. For all its current international chic, however, this was once hearty peasant music, often performed by prostitutes for the entertainment of neighborhood toughs. On her most recent album, Sensus (Decca), Cristina Branco uses Portuguese-language poetry (set to music by her husband, guitarist Custodio Castelo) to explore unrestrained eroticism, simultaneously expanding the definition of fado and harking back to its earthy roots....
The 13th incarnation of this annual festival–this year called “Freedom!”–seems more focused on social commentary than previous showcases have been. Described as controversial and outspoken, South African rap/hip-hop group Prophets of da City has had an album banned but has also enjoyed considerable recognition, performing at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. They’re more a music group than a dance group, rapping and turntabling in ways that combine Western influences and traditional African forms of chanting and drumming, but one of them, Ramone De Wet, is brilliant at poppin’ and lockin’....
Political hip-hop has grown scarce over the past decade, as so many MCs settle for simplistic worldviews like “I’m rich, fuck me” or “These are the end times and I am in-saaaane.” Brooklyn’s Dead Prez have been a notable exception, particularly on their fine 2000 album, Let’s Get Free (Loud). Sticman (Clayton Gavin) and M-1 (Lavonne Alfred) started rhyming together after they met at college in Florida in 1990. Though the two seemed occasionally humorless, cuts like “Cop Shot” (“The only good cop is a dead cop / Police brutality must come to a stop”) and “I’m a African” (“Bounce to this, socialist movement”) lived up to their slogan, “RBG”–“Revolutionary but Gangsta....
Flora Purim burst onto the scene in the early 70s as a member of Chick Corea’s original Return to Forever. With her fleshy good looks, a husky voice buoyed by the crisp rhythms of her native Brazil (as adapted by Corea), and enunciations swimming in the slightly nasal diphthongs and lilting cadences of Brazilian-accented Portuguese, she became the adventurous voice of early fusion. Part hipster, part hippie, Purim sang with enough energy to immediately separate her from the prevailing sound of Brazilian music in the U....
Nine members of the Pink Bloque, a local group of women activists, hit Taste of Chicago on July 4 to pass out flyers protesting the proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003–aka Patriot Act II–and dance around to Missy Elliott’s “Gossip Folks.” The 15-member collective, whose slogan is “dancing in dissent,” has gained recognition over the last year and a half by using pop music and pink outfits to grab people’s attention and help its political messages go down easier....
The sun is just rising as Rahm Emanuel takes to the sidewalk under the Brown Line stop at Addison. He’ll be there for over an hour, his gloveless hands raw from the cold, greeting the commuters dashing for their trains. He even pretty much sat out the greatest political campaign of the last 20 years–Harold Washington’s 1983 mayoral race. As he recalls, he voted for Richard M. Daley over Washington in the Democratic primary....
A male harlequin duck on the Chicago River would be a rare and beautiful sight. It has a curl of light feathers streaking over its forehead and swirling down its neck, cheeks that are a striking blue, and an animated manner that earned it the scientific name Histrionicus histrionicus, from the Latin for “melodramatic.” She caught the hum of a fisherman’s boat before I did and, with a surprising burst of speed, paddled to a rock and rode out the boat’s wake....
Jerry Douglas has been playing Dobro since he was a child in eastern Ohio. In 1971, at age 15, he became a regular member of his father’s bluegrass band, and two years later joined a leading “newgrass” revivalist outfit, the Country Gentlemen. Since then he’s worked with a long list of roots-music stars, including J.D. Crowe, Ricky Skaggs, Earl Scruggs, and Alison Krauss; he’s also released critically acclaimed albums under his own name on MCA, Rounder, and Sugar Hill, establishing a distinctive combination of harmonically daring playing and solid folk structures....
In 1933 in Buenos Aires, Federico Garcia Lorca gave a now famous lecture entitled “La juego y teoria del duende” (“The Play and Theory of the Duende”), in which he sought to identify the source of artistic inspiration. Variously defined as ghost, goblin, demon, or charm, duende–strongly identified in Spain with the dark passion of flamenco–for Garcia Lorca was “that indefinable force which animates different creators and infuses their deepest efforts....
Todd Hido: House Hunting The images are extremely sharp–Hido makes them himself from negatives taken with a medium-format Pentax–and the colors are almost hyperreal, lush and seductive. In Untitled (2844) (the titles come from the sequential numbers Hido assigns his negatives, not all of which he prints), the tail of a blue car peeks around the corner of a one-story cinder block home, contrasting with the warm light in the windows and a glowing tannish sky; one can almost feel the granularity of the snow....
Man and Superman, Rogue Theater, at the Playground Theater. George Bernard Shaw’s domestic epic is amusing even without its famous philosophic parable, “Don Juan in Hell.” Director Kerstin Broockman has dispensed with that third-act interlude, cut two characters, and streamlined the dialogue, reducing Shaw’s four-hour tour-de-talk to a much more bearable two. The result is a clean look at the mating game that fuels the play’s paradoxes. In Shaw’s mind, women are driven by the Life Force to advance the species, pursuing men and trying to trick them into thinking they control the courtship....
