THE LOCUST 7/25, FIRESIDE BOWL This San Diego quartet has just released a new album, Plague Soundscapes (their first on Anti-). Cramming 23 songs into just over 20 minutes, it’s as stimulant-addled as you could want: close kin to hardcore but lighter, faster, and, in its own yappy, short-lived way, more abusive. It’s also rather easy to adapt to and face on its own terms, which is probably not what the band wants to hear....
GREENHORNES 5/4, EMPTY BOTTLE This cute young Cincinnati quintet makes me feel old. Not that I’m a child of the Nuggets age or anything–but I do remember my first garage revival like it was yesterday, and my affection for The Greenhornes (Telstar) feels too much like nostalgia for something that was itself nostalgic to get comfortable with. Guess it’s somebody else’s turn to discover the Seeds and the Animals for the first time....
Thirty minutes before the game Lisa Pugh is already on the field, loosening up with a friendly game of catch, the ball making a loud whack in the mitt of her teammate. The other players sneak a glance. Pugh stretches her legs and arms, and when the umpire lets the players take the field she trots out to shortstop, arriving just in time to scoop up a practice grounder. It’s 9 AM on Sunday–an ungodly hour for many of the players–and the women’s softball league at Lincoln Park is about to start another round of games....
Ted Wern was in two different places at the same time one night in May 2000. He was in his apartment in Chicago, fresh out of law school and studying for the bar exam. He was also in Mansfield, Ohio, drunk on his ass and joyriding through the outskirts of town. The police pulled him over and discovered he was driving without a license, but he sweet-talked them into letting him drive home....
Rock, Pop, etc. AREA2 WITH DAVID BOWIE, MOBY, BUSTA RHYMES, BLUE MAN GROUP, ASH DJ tent performers include John Digweed, DJ Dan, Avalanches (see Critic’s Choice), Dieselboy, DJ Tim Skinner, John Curley & Chris Walsh. Thu 8/8, 3 PM, Tweeter Center, I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park. 708-614-1616 or 312-559-1212. MARY J. BLIGE Sat 8/3, 7:30 PM, Tweeter Center, I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park. 708-614-1616 or 312-559-1212. PETER DEMUTH Free in-store performance....
Jean Adamak Gottlieb has lived in Downers Grove for eight years–long enough to persuade herself and others that it could use a nonprofit professional theater. Gottlieb was an artistic director of Chicago’s feminist Footsteps Theatre Company from 1991 to ’99; when that group split up, she went to graduate school for a degree in directing. In January she recruited Chicagoans Laura St. John and Melissa Van Kersen and founded New World Repertory Theater to “produce theatrical works that examine the idea of family in this new world....
Just when I think painters have done it all, someone comes up with images unlike any I’ve seen before. Doug Smithenry’s 34 paintings at Aron Packer are based on figures and backgrounds he finds on the Internet–but after he prints them, he crumples up the paper and flattens it with a rolling pin. This makes the figures he paints feel strangely displaced and even more strangely fragmented, and Smithenry emphasizes the arbitrariness of his process by hanging different crumplings of the same figure as series....
Over the last five years, Polish-born vocalist Grazyna Auguscik has proved herself among the most venturesome and versatile of Chicago-based musicians. She’s explored new crannies of old standards (Pastels) and classic bossa nova (Fragile), but lately she’s been investigating her Polish heritage: on the 2001 stunner River (all albums on her own GMA label), Auguscik delights in the off-kilter meters and busy melodies common to most eastern European folk music, but she also shows off her lovely command of slower tempos and lyrical sweep....
Artistic director Billy Siegenfeld, who calls his troupe a “jazz orchestra,” makes dances by developing a “rhythmic counterscore” to the music he plans to use, then rehearses them without any music whatsoever. These rhythmic counterscores are complex in themselves–incorporating singing and audible breathing as well as percussive moves of the feet, hands, and head–but when they’re layered with the classic jazz Siegenfeld favors, the end result is intricate indeed. Fortunately his approach doesn’t preclude storytelling or emotion....
Local Record Roundup Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DANNY THE WILDCHILD Booked 001 (Strictly Hype) One of Chicago’s most active drum ‘n’ bass DJs, Danny the Wildchild (aka Danny Garcia) is known for flaunting his hip-hop roots in his hard-hitting sets, dropping in old-school tracks and new-school scratching, but on this new mix CD he sticks to basics. Although hypnotic diva samples drift in and out of a handful of tracks, most of the album’s 17 selections–including cuts by heavies like Danny Breaks, Mickey Finn, and DJ Zinc–are all woofer-blasting bass and heart attack-inducing beats....
Musings of a Jarfly, Galileo Players, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Approximately 50 minutes of the 75 in the Galileo Players’ fifth sketch-comedy revue exhibit the curiosity and intelligence befitting the company’s alleged pursuit of humor based in “the interplay between science, technology, faith, and reason.” In one vignette that manifests this ethos, a father attempts to demystify a wizard’s powers in a Harry Potter book with a scientific demonstration of static electricity–only to have his young daughter evoke genuine magic with the same instruments....
Lead Stories This past April a 12-year-old girl in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was charged with coercing younger girls into prostitution, one of several local cases involving adolescent pimps….And the April issue of New Scientist reported on a study conducted by a retired U.S. army researcher who argues that the excessive hormones in B&B Super Gro and other shampoos marketed to African-Americans are causing girls to reach puberty as young as age eight....
“Every man must die sooner or later, but good books must be conserved,” the 19th-century Spaniard Don Vincente is quoted as saying in Nicholas Basbanes’s 1995 study, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. The former monk stood accused of murdering at least eight other book collectors for their printed treasures, and his defense attorney, Basbanes reports, argued that his client was obviously insane. When that didn’t wash, Don Vincente went to his execution still consumed by a madness that seems none too gentle at all....
Until several years ago, anyone could show up at Marcos Raya’s cramped studio, poke around, fork over a few bills, and leave with an original painting, collage, or assemblage. People knew a good deal when they saw one, and Raya usually needed the money. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m lucky and happy I’m still here,” says the 52-year-old Raya, the subject of a Reader cover story four years ago this month....
In Chicago’s kaleidoscope of a performance scene people fall together and apart, forming new and different patterns, often over a period of many years. Dancers Carrie Hanson and Susan Hoffman and performance artist Doug Stapleton have been kicking around the city for a while and worked together (with a few others) on a piece in 2000 called The Flying Man’s Falling Thoughts. Now they’ve formed a group called the Seldoms, giving its debut concert this weekend....
Simone “The idea of Hollywood is the most original idea Hollywood ever had–the only one that it ever made up by itself,” asserts critic Richard Schickel in his 1993 documentary Hollywood on Hollywood. Since at least 1912, when nickelodeon patrons got a glimpse at the filmmaking process in the one-reeler A Vitagraph Romance, Hollywood has reveled in stories about itself, which range from the sweetly nostalgic (Singin’ in the Rain) to the bitterly satiric (The Player)....
Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs Photograph 2929 shows such scraps at rest, where we can read a fragment whose calm tone was mocked by the catastrophe: “…and D. Stubbs understood that Mr. Carroll was contemplating…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago is the first city to host “Here Is New York,” a project housed in a SoHo storefront where volunteers continue to scan, print, and exhibit the photographs that keep coming in of apocalyptic dust, twisted steel, and distraught faces....
The word that comes to mind for Akram Khan’s evening-length Kaash (“If” in Hindi) is elegant. The costumes are sleeveless black split-skirt jumpers over loose black pants, for men and women alike. Sculptor Anish Kapoor’s set–a glowing rectangular frame of red light at the rear of the stage–has an evocative simplicity, suggesting without depicting an otherworldly realm. Nitin Sawney’s score layers silence, the voice, and percussion in ways that recall but don’t reproduce traditional Indian music....
Alto saxist Bud Shank is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In 1950s Los Angeles, his name was synonymous with west-coast jazz–the cool (some called it bland) offshoot of bop with its roots in the 1949 recordings of Miles Davis’s nonet. Shank certainly had the credentials to warrant this association: in 1950 he’d starred with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, a breeding ground for California cool, and later in the decade he became a principal of the Lighthouse All-Stars, a pool of musicians who gathered at the eponymous California club and whose studio recordings, heavy on calm tones and smooth textures, epitomized the west-coast sound....
Veteran bassist Buster Williams has a fat but agile pulse and a tone like liquid mahogany, and his unyielding belief in the melodic potential of his accompaniment lines consistently elevates them above mere functionality. If you need an easy reference point, think of Ron Carter, but without the exaggerated attack and fussy detail–indeed, when Carter switched to the smaller piccolo bass to lead his own quartet in the 1970s, he tapped Williams to play double bass behind him (making Williams a bassist’s bassist in more ways than one)....
