Director John Berry got his big start as an actor in Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in 1937. Welles then introduced him to film in 1938 when he hired him as assistant director on a silent slapstick short made to accompany and introduce portions of the stage farce Too Much Johnson. (The farce never made it to Broadway, alas, and the short film was lost in a 1970 fire in Welles’s villa in Madrid....
The Libertines The Libertines stumbled straight into the big time with their 2002 debut, Up the Bracket, and even without Doherty’s antics they’d probably be the most talked-about band in Britain right now–their second full-length, The Libertines (Rough Trade), hit the UK charts at number one when it came out this summer. Mick Jones of the Clash produced both albums, Peter Perrett of the Only Ones has joined them onstage and in the studio, and last fall former Creation Records boss Alan McGee signed on as their manager....
Kippur By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps the director’s experience accounts for the film’s deeply felt sense of chaos. Soon the two young men have to maneuver around a truck and other vehicles to pass along the road. This long take recalls the famous traffic-jam long take in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). But the Godard shot is a panoramic tableau, a distanced and ironized view of a civilization choking on automobiles....
“Andy went out drinking with his friends from work one night and they stayed out very late. It was about 4:30 in the morning when he was finally walking up Broadway on his way home. The neighborhood was completely silent. Just north of Aldine, a very cute young guy appeared from a side street. He made eye contact with Andy and said, ‘Hey.’ That’s the opening of Rob Christopher’s book, 100 Spinning Plates....
Jenny Poetzel: Self-Portraits Many of us go through a period of mirror gazing in adolescence, of wondering who we are and what we’ll become, perhaps incited by a changing appearance at once familiar and strange. So it’s no surprise when art students and recent art school graduates focus on self-portraits. Ten paintings and drawings at the Contemporary Art Workshop by Jenny Poetzel, who received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2001, don’t bring anything conceptually new to the genre but combine humor with a technique that makes vivid the instability of the young self, a notion also embodied in the myth of Narcissus....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a feature last month in the Washington Post Magazine, a deaf female couple in Bethesda, Maryland, recently gave birth to a partially deaf child who had been artificially conceived using sperm from a man with a long family history of deafness. The couple said they merely wanted their son to be like the rest of the family, including their older daughter....
Jean-Marc Bustamante Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jean-Marc Bustamante’s huge color prints of Swiss landscapes–some nearly eight feet high–humble the viewer. The 9 (from a series of 12) on view at Donald Young are so precisely detailed, down to the tiniest pebble, they evoke pristine mountain air. Shot on eight-by-ten-inch negatives, each includes part of a lake and often trees, mountains, and tidy, well-kept buildings....
By Cara Jepsen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Encouraged by Wilson, Pattillo-McCoy was also gathering data for her dissertation on special difficulties faced by the black middle class. She had become interested in the subject after observing the experiences of her childhood friends from Milwaukee. “Some had children young, were sporadically employed, or were lured into the drug trade, while others had gone to college, or worked steady jobs and earned enough to start a family,” she later wrote in her book based on the dissertation, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class....
Thirteen years ago Scotland Yard raided Genesis P-Orridge’s home while his longest-running band, Psychic TV, was spending its royalties feeding the poor in Nepal. His print and video archives were declared apocalyptically pornographic, and fearing arrest he exiled himself to the States rather than return to England. After years of relative obscurity, he’s assembled a new version of the band to tour in support of the two-disc set Godstar: Thee Director’s Cut (Voiceprint), a sound track to an unrealized biopic of late Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, who’s fascinated P-Orridge ever since the two met in 1966....
Most of the works in Gallery 312’s annual show of local “emerging and underrepresented artists” are worth seeing–and several merit a special trip. In Shannon Stratton’s Spectacular Time a messy network of thread is attached to a partly dissolved plastic surface; she calls it an image of “transience and abandonment,” and it also has the creepiness of a bit of detritus come to life. Geoffrey Smalley’s installation Termination of Vista, whose shapes are based on “the instructional diagrams for Hot Wheels play sets,” includes a wall painting showing cutout fragments of an urban scene, faux floorboards cut in jagged patterns below it, and pieces of Astroturf on the walls behind it....
At the Evanston retirement community where he taught art, Pate (pronounced “Patty”) Conaway used herbal tea and show tunes to lure his students into his basement classroom. “The ladies,” as he came to call them, sipped their tea and listened patiently as he presented workshops on bookbinding, papermaking, collage making, and drawing. But the ladies found the vats of paper pulp too messy, too cold. They didn’t like getting graphite under their fingernails....
Friday 8/17 – thursday 8/23 “It can be anyone’s experience,” says Marcel Townsel about the fate of the unnamed protagonist of his new book, Beneath the Silhouetted Rainbow. The self-published, semiautobiographical tale combines poetry and prose and skips around in time from the days of the Middle Passage to the present. Some of the writings date back to 1986; Townsel was experiencing writer’s block a year and a half ago when he found an outdated Mac that allowed him to pull up his earlier work....
The fifth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday, February 15, through Thursday, February 28, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Admission is $8, $4 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-846-2800. All films will be shown in 35-millimeter prints, and those marked with an * are highly recommended. In July Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pressured to come up with a best-seller, a writer tries to jazz up his staid life by picking a fight with an itinerant young punk and winds up in a drag race....
Thomas Struth My favorite variant of the idea that the real world is a bleak, tedious place is the phrase “reality hit me,” implying as it does that reality is a violent, unforgiving entity that can’t be changed under any circumstances. Many photographs in the Thomas Struth retrospective–curated by Charles Wylie of the Dallas Museum of Art and now at the Museum of Contemporary Art–depict what appears to be a variation on this immutable real world....
Silver Spoon The word fusion makes me want to eat Hamburger Helper for a week, but many of the combinations the Gumtrontips and Yu have come up with, some obvious and some unlikely, are inspired. Yu’s red snapper sashimi with crispy onions is a blazing religious vision with spears of fresh fish pinwheeling out from a nucleus of fried shredded onions and daikon, garnished with salmon roe and drizzled with hot sauce....
Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago present this self-styled “convergence of Chicago artists,” running March 28-April 26. Boasting Chicago first lady Maggie Daley as its honorary chair, the avant-garde festival features more than 100 multidisciplinary presentations; participants include Plasticene Physical Theater, Theater Oobleck, the Curious Theatre Branch, Blair Thomas, Lucky Pierre, Free Street, David Kodeski, Sandra Binion, and others. All shows take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N....
The Droplift Project: Thirty Masterworks of Audio Collage, Media Appropriation, and Other Illegal Tricks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The recording industry pursues a legal stranglehold on work which is essentially done by marginal artists and crackpots,” says Tim Maloney, aka Naked Rabbit, a Los Angeles collagist and the person responsible for coordinating the Droplift Project. “There is a one-way communication, in which we are all overloaded with stimulus from the corporate owners of culture but are unable to talk back to it in any meaningful way....
As they say in the movie biz, Tammy Brody and Diane Falanga “met cute.” “High taxes and terrible schools,” Tammy would respond. Gradually it occurred to Reid that the pair’s conversations were a script waiting to be written. “Tammy is just over-the-top, all the time, over-the-top,” he says. “There’s no middle ground for her, her mood is way up or way down. And Diane has this chameleon quality, she would sort of adapt herself to Tammy’s mood, and it’s funny to watch them go off on each other....
Two-strip Technicolor–in which red orange and blue green exposures of the same action were fused into a single length of celluloid–was being used in silent films as early as 1922, but this rousing 1926 swashbuckler was the first full-length two-strip feature. Douglas Fairbanks stars as a Spanish nobleman who loses his father in a pirate attack and vows to bring the killers to justice; after infiltrating the pirate crew he proves himself by capturing a ship single-handedly, then complicates his scheme by falling for the lovely princess on board (Billie Dove)....
The setting for this year’s Christmas Revels is a rural Kentucky household in 1863, where a group of runaway slaves seeking the Underground Railroad find shelter on the eve of the winter solstice. This makes for a celebration so rooted in mutual hope for peace and freedom that even a lone Confederate soldier comes to see the error of his ways. Spirituals and African-American myths join with square dancing (featuring Chicago Barn Dance caller Michael Miller), children’s games, and ballads and customs brought from the Old World–among them a mummers’ play recounting the story of John Barleycorn....
