It was a warm April evening, much warmer than it should have been, and the sun was coming down slowly over Chicago Avenue. Waiting at Milwaukee for the light to change, I argued with my girlfriend about which way to head on our bikes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just then the light changed, and I took off going east on Chicago before she had a chance to speak again....
Winesburg, Ohio, Steppenwolf Theatre Company. No one would ever confuse this suffocating Buckeye burg with the idyllic Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire (though Sherwood Anderson’s influence on the mood, characterization, even dialogue of Our Town is palpable). Eric Rosen’s swift-moving but broadly drawn 70-minute stage adaptation faithfully reproduces Anderson’s conditional compassion for small-town “grotesques,” tenderly exploiting his hick stereotypes. This antinostalgic vision of a turn-of-the-century tank town includes a repressed minister, falsely accused pedophile, jilted girl, closet drunk, mercenary hotel keeper, horny schoolmarm, and ambitious reporter George Willard, who records their frustrations....
Critics have compared this San Francisco pop ensemble to the Beatles and the Velvet Underground, to Love and Pavement, to the Beach Boys and Built to Spill–references so varied they probably tell you more about the critics than they do about Beulah. And writers who don’t haul out their rock encyclopedias inevitably pigeonhole the band with their bedroom-pop peers the Minders, Olivia Tremor Control, and the Apples in Stereo, all of whom are much more slavish in their devotion to 60s pop....
Pistol Opera **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Seijun Suzuki Written by Kazunori Ito and Takeo Kimura With Makiko Esumi, Sayoko Yamaguchi, Masatoshi Nagase, Kan Hanae, Mikijiro Hira, Kirin Kiki, Haruko Kato, Yeong-he-Han, and Jan Woudstra. Having recently seen the movie again with subtitles and read a few rundowns of the plot, I’m only more confused about its meaning. The gist of the narrative is that a beautiful young hit woman known as Stray Cat (Makiko Esumi)–“No....
Exclusive: “Father R. Kelly? Cardinal Persuades Singer to Enter Priesthood….Believes Kelly could lift moral standards of wayward priests by persuading them to take advantage of drunk teenage girls instead of sober young boys.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » News brief: “[W]hite people from across the country gathered in the rubble of Robert Taylor Homes to reminisce on their past drug buy experiences and to urge the Chicago officials to reconsider redevelopment plans....
Friday 11 October Leading Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang is best known for his sublime historical epic Blue Kite (1993), whose depictions of the horrors of life under Mao got him banned from filmmaking for three years. His greatly anticipated return is a remake of the most revered Chinese film of all time: Fei Mu’s 1948 Spring in a Small Town. Just after World War II a sickly landlord, Liyan, living in a half-ruined manor receives an unexpected visit from an old university friend, Zhiwen....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A poster boy for 19th-century Romanticism, Berlioz liked to tackle big subjects and big passions: the birth of Christ, the Faust legend, the story of Romeo and Juliet. The Trojans, his two-part operatic adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid, clocks in at four and a half hours total, and its harmonic structure and orchestration were so ambitious for their day that the halves weren’t performed together until 1890, over three decades after their completion–in fact, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will only play the first, “The Fall of Troy,” in its concerts next week....
Orson’s Shadow –Kenneth Tynan on Orson Welles It’s the spring of 1960, and British drama critic and would-be impresario Kenneth Tynan has an idea. He’ll arrange for his friend Orson Welles to stage the London premiere of Eugene Ionesco’s Paris hit Rhinoceros as a vehicle for Sir Laurence Olivier. America’s most innovative and controversial director and England’s greatest and most famous actor working together for the first time–what could possibly go wrong?...
Back in Wyandotte, Michigan, when Andy Reynolds was just nine years old, an old lady who lived on his street used to send him to the Max Variety Pac for six-packs of Pepsi a couple times a week. She drank it every day. Then one day she told Andy she wouldn’t need him to run her errand anymore. Her doctor had told her she needed to quit. This boggled Andy’s mind, but now he’s haunted by the memory....
Here in the U.S. we may view music as a transaction between artist and consumer, but in the slums of Cuba it’s a communal experience, with nothing but the tap of a foot dividing the listeners from the performers. For this jubilant French documentary, director Karim Dridi uses a single handheld camera and boom mike to follow 76-year-old bolero guitarist Miguel Del Morales, known as El Gallo (the Rooster), as he travels to Santiago, Guantanamo, Trinidad, and back home to Havana, joining in local street jams and dropping in on old friends to party and sing....
Anyone who’s seen Danilo Perez play live–with his own group or with saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s quartet–knows the intensity he brings to the stage. Unfortunately that fire’s been absent from the Panamanian pianist’s last two recordings. Motherland, from 2000, is overstuffed with ideas, as Perez attempts to draw correspondences between too many North and South American song forms and gets bogged down in this formal task. The new album, …Till Then (Verve), isn’t as wearyingly ambitious, but it still emphasizes lyricism and introspection at the expense of explosiveness....
Twenty-five-year-old Erin McKeown started out on the coffeehouse circuit as an oddball folkie, but her early recordings, particularly Distillation (Signature Sounds, 2000), suggested she was onto something bigger. On that record she sang personal originals and strummed acoustic guitar, but she avoided the breathy, earnest vocal style of so many confessional singer-songwriters. She sounded like a misplaced jazz singer, and she made her pretty pop songs swing. McKeown had enrolled at Brown University expecting to study biology, but she ended up in musical theater, and although her repertoire thankfully doesn’t include show tunes, her rhythmic elan and fetching sense of melody suggest an understanding of music that’s both broad and deep....
Now in its second year, this Aardvark theater company festival has expanded to include dance, performance art, and music as well as short plays. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of womanhood spread over two evenings–called “Light Days” and “Heavy Flow.” I haven’t seen the offerings in “Heavy Flow,” but not all of the “Light Days” fare is successful. Asimina Chremos’s improvised dance, “Because I Feel Like It,” is self-indulgent, and the opening “invocation,” directed by Ann Filmer, warms up the show’s 13 performers but does little to illustrate Diane di Prima’s words....
Around 1:30 in the morning on May 24, Barry Cunnane was walking down West Leland on the way to a Ravenswood bar when he and a friend passed two men on the sidewalk. One of the men whirled around and said “What’s up?” and shot Cunnane in the head. Cunnane died that afternoon at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center as his parents arrived at O’Hare. Cunnane and his killer do not appear ever to have met, there was no apparent motive, and the crime is still unsolved....
In college right away I learned the best way to hit on a guy is to hold his hand if you know him at all. It’s that easy. Pick one, walk beside him as he cuts across the overly kept grass of the broad, open campus or the wide sweep of psychedelic mushrooms on the football field, and wrap your arm through his. This’ll make him nervous but he won’t want to show it....
Willem Diepraam My least favorite of Willem Diepraam’s 26 photographs at Stephen Daiter is a portrait of a sad-eyed woman with a deeply lined dark face and white hair. True, the elegant textures in Suriname, Paramaribo, 1975 ennoble the subject, and the photograph conveys her humanity. But this is the only close-up in which someone gazes into his camera–the other images conceal as much as they reveal, creating a provocative tension between the seen and the unseen....
Marco Schiavoni thought he couldn’t take another January in Chicago. A 31-year-old baker from Rome, Schiavoni moved here in 1996 and got a job cooking at Bice. After one winter he’d had enough, and the Bice restaurant group transferred him to Los Angeles, Vail, and finally Miami. But when he heard a space was available on Division near Milwaukee and Ashland, directly across from Mas, he saw an opportunity. Schiavoni placed an overseas call and got his 36-year-old cousin Fabio Marogiu, another baker, on the line....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Continuing Crisis In September a British charity, the Family Planning Association, distributed a cartoon booklet, produced with government funds, intended to teach 9-to-11-year-old children about healthy sexuality (one drawing depicts a little girl apparently masturbating in the bath). Also in September, the British community-service organization Connexions distributed a primer for teens on sensible marijuana smoking–actually a leaflet printed to resemble an oversize package of rolling papers....
Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Marquis alleged that the Tribune’s coverage of the criminal justice system has been inaccurate, biased, and duplicitous. I spoke with Mr. Miner in response to a phone message, and he indicated that Mr. Marquis had contacted him regarding the Tribune’s recent articles about the failure of some law enforcement authorities to reinvestigate crimes after individuals are exonerated or released....
Seeing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These five films by Stan Brakhage–one from each decade of his career–are part of a surrealism series presented by Doc Films and the Smart Museum of Art. Yet Brakhage’s work explores every variety of visual consciousness, from dreaming to waking to imagining to discovering previously unimagined sights through film. Window Water Baby Moving (1959) documents the birth of his first child; daring for its time, this carefully constructed “home movie” was later used by advocates of natural childbirth....
