Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a report in the Pensacola News Journal, a 59-year-old man at a gas station in West Pensacola, Florida, was accidentally run over and torn in half by a slow-moving tractor-trailer on March 22, but his torso continued to show signs of life and paramedics airlifted it to the West Florida Regional Medical Center, where the man was not pronounced dead until about three and a half hours later....
Shopping is our national religion. Our malls are grander than our cathedrals, and retail design turns the act of shopping into a grand ritual with the shopper as star. BRIAN ULRICH in his ten color photographs at Peter Miller articulates this with a frightening precision. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ulrich’s images show how stores feed shoppers’ narcissism, placing them at the center of a constructed universe....
It’s a sad comment on the state of rock radio that Limp Bizkit gets massive airplay and the Queens of the Stone Age don’t. The Queens’ 2000 album Rated R was more than a classic riff fest–it was one of the flat-out catchiest hard-rock albums in recent memory. “Feel Good Hit of the Summer,” “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret,” and “In the Fade” all took immediate root in my subconscious....
It’s been three decades since Waterdog disappeared into the neon wilderness of all-night poolrooms. He was 15 years old, a kid hustler from Connecticut carrying nothing but a cue stick and a bus ticket. In the late 1960s there was action in every town and even a skilled teenager could make money on the road. In Norfolk, Waterdog hustled sailors for $30 a rack. In Albany he shot against men who’d traded their identities for pool-hall handles like Boston Joey, Popcorn, Charlie Mumbles, or the Connecticut Kid....
The son of an Argonne National Laboratory scientist, musical theater star Jason Graae spent his early years in Elmhurst, Lombard, and Villa Park, and after his family moved away he returned for several summers to attend a Northwestern University program for talented teens. But once his career took off in the 80s and 90s, he had precious little time for the Chicago area, instead establishing his reputation with performances in Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?...
Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In my earlier years, driving in a car, I saw an old man about to jump off a bridge overpass above a busy highway. He had climbed up a fence and had one more step to go. We immediately stopped, and I ran across the road, pulled him off the fence, and saved his life. He was elderly and disoriented, and I took him home and stayed with him until he was OK....
Inaugurated in 1981, this annual 24-hour marathon of B (and Z) movies runs Friday and Saturday, January 24 and 25, at Northwestern Univ. Norris Center, 1999 Campus Dr., Evanston. Tickets are $20, $10 after 8:00 am Saturday; for more information call 847-491-2378. Cool as Ice Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Better than it might have been, given the limitations of this kind of brand-name filmmaking....
Baroque composers were fond of concealing coded references and sly musical quotations in their work, and few did it with as much craft and zeal as Bach. Musicologists have long marveled at the many cunning ways he embedded his name in his music, and recently German scholar Helga Thoene delved into his six pieces for unaccompanied violin (BWV 1001-6) and proposed that the sequence of sonatas and partitas not only follows a complex key signature scheme but also a theological progression from Incarnation to Passion to Pentecost....
Slide guitarist Lil’ Ed Williams learned his craft from his uncle J.B. Hutto, whose stripped-down approach in turn owed a debt to Elmore James’s slashing, Delta-inspired style. When Ed takes on the persona of a slide-slinging Lord of Misrule, he can make even the glitziest tourist trap feel like a house party, but in recent years he’s also been developing a nuanced side. Though his new CD, Heads Up! (Alligator), is replete with the usual boogie-charged fare, like “Lil’ Ed’s Home Cookin’” and “Woman in the Castle”–and though he continues to rely on his well-worn but still thrilling armamentarium of screaming, distorted licks, as well as on the churning high-octane blooze kicked up by his backing band, the Blues Imperials–Ed crafts even his most overwrought lines with care and precision, and his deep-chested baritone vocals are heartfelt and sincere....
Like so many of her male counterparts, Lil’ Kim fixates on sex less as a source of pleasure than a means of wielding power. (Sometimes I wonder if Kim has ever had an orgasm. Sometimes I wonder if she’s even considered the possibility.) Male dominance being what it is, however, even her dimmest Y-chromosomed adversaries still have the upper genitalia in this war–the penis continues to pack more of a metaphorical punch than Kim’s oral fixation probably ever will....
“Celebrating humanity” is the theme of Muntu Dance Theatre’s spring concerts, according to drummer and assistant artistic director Babu Atiba. And there is something joyous about the company; arriving for a rehearsal, I found the women of the troupe sitting on the floor singing and sewing beads on costumes. The program provides a kind of tour of west Africa. The opening piece, Koutiro, is made up of three Senegambian dances: “Lenjengo,” the national dance of the Mandingo people; “Econne Econne,” a Djolla dance celebrating the strength of workers in the rice fields; and the Gambian “Koumpo,” featuring a single masked dancer–the unknown keeper of the law....
This traveling festival of digital works runs Friday, December 3, through Sunday, December 5, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago; tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door. For more information call 312-397-4010; a full schedule is online at www.resfest.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Videos That Rock, an 85-minute program of 23 works, includes many strong music videos. The low-tech animated blob humans in Hannes Hayha’s I Love Death (music by Lodger) are appropriate to this charmingly simple parable of birth, marriage, and death....
This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 13th annual Rhino Fest runs through October 13. Performances take place at the Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln, and at Prop Thtr, 4225 N. Lincoln....
On an episode of The Sopranos, a hunk went to the bathroom, where he died, and the camera caught the actor sitting in a position with his pants and shorts down around his ankles. It made me so hot I whacked off immediately. Later, I taped the episode for that purpose. Also, I found a picture of an opera staged in Barcelona where six men were sitting on the can with their pants and shorts around their ankles....
Stages 2001: A Festival of New Musicals in Progress Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Performances take place Saturday and Sunday, August 11 and 12, in the north and west theaters of the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont. Admission is $12.50 per performance or $65 for a two-day pass. On Friday, August 10, the festival opens with a benefit dinner and a performance by Jo Anne Worley (who will also emcee Saturday’s performances) at the Claude Seymour House, 817 W....
La Cumbamba rocks. “Hotel California” is turned up to 11, competing against El Beso Azteca banging it out in the basement clubhouse. Fresh salsa, drippy candlesticks, and expired gladiolus loiter on mismatched tables under the sulk of a Keith Richards portrait and nudie ceramic figurines. William Restrepo, chef, waiter, owner, and antagonist of “poopy Colombians” who, he complains on the back of the menu, don’t approve of his nontraditional Colombian fare, stops by to gauge your appetite and decide what you ought to eat....
In 1673, the governor of New France (now known as Canada) sent the explorer Louis Jolliet to find out whether the Mississippi River offered a shortcut to the Pacific Ocean. Jolliet went to Mackinac Island, picked up a traveling companion–a priest named Jacques Marquette–and set off, via canoe, on the only route they knew: down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, then up the Fox River to the area that is now Portage, Wisconsin, where they got out and schlepped to the Wisconsin River....
There’s no denying that Eve Ensler’s cultural tsunami of female empowerment suffers from an occasional surfeit of earnestness. But if there’s a better antidote to self-important solemnity than Judy Tenuta, I haven’t encountered her–and the Oak Park native has stepped into the long-running show at the Apollo until May 19. Tenuta doesn’t haul out her famous accordion, but she does manage to both celebrate and send up Ensler’s parade of women discovering V power....
Rock, Pop, etc. BoDEANS, VIOLENT FEMMES, NICHOLAS TREMULIS ORCHESTRA Tue 12/31, 8 PM, Grand Ballroom, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. 312-836-4299 or 312-559-1212. DARK STAR ORCHESTRA 18 & over. Sun 12/29, 8:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. SANDY LUCAS & LENNY MARSH Free holiday concert celebrates Kwanza. Fri 12/27, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. MUSIC WITH MEANING 3 with Addie, Greg Smith, Billy, Brandon Weatherbee, Fetor, Anthony Rayson, Brent, Dave; free admission....
Rock, Pop, Etc. BADLY DRAWN BOY, LEONA NAESS All-ages. Wed 11/12, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. KRISTIN COTTS Free in-store performance. Sat 11/15, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1500 16th, Oak Brook. 630-574-0800. BRIAN DIBBLEE, JIM RYAN, TODD CARTER Sun 11/16, 8 PM, Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton. 773-395-2844. ANNA FERMIN’S TRIGGER GOSPEL Free in-store performances. Fri 11/14, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 6103 N....
