Rock, Pop, etc. BAROO Free performance in Cafe Espresso. Sun 3/25, 2 PM, Borders Books & Music, 2817 N. Clark. 773-935-3909. COLD AS LIFE, DIE CAST, GOD FORBID Fri 3/23, 6:30 PM, Knights of Columbus Hall, 15 N. Hickory, Arlington Heights. 847-718-0527. TIM EASTON Free in-store performance. Tue 3/27, 5:30 PM, Borders Books & Music, 150 N. State. 312-606-0750. DAVID JOHANSEN & THE HARRY SMITHS, SYD STRAW Fri 3/30 and Sat 3/31, 8 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N....
Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the lax policies of the previous administration, we are doing everything necessary to make companies both large and small live up to their end of agreements. If they don’t, the state has the ability, and the obligation, to get its fair share of the economic incentives back. In fact, this is the first administration to put corporate accountability recapture language in all new business deals....
Every year when I fill out Down Beat magazine’s critics poll ballot, I have a hard time coming up with three nominations for the best male vocalist category: Andy Bey is blessed with such flawless intonation, breath control, and artistry that all other competitors seem unworthy, and on each recording since his 1996 comeback album, Ballads, Blues & Bey, he’s confirmed his place as one of the world’s greatest jazz singers....
Nashville-based songwriter Darrell Scott was born in Kentucky but grew up in Gary, Indiana; thematically he alternates between the stance of the Springsteen/Mellencamp proletarian poet and that of the alt-country po’ white bard. His recent Theatre of the Unheard (Full Light) revisits a set of tunes he originally cut 12 years ago for a never-released album. In the interim Scott has changed his musical approach, abandoning the melange of honky-tonk tropes, rock rhythms, and jazz colorings on his early recordings for straight-ahead country-rock bombast....
Joe Meno started writing when he was 14, after a girl he knew from his Evergreen Park neighborhood shot herself in the head. “It was the first time someone of my own age had died and, well, it affected me, I guess,” says Meno, who’s now 27. “I started writing songs about it for this punk band I was in, and it was the first time I’d written about myself or my life, and that led me to writing poetry and then eventually short stories....
In Casey Suchan’s new, darkly comic short film, Janey Van Winkle, the title character wakes from a seven-year sleep to learn that her parents have married her off to a barista at the neighborhood coffee shop and that she’s now the mother of triplets. A nearby military base is being used to test bombs, and no one around her seems to be bothered by the explosions–or her discomfort. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Steppenwolf cofounder Terry Kinney made a habit of going to very dark places for the disturbed characters he played. “I used to be so cocky in my adolescent hero phase,” he told me a couple years ago. “I was in touch with pain. I was clearly regaling in the fact that I could go to extreme catharsis.” But all those years spent sponging up psychological trauma caught up to him one night in 1996 while he was portraying the tormented Tilden in Buried Child on Broadway....
ANTIBALAS 3/9, OLD TOWN SCHOOL; 3/10, PARK WEST The first time I saw Antibalas was in Brooklyn on a snow-crusted New Year’s Eve. My friends and I were between club and car at the moment midnight struck, and we heard cheers at staggered intervals from different parties bursting out onto the street, crowned at last by a spatter of fireworks across the river in Manhattan. Then we were out of the brittle cold and squeezing our way through hot and swaying bodies in a tiny storefront space, where some 15 people, on a stage that could barely hold them all, were pouring out a steady stream of sweaty, irresistible Afrofunk....
LUNA 2/16 & 17, DOUBLE DOOR Live (Arena Rock Recording Co.), the new live record by New York indie darlings Luna, turned me off before I’d even turned on my CD player: the liner essay is a yucky diary entry by Rolling Stone editor Joe Levy about making out with his current girlfriend for the first time to Luna’s 1993 EP, Slide. Now, maybe it’s just that I’ve never kissed anyone, special or otherwise, to the competent but unremarkable sounds of Luna, but listening to what amounts to a pretty well assembled career retrospective, I think the problem is that in sound and presentation these guys aspire to an intimacy they’ve never quite earned....
SNAPCASE 2/25, METRO The local Victory label is marketing the hell out of the third album by this former hardcore band from Buffalo, with videos, ads in Spin and Alternative Press, tens of thousands of cassette samplers and stickers, and placement on “extreme sports” programs. In Billboard late last year, singer Daryl Taberski made all the usual arguments underground artists make when they decide to systematically pursue a larger audience, equating “opting for tighter, more accessible song structures” and “more personal lyrics” with “keeping an open mind....
Until two years ago, fine dining in Hyde Park was an oxymoron. The University of Chicago community has never lacked for a sophisticated, affluent clientele, but somehow no decent French or contemporary American restaurant had succeeded there. Not even the renowned John Snowden–who ran La Provencale for a few years in the early 60s–could pull it off. But now there’s hope, thanks to a workaholic neighborhood bartender who dropped out of the U....
Last July a kitchen fire spread unchecked through the home of Nancy O’Reilly, a longtime resident of south suburban Bridgeview. The blaze should have been extinguished sooner than it was: firefighters tapped the hydrant in front of O’Reilly’s trailer in the Rosebud Mobile Home Park but were thwarted by low water pressure. “A water supply was attempted, but the hydrant did not work,” wrote firefighter Anton Gass in his report to the Bridgeview fire department....
The first settlers in the wilderness that became Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka bought their land for a dollar an acre in the 1820s. Then they started cutting down the trees, clearing space to farm and making money at the same time. They could sell a cord of oak firewood for 75 cents in Chicago. And they could stack stumps ten feet high, let them burn for weeks, and sell the resulting charcoal for five cents a bushel....
Last year, Zephyr artistic director Michelle Kranicke and associate director Emily Stein made a dance, Broken Time, about war widows and the process of rebuilding after a war. This year, they’ve gone for the abstract. Kranicke says that The Rhythm of Irreversible Direction addresses “flowing things, time and light” and that it was inspired by sitting in a rocking chair on a porch one afternoon when she wanted time to stand still....
Editor’s note: Alison True The assembly looked anything but official. There were no uniforms. Most of us in the room could never have been pegged as cops. We wore shorts, jeans, T-shirts, beards, dreadlocks–whatever we needed to fit the part. To ordinary citizens we looked like gangbangers, street trash, or just other citizens. But we were careful not to look like anyone in particular, and we wore nothing that would identify us with any gang–we didn’t want to be mistaken for rivals....
Unfinished Family Business Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps not, but the former acting mayor, now 68 and retired, has been lending his nephew a hand, giving him advice and making campaign stops with him. He’s greeted warmly. “We forgive and forget about old conflicts,” said the Reverend Sylvester Brinson at a ministers’ breakfast on January 29. “The Sawyers are perceived as a standing family with a rich history–just like the Kennedys....
Alvin Youngblood Hart Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alvin Youngblood Hart’s 1996 debut, the all-acoustic Big Mama’s Door, catapulted him into the forefront of the blues revival movement, mixing up his own songs with classics by the likes of Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell. A hip young black man in dreadlocks who played impeccably and naturally in idioms nearly a century old, Hart seemed to offer proof that folk blues was a living tradition–as many critics wanted to believe–instead of just a clubhouse for academics and preservationists....
Friday 12/13 – Thursday 12/19 “We’ve taken stories from our childhood and things that were memorable or life changing–where we said, ‘Wow, now I’m an adult,’” says Kerensa Peterson, director of the multidisciplinary performance piece the Women’s Project. She and eight local actresses started workshopping it two months ago; vignettes include one participant recounting “the trauma that ensued from having her mom and dad be really proud and excited” when she got her first period and another discussing the first time she was forced to budget her money....
Heather McAdams’s L’il 2003 Country Calendar highlights a different country music great each month–from January’s Johnny Cash to December’s Hank Snow–and it’s so jam-packed with country trivia that you’d be hard-pressed to find space to pencil in a doctor’s appointment. Cartoonist and filmmaker McAdams has been producing hand-drawn calendars for the last ten or so years. She and her musician husband, Chris Ligon, sold their Chicago Record Roundup store last year and relocated to Delaware, where she’s been working on a film about her father and Ligon has been writing new songs on a thrift store piano with his brother Scotty....
Oak Park native Victoria Cross majored in art but got into puppetry by accident after she turned an old sock, a few buttons, and some other odds and ends into a gift for a nephew. The way the materials determined the character of the puppet fascinated her. “It’s a collaboration,” she says now of Los de los suenos (The Ones of the Dreams), the hand puppets she makes from recycled materials....
