There’s a passage on “Rock,” the final track on his acoustic solo album Singularity (Aum Fidelity, 2001), where Joe Morris sounds less like a single guitarist than a small African string ensemble: a rapid arpeggio gives way to a droning thrum, a single-string snap, and a delicate two-note melody. It’s one of many wonderfully dense moments on this album that make your head swim as you try to follow the various threads....
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE JOURNEY, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. A couple of things make this musical sketch-comedy show distinctive: the large cast of 15 and the fact that some of these folks can really belt. But despite some standout numbers, most of the material feels tired: a Telemundo sketch, a takeoff on the Judds that owes a lot to the old Jan Hooks/Nora Dunn “Sweeney Sisters” routines on Saturday Night Live, and the obligatory mad-cow-disease bit....
I had the same problem with Leslie Stella’s second novel, The Easy Hour (Three Rivers Press), as I did with her first: it was embarrassing to read on the bus because I couldn’t help laughing out loud. The Easy Hour, subtitled A Novel of Leisure, chronicles the travails and triumphs of one Lisa Galisa, a 32-year-old Bridgeport-bred, Old Style-drinking, pastel Sobranie-smoking salesclerk at Fishman’s Department Store who endures a life of “poverty and unwilling celibacy” by spending her meager paycheck on cute clothes and beer....
Composer John Eaton has always wanted his pocket operas to reach an audience broader than the crowd at a typical opera house–his hour-long productions, which require minimal sets and only a small ensemble of instrumentalists and vocalists, are designed to be portable. But though they’ve impressed a number of critics and academics, Eaton’s works have yet to achieve popular success: his classical or literary adaptations (Peer Gynt, Antigone, Travelling With Gulliver) tend to be too cerebral for musical-theater fans, and his rich and distinctive idiom, which encompasses microtones and other unconventional sounds, isn’t melodic enough for Puccini lovers....
Italian director Ermanno Olmi followed up his first big success, Il posto, with this striking 1962 portrait of a Milanese engineer (Carlo Cabrini) whose relationship with his fiancee (Anna Canzi) suffers when he goes to Sicily to help open a steel factory. As usual, Olmi supplies only the hint of a plot, defining the hero not through his conflicts with others but through the friction between his emotional needs and the incessant rhythm of his work life....
I Can’t Tell You “Dear Miss Hillary,” wrote another in September. “First I want to thank you for opening my eyes in a whole new way. Your book . . . was so shoking and theres no words 4 it, it has become my favorite book, exept 4 the wanderer, but i think your book is winning by a lot. . . . I never thought this book was going 2 be about sex ....
The third feature directed by Sean Penn and the first one that I’ve liked. Adapted by the couple Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski from a 1958 Friedrich Dürrenmatt novel, this is a nervy as well as somber piece of work, not only for the way it confounds and even frustrates certain genre expectations, but also–and especially–for how it confronts the viewer with the moral implications of that frustration. Jack Nicholson, in one of his most impressive, least show-offy performances, plays a Reno police detective who becomes obsessed with the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl and by his pledge to her parents that he’ll catch the murderer–unlike his colleagues, he still considers the case unsolved....
Chicagoans may remember Richard Maxwell as a founding member of the experimental company the Cook County Theater Department, known for stunts like restaging Puccini’s Tosca with nonoperatic singers, projected film clips, hand puppets, and saxophone accompaniment. But since leaving Chicago he’s won an Obie award and become the toast of the New York underground. “A genuinely original new talent,” Ben Brantley called him in the New York Times. “Watching Mr. Maxwell’s work makes you think of what it must have been like to stumble upon the baffling but seductive creations of the young Sam Shepard in the early 1960’s in the East Village....
Though plenty of atrocities occurred elsewhere this year, King Richard II and his court did their part to uphold our atrocious local traditions. Look at the leadership role Daley played in honoring the Chicago police officers and firefighters who went to New York to pitch in following the devastation of September 11. Listen to the words of praise he had for all our police and fire personnel. But don’t notice that, after nearly three years of stalling, he still hasn’t given those noble public servants their union contracts....
Beginning Transmission Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The event had been a grassroots effort from top to bottom: McDonald, then a grad student in communications, and her two primary co-organizers, Ethan Clauset and Julie Shapiro, relied on the generosity of more than a dozen friends and acquaintances to pull it off. All three had dabbled in promoting shows, but none had ever planned anything on such a large scale–they spent months negotiating with artists, finding venues, obtaining a sound system, and arranging lodging, and while the festival was in full swing they managed to stream most of the nearly two dozen performances over the Internet using a single dial-up account....
Two elderly Russian immigrants, one man wearing a baseball cap and the other a fedora, stood by the entrance to Agudas Achim North Shore Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue at 5029 N. Kenmore. The man in the baseball cap looked north on Kenmore and then south, waiting. Gradually a few more men showed up at the temple. “Good shabbos,” said the man. It was a Saturday morning in August, and traditional Jewish law requires ten men–a minyan–for a service to get under way....
She’s never going to be a star. Viki Navratilova is not tall–she’s maybe five-foot-five–and not waif thin. She has a shy smile and wears glasses, faded blue jeans, a T-shirt, and comfortable brown shoes. When she speaks onstage she can hardly be heard. “Noah Gregoropoulos started taking classes with me in the mid-80s,” Halpern says. “He was very, very shy.” Gregoropoulos was a manager at U.S. Robotics who signed up at ImprovOlympic after he saw a show there in summer 1986....
When euchre night at McGee’s fell on the same night as the climactic episode of Joe Millionaire, some cardplayers were torn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or West Lafayette. Or Columbus. Or Evanston. When Big Ten students run out their four years of eligibility but want to keep partying, they move to Lincoln Park, where the taverns offer a postgraduate Elysium of $2 Bud Light specials, modern rock cover bands, and card parties....
Hermeto Pascoal’s place in Brazilian music has no single analogue in the States: he simultaneously occupies roles held at various times and places by genre-defying keyboardist Chick Corea, outsider composer Moondog, and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Pascoal plays a variety of flutes, guitars, and saxophones as well as piano and accordion, all with dazzling wizardry, and as an improviser he’s developed a characteristic style that transcends existing schools–in keeping with his wild-man image, he plays like a barely tuned spring, coiling and then flying loose but never quite coming completely unmoored....
Brian Thomas watched three movies a day last year. As he worked 14-hour days to complete the guide to Asian action films he was writing, the West Rogers Park apartment he shares with his wife, Kristin, and their pets began to overflow with videotapes and DVDs. “I didn’t see my wife much,” he admits, “although she watched some with me.” When they needed a break from the mess, they’d go out to the movies....
Discovering you aren’t the person you were raised to think you are must be disconcerting, especially when you’re in your mid-30s. But writer-performer Michael Fosberg forged from his own shock and bewilderment a story of personal growth that transcends his individual experience to address all cultures and ages. Premiered at Bailiwick Repertory in 2001 and revived a year later by Apple Tree Theatre, this one-man play has now been revised for Apple Tree’s educational-outreach program: the one-hour version of Incognito has been edited for young audiences (grades 4-12) and is being performed by Chicago actor Gregory Hardigan instead of Fosberg (though Michael E....
KENNY WERNER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you don’t pay close attention to Kenny Werner, you might mistake him for just another preternaturally proficient melodist–but listen beneath the exquisite surface of his music and a world of subtle, challenging variations reveals itself. Among the brainiest pianists of his generation, the 49-year-old seems to have studied the same models that shaped many of his peers: Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Herbie Hancock, as well as their common forefather, Bill Evans....
Dante meets American consumer culture in Gregg Biermann’s startling digital video update of The Divine Comedy. The longest of its three sections, “Inferno,” is a filmstriplike series of images made out of junk mail. A Victoria’s Secret catalog stands in for those damned for lust, while other associations–Rite Aid ads that represent thieves–are less obvious. The text and images flicker fleetingly by; the excess flirts with a tedium that sets up the concluding sections, “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” in which the flatness of the ads gives way to scans of actual objects uncorrupted by accompanying text....
“It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time,” grouses Milo, the apathetic schoolboy in Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollboth. Had Milo been blessed with an opportunity to see Heath Corson’s pitch-perfect adaptation of Math Curse, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s children’s book, he might have felt quite different about his schoolwork. Like the loopy, fantastical Disney animated short Donald in Mathmagic Land, this play offers a brilliant summation of the practical application of mathematics....
Neon Hunk, a young couple from Milwaukee, are probably the best-looking act in noise music right now, but you’d never know it from their stage show–they squeeze their cute faces into latex dummy heads that are split open to puke out fluorescent zebra-print bandannas. Donning knee and elbow pads and covering her hands and feet with socks, the woman (who goes by a bunch of monikers, among them Mothmaster and Jennifurmium) jerks around electrocution style while zapping out minimalist, butt-wiggling synth melodies; meanwhile, the guy (aka Mossmaster, Pink Diamond, and so on), sometimes dressed only in his BVDs, smacks the shit out of his drums....
