Eric San, aka Kid Koala, is as modest a virtuoso as has ever manned a pair of turntables. His shuffling beats don’t rock your body and he doesn’t try to show you what a tech whiz he is; instead his records are gently funny and deliberately small in scope. Koala’s new disc, Some of My Best Friends Are DJs (NinjaTune), clocks in at just 36 minutes, and when I say it’s as slight as it is brief I mean that as a compliment....
This is where it all began. It was a freezing night, and my girlfriend and I decided to hail a cab. The cabbie was this big bear of a guy, and he started chatting with us. “You guys ever been to Chinatown?” he asked. We said no. A few blocks later he said, “C’mon, let’s go.” My girlfriend gave me this concerned look, but we decided to just go with the flow....
My friends and I were here on Halloween for a show by the Legendary Pink Dots–they’re like a gothic Grateful Dead. The place was packed. I’d say half in costume and half out. I met some interesting people, including a mysterious gothic young lady who had the widest, most frightened eyes I’ve ever seen. I realized later that it was because her boyfriend thought I was trying to pick her up as he was standing beside her....
On his last album, 2001’s The Houston Kid (Sugar Hill), longtime Nashville hit maker Rodney Crowell began to make music for himself. Between 1978 and 1997 Crowell released nine albums of commercial country, among the best of which was 1988’s Diamonds and Dirt, an artful blend of honky-tonk, rockabilly, and Merseybeat. But in the late 90s he went low profile, producing records for other singers and spending time with his new family....
The Slow Food Guide to Chicago: Restaurants, Markets, and Bars Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As is the case pretty much everywhere else, people who live in Chicago have little idea of the culinary scope their city offers, lacking guidance beyond advertising by chains and writing by critics who push trendy openings. But this is one of the best places in the world to eat....
Somos Gringos Malos, Somos Diablos Blancos (We Are Bad Gringos, We Are White Devils), Half Cocked Productions, at the Space. In writer-director Arik Martin’s plays, the characters become more insightful when reality threatens to burst at the seams. His latest work–a gritty tale of seven escaped convicts hiding out in a villa just across the Mexican border–owes its lifeblood to Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Like Shepard, Martin understands that naturalism is more intriguing if given a few twists, and he’s hell-bent on reestablishing high standards for apposite antiheroes, who had their heyday in 1970s antiauthoritarian art....
INTERPOL 9/6, EMPTY BOTTLE This New York band, which released a single on Glasgow’s Chemikal Underground label before getting signed closer to home, has been compared left and right to Joy Division. I don’t hear it myself, except superficially: Joy Division was the last band to successfully render true despair into beautiful ugly rock; most subsequent attempts sound ham-handed or melodramatic. The pretty and stylish Interpol sidestep that trap–they’re simply not that bleak....
Nirvana Like all the widow Cobain’s public statements, it was taken with a grain of salt. But other sources confirmed her claims that Kurt had left behind more than 100 cassettes of unheard music–mostly solo acoustic material, from fleshed-out songs to workbook noodlings–in addition to the already well-documented trove of unreleased live and studio recordings from Nirvana. The makings were there for the end-all be-all collection of Nirvana rarities, one that could stack up as one of the most historically important box sets ever....
Margaret Klimek Phillips grew up in Chicago and was a scholarship student at the School of the Art Institute, graduating with a degree in art education in 1953. She taught in New York, got an MA at Columbia University, and returned to SAIC, where she was a faculty member from 1966 to 1992. She reinvented the children’s program there, chaired the faculty senate during its tumultuous early years, and championed the radical idea that art teachers at all levels should also be working artists....
To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lynn Becker and the Chicago Reader have deftly skewered the numbing sameness of the downtown high-rises that are now limping skyward [“Stop the Blandness!” January 17]. Never has so much cheap-looking architecture been put up under one mayor’s watch. Improving the quality of these sterile slabs can only be done if Mayor Daley and his planners develop some sense of taste....
Few musical formats can inspire dread like songwriters-in-the-round, and the four songwriters who constitute Voices on the Verge–Jess Klein, Erin McKeown, Beth Amsel, and former Chicagoan Rose Polenzani–knew that all too well when they were first booked together that way in November 1998. So they tweaked the formula: they each sang some of their own songs but developed scrappy arrangements to allow all the participants to join in–on harmony vocals, contrapuntal guitar and piano lines, light percussion, and even some delicate clarinet by Klein–without going so far as to become a “band....
In remembrance of September 11, 2001, Mayor Daley has called for three minutes of silence at noon on Wednesday, and most religious institutions will be open that day as well. But there are plenty of other ways to take note of the date; below is a selection of vigils, performances, discussions, and other memorials. Events are free or by donation unless otherwise noted. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Running September 13-15, the 13th edition of this annual fall arts festival in Chicago’s Wicker Park/Bucktown area showcases the work of emerging artists in all media–including numerous theater and improv productions, as shown in the following listings. Plays are scheduled at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division; an “Improv in the Park” series takes place at the northwest entrance to Wicker Park, 1425 N. Damen. (For information on poetry, visual art, film, dance, and musical attractions, see Readings & Lectures, Galleries & Museums, Movies, Dance, and Music listings elsewhere in this issue....
Chicago Comedy Festival offers stand-up, improv, sketch comedy, and variety at assorted Chicago venues Thursday, May 30, through Sunday, June 2. For more information and tickets call 888-866-9938 or visit www.comedytown.com. PM Comedy Eclipse at Coyle’s Tippling House hosted by Henry Scott, with John Hope, Kevin Foxx, Ron Morey, Dwight Slade, Megan Mooney, and Peter Spruyt. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 10 Fresh Mugs 3 at Coyle’s Tippling House hosted by Kathleen Madigan, with Tyler Kroll, Tim Northern, Dan Kaufman, Rich Gabe, Isaac Witty, Tig, Rob Little, and Dan Lewis....
Icarus Making clear the distinction between literal and metaphorical is a challenge for most artists working with myth. Mary Zimmerman’s best work succeeds because it’s so unflinchingly nonliteral: of course life doesn’t happen in and around a swimming pool; of course people don’t die when all the sand runs out of a bag. When the line between reality and metaphor is blurred, the audience starts asking the wrong questions: “Since when is chocolate an aphrodisiac?...
Last September the City Council OK’d a $7.1 million project that would tear down a historic hotel on Broadway near Lawrence, build a two-story condo complex on the site, and put more condos and a Borders in two adjoining buildings. The three had been sitting empty since Goldblatt’s vacated them in 1998, and the city hailed the deal, calling it a big boost for Uptown. It would give the neighborhood the bookstore it’s always wanted and some of the development it needs....
On October 14 activists on the southwest side held a celebratory press conference: after seven years of fighting they’d finally persuaded the CTA to restore weekend service on the Douglas branch of the Blue Line. That same day, over at Roberto Clemente High School, scores of transit users were at a hearing protesting new service cuts the CTA said were looming. The CTA seemed to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other....
Go Away–Go Away It’s often too easy to label a Russian work Chekhovian, but Kolyada invites the comparison. One character describes the play’s situation as “Uncle Vanya meets The Three Sisters,” and the action hinges on the protagonist’s desire to go elsewhere–not Moscow in this case but the Caucasus. It won’t spoil the end to report that ultimately she stays put, for here as in Chekhov the subject is not the outcome but the struggle....
Lead Stories After resisting for five years, Missouri was forced by a federal judge in November to allow the Ku Klux Klan into its Adopt-a-Highway cleanup program. In September the army revealed that its new lead-free combat bullet will not be ready before 2003; it needs the bullet because 1,000 indoor military firing ranges are currently closed due to lead contamination. In June researchers at Ontario’s University of Guelph reported genetically engineering a pig that produces manure 20 to 50 percent lower in phosphorus–which can pollute water supplies–than ordinary pig manure....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a recent issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, Dr. Rogerio Lobo, chairman of the ob-gyn department at Columbia medical school, reported that random groups of South Korean women practicing in vitro fertilization had almost double the success rate when a group of Americans prayed for them. Lobo told reporters that he almost withheld his findings because they were so improbable; he had probably failed to account for some variable, he said, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be....
