For several years Neal Wilson has been a regular at the summertime festivals around his Lakeview neighborhood, but no more. “Ah, they’re just not the same,” he says. “They’re being ruined by greed.” As Thomas points out, the key to making money at the gate is in the layout of the entrance. In most cases the entrances are narrow lanes–cattle chutes, really–barely big enough to let through more than one person at a time....
Q I am new to anal sex and enjoy it, despite the embarrassment of occasional santorum. But I’ve wondered about this for a while: Is the person receiving supposed to have an enema first? I’ve heard about people “cleaning themselves out,” and I assume that’s because they don’t want to make any santorum, but is that the real reason? Am I not being sensitive to my lover if I don’t have an enema first and there is some santorum?...
SCHRAMMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several alt-country figures–including Richard Buckner, Syd Straw, and Jeb Loy Nichols–make cameos on One Hundred Questions (Innerstate), the fifth and latest album by the Schramms, but when it comes to stealing the show on someone else’s record, none of them is as good at it as Dave Schramm. The singular guitarist was an early member of Yo La Tengo, and in subsequent years his piercing, compact solos have improved recordings by Freedy Johnston, Kate Jacobs, and Buckner, among others....
The Soft Boys show at last year’s South by Southwest was so surprisingly enjoyable it weakened somewhat my instinctive distrust of rock reunions. Twenty years after the band’s breakup, guitarists Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew are still perfect foils for each other, their dynamic leads tangling together and then skittering apart. The quartet focused on their 1980 classic Underwater Moonlight, then just reissued by Matador, and they faithfully rendered the album’s concise psychedelic beauty; as a bonus, Hitchcock’s sometimes charming but usually irritating between-song fever-dream monologues were kept to a minimum....
DONNAS 11/1, METRO The Donnas “turned 21” almost two years ago, and they sure don’t play like little girls anymore. They can’t afford to–as Allison “Donna R.” Robertson told Spin recently, “Cock rock is about how well you play. Guys are always waiting for you to mess up.” I hope the slumber-party cover art of their fifth album (and Atlantic debut), Spend the Night, is their farewell to teen sleaze–trashy yet professional, the band’s glammy hard rock courts the id with a confidence that’s unmistakably grown-up....
HARVEY SID FISHER 11/23, HIDEOUT Remember the “cocktail nation” craze of the mid-90s, when martinis, lounge singers, and cheesy Vegas comedians were all the rage? I thought it was pretty noxious coming from twentysomethings, but the shtick does have its charms coming from the real thing–from a parallel universe–like Harvey Sid Fisher. The 50s-vintage battle-of-the-sexes banter in his lovers’ quarrel series and the hey-baby-what’s-your-sign smarminess of the “astrology songs,” bad as they sound on paper, are absolutely irresistible in performance....
Is there some reference to snake or serpent handling in the Bible that would drive people to the religious conviction that if they are true believers snakes will not harm them? I live in Alabama and know of such groups but don’t know anyone who has participated in one. I am interested in finding out why and how these groups got started and how they worship. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Operetta fans can die happy now that the Savoyaires have “re-created” Gilbert and Sullivan’s first collaboration. Only two of Sullivan’s songs survived the original 1871 production of Thespis, but in 1982 Kingsley Day composed a score as faithful as he could make it, now lavishly arranged for 25-piece orchestra. The result is as exhilarating as if the music had been recovered. Though Gilbert’s plot is light on incident and silly even for a Savoy opera, it’s vintage topsy-turvy: inspired by Orpheus in the Underworld, Offenbach’s spoof of classical mythology, it traces the calamities that ensue when a troupe of temperamental actors replaces the aging gods of Olympus....
To the editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there is a feminist issue that should be addressed. I teach at the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue. A few years back there was a particularly obnoxious beggar who plopped right down on the pavement in front of our entrance just about every day. A white kid, perhaps in his 20s, though he looked like a boy....
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival continues Friday, April 18, through Friday, April 25. Screenings will be at Women in the Director’s Chair Theater, 941 W. Lawrence, and Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. All screenings are free, but reservations are encouraged; for more information call 312-560-6661. Following is the schedule for April 18 through 24; a complete festival schedule is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com. SATURDAY, APRIL 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now....
It’s a clever idea to exploit the conversational aspect of tap in a narrative piece: tappers onstage together usually seem to be talking to one another, arguing, conspiring, cracking jokes. And it’s courageous of Mark Yonally, artistic director of the year-old Chicago Tap Theatre, to turn the usually upbeat form of tap on its head: his new 75-minute dance-theater piece, Silence, deals with suicide, murder, and the anomie of modern life....
“In the world of tractor collecting, there’s a lot of priority on low numbers,” says Bill Borghoff, a former test engineer for International Harvester. He’s talking about serial numbers–the lower one is, the older and more desirable the machine. Borghoff isn’t the biggest collector; he has two tractors, and he’s part owner of a third. But that last one just happens to be the first diesel-powered International Harvester Farmall 806 ever made....
In 1997 a group of Jewish students dragged French absurdist Jean-Louis Costes to civil court for “inciting racist murder” with lyrics from Livrez les blanches aux bicots (“Throw the White Women to the Arabs,” self-released in 1989), which contained over a thousand racial slurs. That suit snowballed into a five-year ordeal that cost Costes thousands of dollars and had him facing the prospect of prison. In an interview with his ex-wife (and Suckdog bandmate) Lisa Carver for a 1997 issue of her fanzine, Rollerderby, Costes explained himself: “I wanted to do the worst possible CD, worse than the fascists, just to show them they are not so bad,” he said....
Donnie Johnson, the latest contender in the crowded neosoul field, comes with a compelling back story and some big-name connections. He’s Marvin Gaye’s second cousin, and like Gaye he left the Hebrew Pentecostal religion (which he describes as “Jews for Jesus, but with a slap of the Holy Roller on top of it”) for the secular life; his reputation spread to New York thanks largely to the praise of fellow Atlantan India....
Jordan McLean may fill the first-trumpet chair in Antibalas, but his time in the spotlight with North America’s premier Afrobeat revival orchestra is necessarily limited–when you’re part of an egalitarian 17-piece collective, you have to wait your turn. So he really smokes when he steps to the front of his jazz band Fire of Space, a septet with three other horns (all of whom play with him in Antibalas). Not that he’s a ball hog: reedist Michael Herbst takes the first solo on “Tribute to Forgotten Worlds,” the tune that opens the group’s debut CD, The Visit (Agni), and the three-minute excursion is a corker....
Even fledgling dance makers like Sarah Ford and Gabrielle Saliba, who recently started their own company, have choreographic casts of mind. Ford’s is distinctly musical: her taste is good, and she sings the counts when giving the dancers their notes during a rehearsal. Her Prey, for three women and one man, is based on contrast: she sets balletic, often pretty movements–pas de bourree, fluttering hands–against the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s druggy, free-form music....
Panicky, pulsing music plays as a man runs down a street, covered in blood. A tape labeled “Watch me” lies in the gutter, intriguing a passerby. A man rapes a woman with the help of her girlfriend. A barista gets fired for serving a customer whole milk rather than skim in her latte. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jason Stephens began thinking about the project last spring....
Ernst Lubitsch’s only completed film in Technicolor (1943), and the greatest of his late films, offers a rosy, meditative, and often very funny view of an irrepressible ladies’ man (Don Ameche in his prime) presenting his life in retrospect to the devil (Laird Cregar). Like a good deal of Lubitsch from roughly The Merry Widow on, this is a movie about death as well as personal style, but rarely has the former been treated with such affection for the human condition....
It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Cupidity, Cupid Players, at Theatre Building Chicago. In this musical sketch-comedy show revolving around various people who’ve all rented the same hotel room, the vignettes start off clever and sarcastic but invariably end up sweet and sentimental. A couple carrying on a long-distance relationship by telephone engages in progressively funnier miscommunications that lead to a blowup–and then a reconciliation. A sneering loner attending his ten-year high school reunion sings a crackling solo about his classmates’ shortcomings–then decides he’s the jerk and should try to make nice....
“Get fucked-up drunk!” barked the DJ, sounding like a broadcasting school dropout. “Make out with your lover!” He segued into a nu-metal song and a tall brunette in a pale blue floor-length gown strutted down the shiny catwalk. She flipped her hair, wrapped a long leg around a well-smudged brass pole, and did a little twirl. Then, leaning forward slightly and pressing her breasts against the pole, she unhooked the halter neck of her gown and slowly pulled her dress down to her waist....
