Why link an arty exploitation picture about rape, murder, and revenge with a sober adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, a 1960s German play about the failure of the Vatican to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust? One reason is to point out a critical difference between them. In Irreversible Gaspar Noe elects to show us everything—two faces being smashed to bloody messes, the heroine being raped and beaten for an agonizing ten minutes—while in Amen....
Rephlex Records was started in 1991 by Grant Wilson-Claridge and Richard D. James. The latter, best known as contrarian electronica star Aphex Twin, earned his mythic status by going against the grain, and the label has operated much the same way: its output is rarely advertised, its release schedule is relatively erratic, and many of the releases are short on information, propagating a deliberate air of mystery. Rephlex was home early on to some of the most popular innovators in the IDM (intelligent dance music) genre, including jungle-jazz fusion hotshot Squarepusher and genre-hopping beat freak u-ziq, and perhaps no other label better represents IDM’s loner-in-the-bedroom-with-a-computer aesthetic....
James De Salvo was photographed by Bill Kirby as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. He is deaf and speaks mostly in sign language. I met him at his town house in Wheaton about two years ago, and we spoke with the help of his daughter Priscilla and son Rocco. We continued the interview by letter and finished last month. I grew up in Chicago, around Taylor Street. My parents immigrated from Italy and they settled in the Italian neighborhood, just to be around their own people....
APRIL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Author Frank Robinson had a three-year stint as the Playboy Adviser, and his novel The Glass Inferno was the source for The Towering Inferno. He’s also an authority on the pulp magazines where he got his start and learned that “good writing will seldom sell a bad story, but a good story will frequently sell bad writing.” He’s a guest speaker at this weekend’s third annual Windy City Pulp & Paperback Convention, which includes wares from 100 dealers, an auction, a film festival, and an appearance by horror master Hugh B....
While I enjoyed Dan Savage’s column on swingers [“Swingers: A Love Story,” October 18] and generally agree with him vis-a-vis the faux Christian right and public scolds like Bill Bennett, I must take issue with Mr. Savage’s use of a verse from the New Testament taken out of context. I am referring to his quotation of Paul (1 Corinthians 7:9): “It is better to marry than to burn.” Mr. Savage quotes this snippet to imply, apparently, that Paul suggests that it is better to marry than to burn in hell for committing a sin of lust....
Friendly. In a Take-the-Money-if-You-Know-What’s-Good-for-You Kind of Way. Step one will be a cease-and-desist letter, Anderson told Konkol, step two, if necessary, a lawsuit. This past Monday step one was E-mailed to Tribune Company attorney Michael Parks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She covered the grounds for confusion that the Tribune Company had sown. “The public may believe that the Red Eye newspaper is somehow authorized by or affiliated with Red Eye Press....
“This is the amazing transforming flying egg,” announces Neville, who’d rather not use a last name. He’s standing in the front room of his house in Pilsen, demonstrating a skeletal aluminum-wood structure mounted on a homemade carriage. It’s the start of an airplane he’ll try to fly Saturday at Monroe Harbor. “Once it’s all in place and all the connections are in, then I jump in. I start peddling like hell and I have four guys who will be pushing....
Before the classical canon was enshrined in the conservatories and concert halls of the world, much of the music was performed in more intimate spaces: churches, homes, salons, even saloons. I don’t know if Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello have ever been played in a tavern, much less a rock club like Schubas, but cellist Matt Haimovitz is playing exclusively at such nontraditional venues on his Bach Listening-Room Tour–he refuses to see the combination of Bach, bar chatter, and secondhand smoke as somehow sacrilegious (“I’ll bet Bach loved beer,” he told the New York Post last year)....
“I can’t stop,” says jazz violinist Samuel Williams. “Even when I really want to stop. Even when I don’t have enough money to eat and I’m living off $20 a week. I feel like I was made to play.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1991 Williams dropped out of Lewis University because of money problems. Unhappy in Chicago, he and several friends trekked to Minneapolis to start a pop band....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May, British researchers told the American Society of Clinical Oncology that a poison used by South African Zulu tribesmen to coat the tips of their spears and arrows could be a major weapon against cancer of the lungs, colon, and ovaries. The toxin, which comes from the root bark of the Cape bush willow, appears to deprive human cancer tumors of blood without harming the surrounding tissue....
A group of about eight friends that I went to college with gets together maybe twice a year. We usually come here because it’s low-key. But one night we decided to go find some wild music. We’re at this bar (which shall remain nameless) and this group of beautiful, drop-dead-gorgeous girls walks in. Three of them had apparently seen the movie Coyote Ugly, and they’re opening up their blouses, getting a little wild, flashing people....
Since releasing its excellent eponymous debut two years ago, this cracked Baltimore math rock trio has squandered too much creative energy on conceptual humor. In March 2001 it released what purported to be a split ten-inch with Rhode Island freakholes Arab on Radar; in reality Oxes filled the “Arab on Radar” side of the record with a careful impersonation of their supposed partners. On the B side of a subsequent single they covered a Foo Fighters song....
Rumbles From the Underground Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While in Seattle Kuglich remained in close contact with his friend Ryan Fernandez back in Chicago. They’d met growing up in Bloomington, Illinois, when Kuglich was four and Fernandez was three, and stayed in touch after Fernandez’s family moved to Springfield in 1986. They formed a hip-hop act called Chromium while in high school, and came to Chicago together to attend UIC....
This second annual showcase of one-person performances features more than 40 pieces, ranging from stand-up comedy acts to theatrical monologues and one-person plays. The festival runs March 13-22. Shows take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, third-floor studio, 2936 N. Southport, 312-902-1500; Playground Theater, 3341 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3793; WNEP Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, 773-755-1693; and the Elevated at Cherry Red, 2833 N. Sheffield, 773-477-3661. Ticket prices for individual programs are $12; “all access” passes cost $75....
Held in Philadelphia every New Year’s Day, the Mummers Parade ranks as one of the country’s most peculiar institutions: hundreds of men from tough working-class neighborhoods inhale beer and dress up as women, wearing elaborate self-designed outfits of silk and sequins, as rival brigades compete for what one participant calls “bragging rights.” This entertaining 2001 documentary by Max L. Raab sheds some light on the event using both archival footage and numerous interviews....
Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. JEREMY BOYLE Free in-store performance. Next Sunday, January 16, 1 PM, Borders Books & Music, 830 N....
Rock, Pop, etc. FOUR FRESHMEN Sat 1/19, 8 PM, Harold D. McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, Park and Fawell, Glen Ellyn. 630-942-4000. LUDACRIS Sun 1/20, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence. 312-666-6667 or 312-559-1212. BAR VERTIGO 853 N. Western: No cover; music at 10 PM. Sundays, DJs Stranjah & Marcus B. spin reggae. Mondays, open mike. Tuesdays, DJs spin rock, rockabilly & punk. Wednesdays, DJ Machete & the Faded One, hip-hop open mike....
Last July, Arlene Martsolf got a letter from the city saying her car had been towed and was being held in storage at a cost of about $35 a day. She paid no attention to the letter. “It’s not my car,” she says. “It’s my boyfriend’s car–my ex-boyfriend’s car. I assumed the city wouldn’t press me for the money.” About two months after they bought the car Martsolf and Bill split up....
Chicago is rich in alternative galleries featuring work by recent art-school grads but poor in exhibitions of seldom-seen work by famous artists–the kind that are common in New York and Los Angeles. A new gallery, Valerie Carberry, has stepped into the breach with the first Adolph Gottlieb show in Chicago in 36 years, focusing on preabstract work done between 1927 and ’39. These works aren’t as great as the abstract expressionist paintings that made him famous, but it’s fascinating to see his brush straining toward that freedom....
In the four oil and wax paintings by Chicagoan Brigitte Riesebrodt on view at the Cook County Administration Building, the dense layers of fuzzy script evoke palimpsests and archaeological digs. She blurs the writing, making it mostly unreadable, and in Safekeeping her own red-and-black handwriting is displayed upside down. Some of the words are identifiable as English or German–she was born in Germany–but Landscape 1 also includes pages of Chinese text, and the layering in that work seems especially deep....
