Honky-tonk devotee Dale Watson is hardly the first guy to write songs for therapeutic reasons, but on last year’s Every Song I Write Is for You (Audium) he worked out some very personal demons in a very public way. In September 2000 his fiancee, Terri Herbert, was killed in a car accident en route to meet him in Houston, and over the next several months he sank deeper and deeper into depression....
What doesn’t happen in this one-man show, late of the New York Fringe Festival, is almost as remarkable as what does. Writer-performer Dave Mowers has a talent for understated character impressions, but his range never becomes the topic. He’s unabashedly gay, which figures strongly in his reminiscences of adolescence, but sexuality issues never dominate. And despite a lot of undeniable navel gazing, his stories rarely get stalled in the particular: Mowers’s self-involvement is more than matched by his self-awareness....
Early last week 12th Ward alderman Ray Frias was riding high. A poll conducted by his campaign showed his name recognition in the ward was 57 points higher than that of his toughest challenger, political neophyte George Cardenas. He posed for campaign photos with John Daley, the powerful brother of the mayor. He said what any watcher of Chicago politics would assume: that he had the support of a pack of Mexican-American elected officials–all regular Democrats like himself–including state senators Tony Munoz and Martin Sandoval, state representative Eddie Acevedo, and 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis....
Live Bait Theater’s seventh annual showcase of one-person performances features old and new work by a slew of fringe artists. The fest runs through August 25 at Live Bait Theater, 3914 N. Clark; performances take place in the theater’s main-stage and Bucket spaces. Tickets are $10 per show; a festival pass to all shows costs $30, and a pass to the two “Live Bait Bucket Solo Sampler” shows is $15. Call 773-871-1212 for reservations (tickets are also available on-line at www....
Explorer Mary Henrietta Kingsley fit into late-19th-century British society about as comfortably as Tarzan. While other Victorian ladies were practicing needlework and having babies, Kingsley was wading through the malarial swamps of West Africa, climbing Mount Cameroon, studying the Fang people, a tribe with a reputation for cannibalism, and collecting fish and beetle specimens for the British Museum. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There are so many women who did these incredibly cool things and nobody has heard of them,” said director Eileen Vorbach, who teaches drama at the Actors Workshop....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A whole class of middle school students in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was recommended for blood tests last month after officials learned that in May 2001 a seventh-grade science teacher, since retired, had used the same needle to prick the fingers of about two dozen students to make blood sample slides. The teacher wiped the needle with alcohol between uses, and officials thought the risk of infection was low, but they had no explanation for how a veteran science teacher could have strayed so far from contemporary blood-safety procedures....
I was here with this guy I was dating and a bunch of his high school friends. There was a DJ playing, and the music was so loud it was bouncing off the walls. For the first five minutes we were all just screaming at one another, trying to hear, and after a while it was futile to have a conversation, so we just sat there quietly. The irony is that this guy I was dating didn’t really talk to begin with and/or acknowledge my existence, so it was one of our better dates....
At Christmas one year at work we collected presents for children with AIDS. I took it very seriously and got a lot of great toys for these kids. A couple of nights later I was here at my local pub with my friend and coworker Mary, who’s from Ireland, where I spent my high school years. In Ireland every Christmas the nuns are emphasizing the poor missionary babies, the poor AIDS babies, babies in orphanages, starving babies, etc–it’s completely drummed into you....
I live right down the street and come here all the time with my girlfriend. We were sitting here one night, and this guy invited us over to his apartment to drink some wine. He was very friendly. At his apartment, he kept talking about how big his unit was. We kinda laughed along. We figured out that he wanted to have a little threesome, but we ignored it. He kept saying, “Do you want to see my unit?...
By Ted Kleine Ballard returned to the booth and punched a new ballot. This one slid smoothly through the counter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Ballard had double punched in last November’s general election, his vote wouldn’t have been counted. It happened to a lot of people in his west side neighborhood. In the 37th Ward, one out of every eight votes for president was thrown out due to voter error, the second-highest discard rate in the city....
Off the Charts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But while it’s fascinating to see the scores, which sometimes constitute artwork in their own right, and to delve into the theory behind them, the music itself often completely abandons traditional harmony and rhythm–the elements that allow most people to understand and enjoy a piece of music. “When you listen to a lot of 20th-century music it’s not always that interesting,” says guitarist and trumpeter Nathaniel Braddock....
OLD 97’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With their new Satellite Rides (Elektra), the Old 97’s continue their dramatic transformation, begun on 1999’s Fight Songs, from generic alt-country lunks to irresistible pop dynamos. Front man Rhett Miller has been living in LA for several years now, but the rest of the band still lives in Dallas, and the time they all spent together there working on the album really shows....
“I didn’t want to be an actress,” says Bea Arthur, whose new cabaret act comes to the Park West Tuesday for a ten-day run. “I wanted to be a little starlet. June Allyson killed me–I thought she was the end. I wanted to be like her, very small and very blond. But there I was, this tall lady with large breasts and a deep voice.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Timely and informative, this 2001 documentary profiles Israeli and Palestinian children living in and around Jerusalem, near one another but worlds apart. Filmmakers Carlos Bolado, Justine Shapiro, and B.Z. Goldberg shot much of their footage between 1997 and 2000, before the second intifada, and like eager mediators they travel back and forth, from Arab East Jerusalem to Jewish West Jerusalem, from the Western Wall to a Palestinian refugee camp. Goldberg, an American who spent his childhood in Israel, serves as a brother figure to the seven Palestinian and Israeli children he questions, soliciting a wide range of views, yet the children mostly adhere to their elders’ opinions....
Since arriving in New York in the late 80s, Pakistani-born, California-raised guitarist Rez Abbasi has quietly earned a respected place in the city’s music scene: guitar aficionados admire his clean, sparkly technique, and his contemporaries in jazz (such as saxist Gary Thomas, trumpeter Tim Hagans, and pianist Kenny Werner, who’ve all joined him on disc) appreciate his deceptively clear-cut compositions and easy blend of jazz, ethnic influences, and guitar electronics. On his newest disc as a leader, the self-released Out of Body (starring horn men Tony Malaby and Ron Horton), Abbasi scales things down from the expansive canvas of his previous album, 1996’s Modern Memory, but at the same time demonstrates even more clearly that he knows how to get what he wants from a band....
Margo Guryan Margo Guryan is one of those: in 1968, Spanky & Our Gang charted with her “Sunday Morning”; that number and more of her smart, upbeat, beautifully crafted tunes were recorded by Harry Belafonte, Jackie DeShannon, Dion, Cass Elliot, Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell, Astrud Gilberto, the Lennon Sisters, Julie London, Claudine Longet, Carmen McRae, and Harry Nilsson. But by the time Guryan hit her stride, in the late 60s, the line dividing singer from songwriter was being erased by rock artists like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan....
RILO KILEY 3/7, SCHUBAS Saddle Creek’s getting pretty broad-minded in its old age: new signees Rilo Kiley aren’t from Omaha or even the midwest, but from Los Angeles, of all places. Still, there’s no El Lay glitz on their second album, The Execution of All Things–this is diffident indie pop with the occasional organ line or fuzz guitar growling underneath to provide a dose of existential angst. Front woman Jenny Lewis’s singsong voice has a deceptively innocent quality to it, but her eccentrically phrased screeds hint at apocalypse and alienation....
Starting to Add Up Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The town recently emerged victorious from a suit filed in 1997 against Specialty Risk Consultants, Inc., the company that former Cicero president Henry Klosak had hired five years earlier to administer the town’s health-insurance coverage. According to the town’s attorney, Daniel J. Kubasiak, Specialty Risk and various subcontractors engaged in an “elaborate scheme to defraud the town of monies....
Last January, Robert Bank and his neighbors on the far northwest side were worried that a handsome two-story terra-cotta building on Lawrence near Milwaukee might be demolished, so they asked the city what they could do to get it protected. “They told us to fill out an application to have the building turned into a historical landmark and then wait for a hearing,” says Bank, a member of the Jefferson Park Neighborhood Association....
In ancient times, when Saturday Night Live was funny and Wicker Park was cheap, the Sun-Times was a great paper. The left-leaning tabloid was filled with terrific reporting, and mornings started with Mike Royko on the second page. Best of all, you could read it on the el without giving yourself muscle spasms finding the jump. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reading Roeper’s columns is like gaping at a traffic accident: you hate yourself for it, but it’s so awful you have to look....
