Chicago’s Cicero Blake was already a 20-year veteran of doo-wop, soul, and R & B when, in the mid-70s, he wrapped his gritty but sweet tenor around “Dip My Dipper,” a minor R & B classic that helped define the era’s soul-blues style. The song’s written as a slow-grinding ode to illicit sex, but Blake’s silken crooning, effortless enunciation and phrasing, and warmth of feeling transformed it into a tender, even yearning, tribute to erotic bliss....
Contact, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre. Director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s Broadway hit boasts a Tony for best musical, but despite a skimpy script by Stroman and John Weidman, this is a dance concert marketed as a musical to attract a mainstream audience. Performed to recorded music (including classical, big-band jazz, hard rock, and cowboy swing), Contact consists of three variations on the theme of sexual longing. “Swinging” portrays an 18th-century lady on a swing being pushed by a servant as her aristocratic beau watches; when the lover leaves, lady and servant engage in erotic aerial acrobatics....
Talking city politics, Michael Miner once complained of a “shift during Daley’s administration to more private dealings, less open discussion, and diminished public involvement in decision making.” John Stroger has caught the bug. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wish Ben [Joravsky] and Melody [Rodgers] had dug a little deeper into the landgrab about to be launched in East Garfield Park (“Easy Targets,” January 12)....
CUBE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a contemporary-music group, CUBE tends to focus on the instrumental side of the repertoire, but for this chamber sampler, “The Sopranos,” it has rounded up seven local women singers whose paths seldom cross. Each is devoted to interpreting new music, which is demanding, encompassing extremes in range and dynamics for the sake of psychological intensity. Barbara Ann Martin, for instance, has been a muse to George Crumb for years, and she’s done some of the most lucid and affecting performances of his compositions on CD....
Halloween’s a good excuse for all manner of inappropriate behavior. You can drink too much, make out with strangers, start a fight, and do something stupid–no one has to know it’s you, after all, and no one really cares if they find out. Last Halloween I got blackout drunk, peed on the floor at a party, let my period flow down my bare legs, then had a little soiree at my place, where I puked and passed out....
Dennis Lehane’s no member of the Elmore Leonard school of crime fiction, where the violence is delivered with a rim shot and a wink. No breezy nonchalance softens his grim outlook. And no Miami sunshine washes the streets of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, the racially mixed strip of real estate that separates the twin drug-and-gun ruins of black Roxbury and Irish South Boston and that serves as the setting for his Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro series of private eye novels....
“As a singer I act as a bridge between the Arab and the Jewish culture,” Emil Zrihan has said. “We always lived together, ate together, and sang the same songs together. And suddenly we find ourselves in a fight for the same piece of earth.” Zrihan, born in Rabat, Morocco, and head cantor at the main synagogue in Ashkelon, Israel, performs music that originated in ninth-century Andalusia, the region in southern Spain where Christians, Sephardic Jews, and Muslims coexisted in relative harmony for seven centuries prior to the Reconquista, the 15th-century Spanish religious crusade that pushed the Moors and their music into the Maghreb, Turkey, and Greece....
In their time together as the avant-rock duo Gastr del Sol, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke functioned as Chicago ambassadors as much as musicians–touring Europe, attracting visiting artists from both sides of the pond, and exposing fans to new sounds on their own label, Dexter’s Cigar. Like Tortoise, they became a lightning rod for the media attention focused on Chicago music in the mid-90s. But the duo split acrimoniously in 1997, and both members have since moved to New York....
Presented by the Chicago Institute for the Moving Image, the second annual Festival of Cinema for the Deaf runs Friday and Saturday, February 28 and March 1, at the Esquire and at Century 12 and CineArts 6. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $5; a $50 pass covers all screenings at Century 12 and CineArts 6. For more information call 847-322-2464. Short documentaries Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An uneven program of documentary shorts about profoundly deaf people adjusting to their disability....
WEDNESDAY MORNING Michael and his roommate were watching The Event on TV Tues AM when the second plane hit. A few minutes later they lost the broadcast, because the transmitters were on top of the World Trade Center. Now we’re stuck with sucky channel two, which comes from the Empire State Building. “We’re getting cable when this is over,” Michael’s roommate said last night. Assuming it will be over. We ran into M....
A weak Christmas movie denies loneliness and despair; a strong one, like It’s a Wonderful Life, confronts them. This ensemble drama by screenwriter David Hubbard isn’t perfect, but its harsh honesty and sincere faith in humanity make it genuinely uplifting. Its Manhattan characters trudge desolately through the forced merriment of the holiday: a divorced book editor (Susan Sarandon) whose mother has been erased by Alzheimer’s, a beautiful dancer (Penelope Cruz) whose fiance can’t overcome his violent jealousy, an old man (Alan Arkin) whose grief over his wife’s death has made him delusional, and a poor young man (Marcus Thomas) whose holiday plans consist of crashing a party at a hospital emergency ward....
Time Out With Aurelien Recoing, Karin Viard, Serge Livrozet, Jean-Pierre Mangeot, Monique Mangeot, Nicolas Kalsch, Marie Cantet, Felix Cantet, and Maxime Sassier. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This point is only underscored when, relatively late in the film, we hear him describe how and why he lost his job, and we realize that he had inexplicably fallen in love with his own drift, which he experiences basically by driving....
On Second Thought . . . The same morning that the Tribune brought us Hochman, September 18, the Sun-Times carried an editorial that went the Tribune’s one worse. The Sun-Times’s subject was Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground member who’d just been released on parole after serving 22 years in prison for her role in a 1981 Brink’s armored truck robbery in which two policeman and a security guard were shot to death....
Unlike so many disappointing Chicago-area sports franchises in 2002, the University of Illinois men’s basketball team began the current season without high expectations. But the Fighting Illini then won their first eight games, infecting even the most cynical alumnus with visions not only of a third straight Big Ten title but also–dare I suggest it?–of reaching the NCAA Final Four. No sooner had the Illini raised hopes, however, than they surrendered their unbeaten record last Saturday in what amounted to their first real road test....
EYES ADRIFT 10/18, SCHUBAS On Eyes Adrift’s eponymous Spinart debut, Krist Novoselic, Curt Kirkwood, and Sublime’s Bud Gaugh are less a three-man band than friendly participants in a three-way tug-of-war. Kirkwood yanks the music into Meat Puppetsy terrain, but there’s also a dollop of modern-rock oomph here, the sort designed to fill rooms bigger than those the Puppets generally played prior to their association with Nirvana. The sound is expansive and warm and shockingly earnest–a reminder that although alt-rock’s class of ’92 is forever associated with irony because of its alums’ sarcastic takes on stardom, government, and money, those kids took their rock ‘n’ roll pretty damn seriously....
In the Blood Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Touted as an innovator for her semipoetic, semiepic work–apparently everyone’s forgotten Brecht–Parks simply does what the majority of successful American playwrights do: keeps things TV simple while creating a patina of complexity with a flurry of attention-grabbing theatrical devices. The opening moments of In the Blood set the tone for the ensuing two and a half hours: five actors in trench coats bark choral insults against the as-yet-unseen Hester....
Until very recently this pairing–septuagenarian vibist Terry Gibbs with the full-throated organ band led by Chicago guitarist Henry Johnson–might have looked like a misprint to anyone familiar with Gibbs’s career. He’s done his best and best-known work in big-band settings and in quartets and quintets costarring the great clarinetist Buddy DeFranco; even in the early 60s, when the first wave of organ groups would occasionally feature a vibraphone soloist (instead of guitar or sax), Gibbs never tested that format....
I’m driving August again. Actually, at the moment we’re strategically parked, my teal Ford Festiva jutting out of the alley right where flush-cheeked kids are streaming out of the Aragon Ballroom after a Bad Religion concert. My trunk is a makeshift sales booth, loaded with crates of videos. August summons the kids with a wave and shows them his wares–Deftones, Kiss, the Jesus Lizard. August is working the crowd, he’s smiling: This is gooood stuff, dude....
Hello, I’ve looked for documentation and evidence to refute or validate the statement my sociology professor made to illustrate that the world isn’t really what it seems. He claims that “one out of every eight humans has had sex with an animal.” Please respond if you’re going to investigate “the old one in eight” as my professor calls it. –Au Simpson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Alfred Kinsey–you knew I was going to drag him into this–“Some 17 percent of the farm boys in our sample had had some sexual contact with farm animals to the point of orgasm, while half or more of the boys from certain rural areas of the United States had had such experience....
Torkel Korling was one of America’s most important industrial photographers, but his first love was botany, which helps explain his work’s precise beauty. Among the 26 Korling photos in Stephen Daiter Gallery’s “Big Shoulders” exhibit are four untitled cityscapes that showcase his eye for geometry. My favorite is a 1930s image of two streetcars on Chicago’s Madison Street bridge, in which the river, bridge deck, and two sidewalks form trapezoids that create motion in the scene....
