Posts

Child’s Plays Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last weekend was huge for the Duncan YMCA Chernin Center for the Arts. The first class of the center’s new arts training academy showed their stuff in a musical revue Sunday evening, and another group of 30 youngsters trouped valiantly through three full performances of the musical Working after seven weeks in the center’s youth-theater workshop. Ya gotta love the kids–who, in the performance I saw, were pretty much drowned out by the musicians accompanying them–but the jury’s still out on the question of whether plans being implemented by new executive director Malik Nevels will work for the city’s only arts-based Y and its rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the edge of the UIC campus....

European Union Film Festival See Critic’s Choice. (6:00) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This handsomely mounted antiwar saga from Finland (1999) is so classical in form and visually meticulous that it suggests a David Lean epic. But its story, loosely based on novels by Antti Tuuri, is more modest in scope: a young and conscientious lieutenant fighting in the Russo-Finnish War in 1942 is sustained through the cruelties of battle by love for his fiancee, an army nurse....

By M.C. Thomas The root of this distress is Loyola 2000, a budget-cutting plan approved by the board of trustees. In the past year Loyola has cut $16 million from a $218 million budget, but to do so dropped more than 100 course sections and eliminated 116 jobs. Some professors are teaching extra classes because colleagues took early retirement. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meanwhile, tuition has skyrocketed....

Live Bait Theater’s showcase of one-person performances features old and new work by a slew of fringe artists, among them Stephanie Shaw, Lotti Pharriss, David Kodeski, Mark Gagne, Judith Harding, Karin McKie, and Kristin Garrison. The festival climaxes with a salute to the late James Grigsby, whose solo show Terminal Madness was Live Bait’s first production in 1988. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The seventh annual Fillet of Solo Festival runs through August 25 at Live Bait Theater, 3914 N....

“I get really upset with people who are snobby, who sniff the cork…and I feel really bad for the people they’re dining with,” says Alpana Singh, the 26-year-old sommelier at Everest. “Pretension for me is a cover-up for ‘I don’t know, so I’m going to mask it with all these rituals.’ And with wine there’s just so much to know, you can’t know it all.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

It’s a well-worn story. A messianic man-child, pursued by a malevolent father figure, labors to harness his powers and save the world. As the champion matures, the dilemma underlying the operatic clash of good and evil comes into focus: how to reconcile inherited strengths with the darker side of parental legacy. One reason J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been a hit with adults is its handsome framing of this age-old question, which echoes Greek myth (Zeus and Cronos), Celtic romance (Arthur and Uther), and even the pesky gnostic take on Christianity....

LALEZAR ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Kemal Ataturk established modern Turkey in 1923, he sought to transform the Islamic country into a cosmopolitan, secular state–and so the centuries of brilliant court music produced during the Ottoman Empire days were written right out of the history books. Fortunately, Ataturk’s plan failed, but it took decades for the music to be properly revived. By the 70s musicians were receiving a full, formal training in the tradition from Istanbul’s State Conservatoire, and now this vast repertoire is integral to the country’s cultural fabric....

Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gus Giordano’s 1966 Gang Hep comes down squarely on the side of show dancing. But what daughter Nan Giordano’s reconstruction for this concert makes clear is that the battle’s over–and choreography has won. Even in jazz dance, audiences have come to expect not just individual moves but movement meaningfully arranged. That movement can include maneuvers adapted from vernacular traditions like burlesque and minstrelsy–it can even be about those traditions, as the company shows brilliantly in Hi Jinks later in the program....

This brilliant and often hilarious 2003 essay film by Thom Andersen (Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer) assembles clips from 191 movies set in Los Angeles, juxtaposing their fantasies with the real city as seen by a loyal and well-informed native. That might sound like a slender premise for 169 minutes, but after five viewings I still feel I’ve only scratched the surface of this epic meditation. Andersen focuses on the city’s people and architecture, but his wisecracking discourse is broad enough to encompass a wealth of local folklore, a bittersweet tribute to car culture, a critical history of mass transit in southern California, and a song of nostalgia for lost neighborhoods and lifestyles....

Among the films screened at the Toronto film festival last month that will turn up here eventually was Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee & Cigarettes, which taught me something about the complex ethics of celebrity–including the resentment fame can foster in noncelebrities and the defensiveness this resentment can provoke in turn. It also showed me how a cycle of comic black-and-white shorts can become a thematically and formally coherent feature. Other festival films were equally edifying, in their own ways....

Why are you so reluctant to let anyone be bi? You have all these people writing to you saying they’re straight but like members of their own sex, but you never say, “Hey, maybe you’re bi.” You’re awfully quick to either affirm their self-image (Wanna Be a Cocksucker in last week’s column) or contradict them (Mostly Straight Boy in the same column). Why not suggest a middle ground? Why perpetuate the myth that bisexuals do not really exist?...

The Public League championship game went big time this year–taking up a position not just at the United Center but in TV land as well. The city’s most important high school basketball game drew about 15,000 fans to its biggest indoor arena, even as the game claimed two hours on public television’s WTTW–during pledge month, no less. So, thinking vive la difference, I watched the game at home late last Sunday afternoon instead of seeing it in person, my usual practice....

20 MILES 2/21, HIDEOUT Guitarist Judah Bauer, best known for his work with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, formed 20 Miles with his brother Donovan back in 1996, mostly for kicks. That’s some scary talent, considering how plenty of musicians base whole careers on far more disposable music. On Keep It Coming (Fat Possum), the band’s fifth album (and the first without Donovan’s full-time participation), Bauer lathers up his unkempt, Stonesy blooze-rock and gives it a quick shave to make it more presentable....

BOB LOG III, LONESOME ORGANIST 4/11, SUBTERRANEAN Neoblues wild man Bob Log III, a bundle of lascivious stage energy, can do more by his lonesome than most full bands–and with a woman on his lap. On his new Log Bomb (Fat Possum) he sticks to what he’s best at–maniacal slide-driven R & B so lewd it’s probably illegal in several southern states. Standout titles include “Wag Your Tail Like a Dog in the Back of a Truck,” “Boob Scotch,” and of course “One Man Band Boom....

At 4 AM we were still passing around the perforated juice can, trading our jivey tales of horror and dread. Guys huddled around a makeshift bowl at such an hour often turn to boasts of asses kicked, money made, or babes scored; noncontenders in these categories, we three bragged instead of weirdnesses witnessed and chemicals ingested. We threw down stories ever more lurid, ever less likely. Drug-induced brain damage, criminal trespassing, and supernatural menace all crept into the fray....

After Glenn was laid off from U.S. Steel in 1986, he started hanging around the track every day instead of just on payday. Since then he’s worked every racetrack hustle known to a man with an empty wallet and an urge to bet the daily double. He was booted from the sidewalk in front of the State and Lake offtrack betting parlor for selling photocopied racing forms at far below the cost of real forms....

Rock, Pop, etc. BEAUTY QUEEN WANNABES with Margaret Andrea, Matt Davis, Daryl Nitz, and pianist Chuck Larkin. Thu 7/18, 8 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N. Halsted. 312-988-9000 or 312-559-1212. CAM’RON, 3 PC perform at the 2K2 Mega Tour Celebrity Custom Car Show & Concert; hosted by Busta Rhymes. Sat 7/13, noon-10 PM, McCormick Place, 2300 S. Lake Shore Dr. 312-421-5272 or 312-559-1212. MARC COPELY Free in-store performance. Wed 7/17, noon, Best Buy, 1432 Butterfield, Downers Grove....

Rock, Pop, etc. BAIMEI performs “From China With Love” (benefits the New York Police and Fire Widows’ and Children’s Fund). Sat 12/8, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. JACK BRUCE & THE CUICOLAND EXPRESS WITH VERNON REID & BERNIE WORRELL Fri 12/14, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. CELESTIAL STATIC Free in-store performances. Fri 12/7, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 336 S....

Almost no one knew that the sagging Prairie-style house in Gary was anything special until Christopher Meyers, then a 25-year-old historic-preservation student, drove by it in 1994 while hunting for a thesis topic. The single-family home, which had been abandoned for 30 years, was a shambles, yet despite the peeling stucco Meyers detected masterful touches. “When you see a Picasso you know it’s a Picasso,” he says. “Same with Monet, same with Wright....

Friday 1/18 – Thursday 1/24 19 SATURDAY After fleeing the Russian civil war as a teenager, feminist philosopher and activist Raya Dunayevskaya came to Chicago and began working with the various progressive movements of the 1920s. She also served for two years as Trotsky’s secretary in Mexico, wrote the first English translation of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, and developed a critique of the totalitarian tendencies of Marxist philosophy known as Marxist humanism....