How to Move the Taj Mahal In the lower left of the photo we see a low fence at the edge of a lawn that reaches back toward the Taj Mahal. The fence is defined by two vertical posts, and two wires run through them. These wires continue toward us past the near post, then seem to hang in the air. Where is the corner post? It’s visible in another photo, taken at the same time, that I found on the Web site of an Indian magazine....
Legends on Parade: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “Flying Home” solo is often regarded as a paradigm for the tenor saxophone in rhythm and blues. Although plenty of horn players presaged Jacquet’s extroverted excess–nearly every trick in the book had already been used to comic effect by vaudevillians like Wilton Crawley and Rudy Wiedoeft–Jacquet alone pretty much galvanized the blustery, bar-walking jump-blues sax style....
Adapted from a Chinese novel, produced and directed by Germans, and shot on location in the Bronx, this 2001 drama never grows roots deep enough to feel completely authentic–its main characters, a petty blackmailer (Adrien Brody) who’s secretly writing a novel and a brilliant but naive Columbia University student (Charlotte Ayanna) who falls for him, seem to have stepped out of a 1930s Warner Brothers melodrama. But their relationship is so subtly inflected with fear, envy, and self-loathing on both sides of the class divide that I was drawn in nonetheless....
Far From Heaven It becomes apparent that in this context, for practical purposes, “Sirk” does not denote a mood or a philosophy or a set of plot elements, but rather a repertoire of technical decisions. With that lexicon of effects, new sentences can be written. –Geoffrey O’Brien, writing on Far From Heaven in the November issue of Artforum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Significantly, Haynes, who was born in 1961, is splitting with some members of his generation by treating his Sirkian material with sincerity and respect rather than ridicule or cynicism....
First came Bjork, then Sigur Ros; the latest product of Iceland’s prodigiously hyped music scene to make waves in the international press is the quartet Mum (rhymes with “broom”). They first caused a stir last year with their debut, Yesterday Was Dramatic–Today Is OK (Thule), which eschewed both the epic, ethereal grandeur of Sigur Ros and the extroverted eccentricity of Bjork in favor of something modest, meandering, and childlike. The music combined a gentle backdrop of gurgling, subtly glitchy electronics with streaks of live instrumental color–accordion, clarinet, glockenspiel, guitar–but the band’s pretty songs and soft-focus ambience didn’t stray too far from the aesthetic of shapelessness made fashionable by the laptop-loving minions of the IDM scene....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In March a federal judge in Alabama ruled in favor of the Eastwood Texaco station on Montclair Road in Birmingham, which had sued the 11-nation oil cartel OPEC. Judge Charles Weiner said the organization had violated U.S. antitrust law by reducing its oil production (a favorite method of raising prices) and forbade it from doing so again for a period of one year....
George Brant has always had a dry wit–more often than not, too dry for his own good. His instinct is to underplay even when he’s parodying something ripe for comic skewering, like A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, a strategy that worked only part of the time in Lovely Letters. But Brant’s comic style can look more like inhibition than a performance choice, which distances him from an audience that might want to know a bit more about the man behind the funny act....
Anyone familiar with the dismal, decaying high-rises that have made Chicago’s housing projects a symbol of failed public policy will raise an eyebrow at the title of Jim Fuerst’s oral history When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (published last year by Praeger Publishers and now out in paperback from University of Illinois Press), which he’ll read from at the Harold Washington Library on Wednesday. But Fuerst, who worked at the Chicago Housing Authority in the 40s and 50s, remembers when those projects were beacons of hope, and he says the conventional wisdom about them–that they are a failed social experiment–is bogus....
Guitarist Phil Guy grew up in Lettsworth, Louisiana, absorbing acoustic sides by Smokey Hogg, Lightnin’ Slim, and Lightnin’ Hopkins from his father’s record collection. But like his older brother Buddy, who was already playing out when Phil was in his early teens, Guy modeled himself on electric fretmen like New Orleans’s Guitar Slim. In 1969, after about a decade performing with Baton Rouge-based harpist Raful Neal, he arrived in Chicago and within a few years he’d joined his brother’s band, which often featured Junior Wells as a coheadliner....
Before 7 AM on weekdays, working parents start dropping off their children at the preschool building of Lake Shore Schools at 5611 N. Clark. Of the 400 kids enrolled in the private institution, 180 are preschoolers, and many of them are taught by people like Marilyn Del Valle, the lead teacher for a class of 14 three-year-olds. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several states already have programs, and more are considering them....
Thank you so much for advising that whacked-out, sexually ignorant mother to buy her daughter a dildo! As a former sex worker (I was a stripper at the fabulous Lusty Lady in San Francisco as well as a pro domme in a lovely Bay Area house of domination), I understand intimately the ability of parents to turn normal sexual curiosity into something shameful and embarrassing. I myself had a similar incident when I was a teenager....
On Mother’s Day, his 50th birthday, Jim Hasser stood behind his barn inspecting his corn and soybeans–more than 1,000 acres of uniform rows of sprouts that extended all the way to the horizon. Hasser, whose farm is two hours southeast of Chicago near Earl Park, Indiana, was happy that he’d been able to finish his spring planting the day before, but much of the area had been hit with frost that morning....
Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and Worst in the White House The first formal ranking of presidents was done by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. for Life magazine back in 1948. He surveyed 55 historians who placed Washington, Lincoln, and FDR atop Mount Olympus and put Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding in the hell of presidential failure. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At least eight subsequent surveys produced nearly identical results–a top three, a few “near greats,” a string of mediocrities, and Grant, Harding, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and one or two others in the cellar....
Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One’s criticism could be directed to any number of the article’s substantive flaws: e.g., its heavy reliance on the biased and often contradictory opinions of an overzealous state’s attorney; its frequent reference to the medically groundless, punitive speculations of the victims’ relatives who remain, understandably, unable to grasp or come to terms with the awful enormity of what happened 13 years ago; or the presumed premise itself that there is major cause for alarm here, that people like the patient described in the article are walking time bombs, when the fact is that after years of intensive treatment and monitoring they are, clinically and statistically, among the safest of release risks....
I have heard for as long as I can remember (and even read in a book somewhere) that a major ingredient of Chanel No. 5 perfume is the sweaty excretions of the Abyssinian civet cat. I have even heard that they stretch these cats out on some type of medieval rack and whip them mercilessly to make them sweat more. The Straight Dope please, Cecil. You’re wondering what these two questions have in common?...
“Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli,” an essay by Adam Gopnik in the September 30, 2002, issue of the New Yorker, was one inspiration for Flying Griffin Circus’s new show, which begins preview performances this weekend. Gopnik’s essay is a rather precious account of his three-year-old daughter’s very New York problem–an imaginary friend too busy to play with her–complete with precocious quotes from the moppet: “We hopped into a taxi”; “We grabbed lunch....
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. ACOUSTIC VAUDEVILLE with Aimee Mann & Michael Penn. Tuesday, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W....
Writin’, Rockin’, and Politics Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have to give DeRogatis credit for inviting the same criticism he loves to dish out, and judging from the album he’s a solid drummer, fueling the quartet’s jackhammer grooves with precision and style. But unless I’m missing some elaborately constructed and meticulously maintained joke, Vortis is among the most boring and didactic punk bands I’ve ever heard....
While attending the Rhode Island School of Design, Brooklyn-based “slide-show poet” Andy Friedman once spent three years on the same painting, only to accidentally ruin it with the final coat of varnish. Not the kind of pain usually sung about by the classic bluesmen he emulates, but it’s surely given him some appreciation for the fleeting nature of human achievement. Friedman has built a following, mostly in bars and music clubs rather than galleries, through his idiosyncratic hybrid performances: he uses a slide projector to flash images of his Polaroids and pen-and-ink drawings (not as easy to ruin as oil paintings) while delivering spoken-word riffs derived from classic blues numbers–sometimes to musical accompaniment, sometimes a cappella–and his own discursive ruminations on love and travel....
“When I make a decoy,” says Natalie Boyett, “it’s almost like I’m making a decoy of a decoy. I’m not looking at a photograph or a model of the actual bird, but a model of a decoy.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “That’s why I love them so much. I see these stitched pieces put together, and I see evidence of the human hand–I see the human hand trying really hard to make this beautiful, living, perfect thing, and it always just kind of fails....
