Arcade Fire Nothing sets off the contrarian impulse quite like a frantic buzz around a band that’s only just released its first proper record. The Arcade Fire put out Funeral (Merge) in September, and already the Montreal-based group has amassed an impressive collection of press-kit hyperbole: in the Globe and Mail Robert Everett-Green opined, “It takes a band like Arcade Fire to remind you that we are all custodians of our innocence and that we let it die at our peril....
The Shaolin Temple, deep in the Shaoshi Mountains of central China, was erected in 495 AD by order of an emperor to house a Buddhist monk from India. Almost a century later it became the cradle of Zen Buddhism when another visiting monk-scholar, Bodhidharma, brought with him from India a reverence for nature and contemplation. Paradoxically, Zen Buddhists came to consider the self-defense implicit in the traditional martial arts, or kung fu, essential to protect serenity....
George F. Walker’s swashbuckling 1977 parody of 19th-century romanticism is wrapped in a florid tale of murder, revenge, and virtue imperiled. Among the generic dramatis personae are a Byronic antihero (so sensitive he has nightmares when he’s awake), an effete aesthete with a messianic mania, a slinky seductress, an intractable virgin, a ruthless henchman, and a loyal servant who recognizes his “betters” as the psychopaths they are but cannot escape the madness and violence of his society....
It’s commencement day at the Moody Bible Institute, and the front steps outside Culbertson Hall look like a flea market. Furniture, bags of clothing, luggage, and boxes are strewn about in a maze of piles through which students mad-dash between Wells Street and the hall, where an information desk is surrounded by other students asking God knows what. Taped to the wall next to a plaque marking a spot near the spot where Dwight Moody decided to establish the school is the cardboard sign “Convention 2002,” with an arrow....
The Field Chicago again hosts performers from other cities as well as Chicagoans in “Choice Cuts,” an evening of interdisciplinary work. The common thread for these pieces is the act of breaking from stasis into action, from emotional deep freeze to exuberance. In Seattle performer Cody Strauss’s clever Igloo Nine, she’s surrounded by kitchen utensils and stuffed animals, reading the stage directions for the ultimate performance piece–“too many dancers” manage to stampede the orchestra....
Cocktail Time, City Lit Theater Company. Because City Lit has run out of good Jeeves and Bertie stories to adapt, it’s now in its second season of mining the rest, if not the best, of P.G. Wodehouse, specifically the Uncle Fred books, which are less rollicking and farcical but equally packed with dotty Brits and droll narration. Cocktail Time recounts an intricate tale of the affable “fifth earl of good old Ickenham,” a childlike prankster who manages to help two nephews contend with the usual Wodehouse crises: imminent scandal and frustrated romance....
Pianist Eddie Palmieri belongs to that select class of musicians for whom change and development are the holiest of virtues. Over the past four decades he’s repeatedly revamped his sound and approach, each time forging a style whose influence continues to ripple through jazz and especially Afro-Caribbean music. Dizzy Gillespie had used Latin rhythms as a catalyzing detail in the late 40s, but Palmieri integrated jazz more fully into Cuban styles in the mid-60s, stretching three-minute dance tunes into eight- and nine-minute jams....
You say your holiday shopping list includes a Vietnamese silk painting? A handwoven shawl? An armchair for your dog? You’re in luck. Those items, plus thousands more–from bottle-cap jewelry to out-of-print books on Native American art–are for sale at this year’s assortment of local holiday bazaars, craft fairs, and fine art extravaganzas. A selection follows. Events are given in chronological order and are free unless otherwise indicated. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Why do people think that interpreting life in terms of Greek mythology will somehow help them transcend their circumstances? I’m not talking about the characters in Joe Goode’s Mythic, Montana but about the choreographer himself. He frames the two tales of love in this piece, set in a fictional Montana town, with a character who combines Sisyphus and Hercules cleaning the Augean stable–a chap in a plaid shirt and dorky hat with earflaps who’s perpetually cleaning up, to no avail....
“Black history is undervalued across the board,” says Morris “Dino” Robinson, a graphic designer pressed into the history business. Robinson was researching his family’s background in the mid-90s when the publisher of the Evanston Clarion, a monthly newspaper, asked him to write an article about African-American history in Evanston for Black History Month. “I didn’t think I was the right person to do it,” Robinson says. “And I assumed something comprehensive had already been written....
On a Wednesday in January shortly before noon, the parking lot at the Beverly Woods, a restaurant at 11532 S. Western, is filling with cars. Amid the compacts and SUVs, 14 or 15 four-door sedans arrive. Most are roomy and low-slung American models: Buicks, Cadillacs, and Fords, hallmark vehicles of an older generation. Some of the men emerging from these boats are as spry as they were 30 years ago; others grip canes and slowly shuffle to the entrance....
Spring Awakening The play focuses on three teenagers trying to make sense of their newly forming moral and sexual selves even as the bourgeois gatekeepers of knowledge–schoolmasters, clergy, parents–enforce a code of silence on all “adult” matters. Moritz, a below average student desperate to avoid expulsion, can hardly study because of the cacophony of sexual questions in his brain. Utterly ignorant of the mechanics of sex, he’s so shamed by his own impulses that he believes his first wet dream to be “some kind of internal complaint” and fears he’s dying....
The impulse behind A Thousand Points of Lite: MK Victorson on Church and State is to put on a show, to amuse rather than educate. It’s an approach that suits the subject: this agreeably childlike 75-minute dance-theater piece deals with Victorson’s experiences in junior high and high school as the daughter of a Lutheran minister. There’s plenty of 80s nostalgia in the musical choices and the hairstyles, but what really makes the piece work is the specificity of Victorson’s reconstructed experiences, especially those related to her church-oriented upbringing: she tries to pray unobtrusively in the lunchroom at her father’s suggestion and never quite gets to lunch itself; her volleyball team is called Genesis 3:19; a church social is dominated by talk about the food–even the pastor, as the self-important woman at the microphone ruefully observes, can’t wait to get to the Swedish meatballs....
I read with interest the analysis in the Works (November 12) of the reason why the 49th precinct of the 42nd Ward was the most GOP oriented in Chicago. The precinct is bounded by LaSalle, Wells, Chicago, and Oak streets. As stated in the article a subsidized housing complex is within the precinct which contains a large Russian Jewish immigrant population. Burton Natarus was quoted as saying this group was especially sensitive to the status of the state of Israel, therefore causing the lopsided 77....
The 15th annual Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, presented by Chicago Filmmakers, runs Friday through Sunday, September 12 through 14, at Columbia College Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan, and Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark. Tickets are $7; for more information call 773-293-1447. Program two Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Christopher Keller’s 30-minute video Retrograd is an exploitative compilation of disturbing images culled from the film archive of a Berlin hospital–eyeballs pierced by arrows, a brain-damaged boy hopping on one leg, homosexual rats humping–intercut with irrelevant interviews with hospital staff....
“Welcome to what’s happening,” says a man at the door of a Pilsen four-flat. He’s a greeter at the annual Third of July Fire Dance, and as partygoers enter he puts a purple glow tube around their necks (or heads or wrists or thighs) and hands them a tarot card. “You’ll need this for later,” he says mysteriously. “No,” says the greeter. “I’m a friend of the host.” No one’s exactly sure when the Pilsen fire dance started, and since it’s well attended by merry pranksters like the Ever-So-Secret Order of the Lamprey and members of the performance group Love Chaos, the reports differ depending on whom you ask....
Seeing Reds I: A Tower of Babble The 18-to-34-year-old public that doesn’t read newspapers is a coveted demographic for reasons that aren’t obvious. The teenagers at one end of this age group are too young to have much money; many thirtysomethings with decent salaries and careers also have babies and mortgages. These two groups speak different languages; some of the 34-year-olds are the parents of some of the 18-year-olds....
Over the last decade Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian Sherman Alexie has busily made a name for himself as both a writer and an uncompromising advocate for Native American concerns. His dozen or so novels, short-story collections, volumes of poetry, and screenplays have dealt with historic and contemporary oppression of Indians, the quest for identity, the pitfalls of intimate relationships, tension between parents and children, and alcoholism and drug abuse. In his latest collection, Ten Little Indians (Grove Press), his characters’ struggles with these and other issues are compounded by the unsettling conditions of life in post-September 11 America....
Midnite Blues Party (Bullseye) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Artists like this weren’t consciously trying to broaden their demographic or keep an endangered genre alive. They were just responding to what was going on. Occasionally one of these forward-looking blues guys would manage to crack the pop charts, like Slim Harpo with “Baby Scratch My Back” in 1966. Some of the ones that wouldn’t wound up on Midnite Blues Party, a collection (released last year by the Toronto blues label Electro-Fi) that documents a time when R & B really was a combination of rhythm and blues–and the combination kept on changing....
One chronic irritant for Ravinia Festival concertgoers is the rumble of the Metra train that stops at the nearby station at around 8:20 most nights. I’ve seen directors shrug their shoulders or look around in exasperation, and in 1940 a piqued Thomas Beecham remarked that Ravinia was “the only railway station with a resident symphony orchestra.” Almost two years ago, in anticipation of the park’s centennial in 2004, Ravinia honcho Welz Kauffman decided to turn this liability into an asset: each summer the festival would commission a new piece to celebrate the railroad, encouraging composers to incorporate the noise into their work....
