Posts

ELLEN ROSNER 1/25, ABBEY PUB Local singer-songwriter Ellen Rosner has a big voice–and on her first album, The Perfect Malcontent, she sounded like she was trying to bind its feet to fit into her brittle and introspective femme-folk tunes. But if she could really let it rip in front of a great band, she could be a sort of contemporary out-of-the-closet Janis Joplin. She’ll release a new album, Count to 3, in March, and while it’s not quite there yet, it’s much closer: playing in front of what sounds like a bunch of tough Chicago guys trying to get in touch with their sensitive side, Rosner still sounds a little misplaced on the lighter pop songs, but she shines on throaty ballads like “Vacancy....

What’s up with popups? I don’t mean the thing that happens when a batter gets too far under a fastball, I mean those maddening advertising windows that crowd your computer screen when you surf the Web. It can take several minutes to swat down the lot of them, giving that animated bimbo–you know the one–a chance to launch into her nails-on-a-blackboard spiel about did-you-ever-wonder-why-your-computer-runs-faster-etc. How can infuriating potential customers in this manner possibly sell product?...

Rock, Pop, etc. BETTER THAN EZRA, COWBOY MOUTH All-ages show. Fri 3/22, 7:30, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine. 773-275-6800 or 312-559-1212. KEN BURNSTEIN Free in-store performance. Sat 3/16, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park. 708-386-6927. DROVERS at the Emerald Ball. Sat 3/16, 8 PM, grand ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, 17 E. Monroe. 312-726-7500. RON HAWKING Fri 3/15, 8 PM, Sat 3/16, 5 and 8:30 PM, and Sun 3/17, 3 PM, Metropolis Performing Arts Centre, 111 W....

A top-notch program of short films and videos–some comical, some evocative, but all dealing with sexual desire and its consequences. Jieho Lee’s funny and macabre A Nursery Tale (1999) transplants a Nabokov story to Seoul, where a geek given to masturbatory fantasies (Lee) makes a pact with a devil disguised as a glamorous madam. Lee’s playful visual style is a delight, and his comic timing is impeccable. Two videos owe a debt to the webs of memory concocted by Wong Kar-wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle: In Voices Like Rain (1998), by Taiwanese video maker Jeff Lee, the mood shifts with the video’s colors and optical effects as a man and woman cocooned in their apartment trade phone messages that seem to revive painful memories of an affair....

A kind of litmus test for auteurists, this philosophical adventure story set in turn-of-the-century Florida (1958, 93 min.) was Nicholas Ray’s penultimate Hollywood assignment, though he was fired before the end of shooting and barred from the final editing by screenwriter Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd), who produced the film with his brother Stuart. (In his introduction to the published screenplay, Schulberg doesn’t even mention Ray....

The Drawer Boy The meaning of the word changes with its context but always implies the power to command attention and belief. It’s a rare quality that’s no less rare in actors. Morgan Freeman has it: as soon as he appears on-screen we know everything’s going to be all right, or at least addressed by a man whose integrity is a given. John Mahoney has it too. He walks onstage and we’re immediately in the presence of someone real, someone whose humanity, however complex or duplicitous, can’t be doubted....

On his second solo album, the recently released Barbarito Torres (Havana Caliente/Pimienta), the Buena Vista Social Club laud player doesn’t mess with success. As on 1999’s terrific Havana Cafe, he delivers a dynamic mixture of classic Afro-Cuban sounds, slightly tweaked. The atypical addition of Torres’s laud (a variant of the lute) to instrumentation standard among the island’s early son groups (two percussionists, a guitarist, a tres player, a bassist, a trumpeter, and a singer) yields an impressive tangle of three stringed instruments whose rollicking arpeggios, resonant chords, and piquant lead patterns are hard to resist, whether channeled into sanguine boleros or hard-driving sones....

AUGUST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a couple generations of Chicagoans–and a lot of tourists–the name Colleen Moore is synonymous with the dollhouse to end all dollhouses, the fabulous fairy castle that’s been on display at the Museum of Science and Industry since 1949. Moore built her half-million-dollar obsession with help from the pros she met (and the cash she made) during her career as a film star....

On a frigid night in January 2003, tropical radio disappeared from Chicago’s airwaves. Salsa listeners who set their alarm clocks to La X Tropical, at 1200 AM, woke up to a canned simulcast of Viva 93.5-103.1 FM, the city’s mainstream Latin pop station. “There’s no La X because it’s corporate,” he says. “When you’re not raking in five million a year, it’s not worth it for them.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Visions of Michigan Avenue crowds knocking around in your head? These holiday craft and art fairs may provide some respite, and handmade frames, blown glass, and knitted caps can make a refreshing alternative to ties and fruitcake. Events are given in chronological order and are free unless otherwise specified. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Winter Arts and Crafts Expo, Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan, Evanston, 847-475-5300....

Since Taste of Chicago isn’t wrapping up until Sunday, the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus have transplanted tomorrow’s concert to a north-side church. Good thing, too: the sole work on the program, Haydn’s monumental oratorio The Creation, deserves a setting free from festival din–and the audience is sure to appreciate the opportunity to focus on the piece without distraction, since it runs nearly two hours. Its subject matter–the six days of creation in the Book of Genesis–likewise seems better suited to a house of worship than to a band shell....

JAVON JACKSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since arriving on the scene in the late 80s, as a member of the final incarnation of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson has struggled to find an identity. He’s been a neoconservative hard bopper, a breezy Brasileiro, a blustery jazz funkster, and a moderate freedom seeker a la late-60s Joe Henderson. But through it all his attractively dry, malleable tone has never faltered, and his quest has never seemed disingenuous–he follows each new path with the same wholehearted enthusiasm as the last....

Brain Surgeons & Friends brown ‘n’ sugar Please, dear reader, consider it no less loving an appreciation than theirs–not a damned iota less! I just, well, view certain things differently, let’s say, but the problem may simply be that I no longer hold to the sacraments of their particular branch of the R & R Church…there are so many branches, y’know? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I first met her, in 1967 or early ’68, Helen Robbins, as she then was known, was a shy little college girl, sweetheart of the drummer for this band called Soft White Underbelly....

The Chicago area has produced some of the most influential bands in power pop: Cheap Trick in the 70s, the Shoes in the 80s, and in the 90s, Material Issue. It’s too soon to tell if, say, Frisbie or Kevin Tihista will make the same kind of impact in the aughts, but meanwhile the local scene is apparently as active as ever. Of the 150 groups filling the 19 different bills that constitute the first Chicago edition of the International Pop Overthrow festival, a whopping 60 are local....

We’ve been to this place a couple of times. The people here are very friendly, and it reminds me of my first time barhopping in Chicago. Before I moved here I came for my senior year spring break to check it out. I’d never been to the midwest before. I was at this bar in Lincoln Park with my friend Sarah. I don’t even remember the name of the bar. Anyway, we met a whole group of about 15 people who were having a birthday party....

I came here after work one night with my friends Liz, a tall Irish woman, and Anke, a tall German woman. We sat at the bar for a few as Anke went on about these wonderful plastic earrings she’d been given earlier that night as a gift by a friend. The friend meant them as a joke–“Oh, these would be fabulous on you.” But Anke really loved them. She took the joke and made it real: her friend had given her this little love token, and she insisted that the earrings were “gorgeous, just gorgeous....

Ben Joravsky and his coauthor [Nadia Oehlsen] resorted to fakelore in making the case for preservation of Uptown’s Plymouth Hotel (“Heartbreak Hotel,” January 24). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » George Spoor (the S of Essanay) and his partner Max Aronson (the A), also known as Broncho Billy Anderson, would be greatly surprised to know that their studio, founded in 1905, was ever Chaplin’s property....

Robbed Blind That day Halperin called in the league’s auditing firm, Pandolfi, Topolski, Weiss & Company. The auditors, led by former city comptroller Ron Picur, spent three weeks combing through the league’s financial records and finally delivered some shocking news to Halperin and the board’s executive committee: over several years a longtime league employee had allegedly undertaken a systematic embezzlement totaling at least $200,000. According to Picur, the league’s annual audits failed to uncover anything because such examinations aren’t designed to ferret out fraudulent activity....

It feels like a million years ago that Republican U.S. senator Rick Santorum told a reporter he hoped the United States Supreme Court would uphold antigay sodomy laws and went on to compare consensual gay sex to incest, bigamy, adultery, and man-on-dog sex. There was a mini uproar, of course, with gay groups calling for Santorum’s head and antigay groups defending him. For his part, George W. Bush called Santorum “an inclusive man”–and for once Bush was right....

“When Temma was born my whole faith world was turned upside down,” says Sherrie Lowly. A lifelong Christian, like her husband, artist Tim Lowly, she wasn’t planning to have a child when she became pregnant in 1985, though she and Tim were willing to be parents. They became concerned when she didn’t gain any weight in the last month of her pregnancy and worried when her labor turned difficult. They’d wanted a home birth, but after 24 hours the fetus’s heart rate started to drop, and they went to the hospital, where Temma was born on September 27....