The Stories Pictures Tell The viewer sees at once the psychological gulf between Gertz and Newman on the right and Leopold on the left. Gertz is smiling at a story the jovial Newman seems to be telling him. These are two men of the world at ease, savoring a job well done. Leopold, his face half hidden beneath his fedora, stares into space, his isolation testimony to those decades behind bars....
I was startled by the more recent of Thomas Skomski’s two installations at the Chicago Cultural Center–it was weirder, darker, and more disjunctive than anything of his I’d seen before. I then learned that he’d had a devastating stroke two years ago, but also that he doesn’t want viewers to connect his work, which now has to be executed by assistants, too closely with his stroke. Buzzard Luck refers most explicitly to drowning, in a deeply unpleasant description of the process on the installation’s front wall....
The sheer impossibility of encompassing jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus (1922-’79) in a single film limits Don McGlynn’s ambitious 1997 documentary, Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog, from the outset. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see it—it’s playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and Mingus’s second wife, Celia Mingus Zaentz, will lead a discussion after the June 27 screening—but if you don’t already know something about the man’s music this may not be the ideal place to start....
Stretching the northern bounds of Andersonville is M. HENRY, a quaint American cafe from partners Michael H. Moorman–formerly co-owner of the fast-food Loop eatery Heartwise Express–and Jorge Aviles. Just a block south of the Clark-Ashland intersection, the former Latina bridal shop has been dressed up with red linoleum floors, rows of white pendant lamps, antique doors and windows suspended from the ceiling, and a few simple, modern works of art on the brick walls....
Zephyr artistic director Michelle Kranicke set herself a difficult task in her new sextet: inspired by William Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, she decided to make a dance about blueness, investigating her own associations with her favorite color. The project, which she’s worked on for the past seven months, turned out to be more difficult than addressing death (as she did in the 1999 Do Us Part) or blindness (last year’s Frozen Straight On)....
8 Bold Souls don’t record much–a paltry four albums since their founding in 1985–but year in and year out, the octet remains one of Chicago’s best working bands. A prime reason is the composing of director and tenor saxophonist Edward Wilkerson Jr. He’s a master of recombination, grouping the players along various lines to good ends: trumpet, trombone, and tuba to the fore for shades of community brass bands, tuba and bass voiced together for a cavernous bottom end, cello and bass melded as a mini string section, a piping clarinet lead to suggest old New Orleans, reeds and brass blended to hint at a big band’s power or at Gil Evans’s orchestral cool jazz (as on the intro to “Gang of Four,” from the Souls’ most recent release, Last Option)....
This gritty 2000 French drama, set in an Ivory Coast ghetto nicknamed the Bronx, plays like a West African Boyz N the Hood, with two friends who dream of a better life in America getting caught in a vortex of crime and gang warfare. Toussaint (Antony Koulehi Diate), the more adept and adaptable, quickly moves up the ranks of drug dealers and robbers, while Nixon (Loss Sylla Ousseni) fumbles along, often inviting danger....
Producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and their regular screenwriter-adapter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala seem to have a special affinity for Americans in Paris, the subject of three of their five most recent films—Jefferson in Paris (1995), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998), and now Le Divorce. The first of these is one of their worst features, while the second and third are among their best. So their special affinity doesn’t seem to matter as much as the quality of their material and their particular feeling for it....
Everybody’s heard “Sweet Home Chicago” and “My Kind of Town.” But these beloved songs are only a small part of our local musical heritage. Most of us don’t know this classic from way back in 1926: Looking for real prosperity There is no other like it. Except to catch the Evanston Express Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The golden age of the band, of sheet music, was from the turn of the century to the 1920s, 1930s,” said Dennis Buck, curator of the Aurora Historical Society, which has preserved “Aurora, Our Own” as well as “The Aurora Two-Step,” a march written for the Zouaves, a local military drill team....
HRVATSKI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Berklee dropout clearly loves the twitchy intensity of drum ‘n’ bass, but his frenetic electronic collages have little to do with dancing. On Oiseaux 96-98 (Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge) Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski, which is Croatian for “Croatian”) uses breakbeats not so much for rhythm as for commentary. For instance: The breakbeat from “Amen, Brother,” a late-60s funk tune by the Winstons, is one of the most heavily used samples in drum ‘n’ bass–so Hrvatski sticks it into nearly everything, until it loses its identity as anything but an archetypal sound....
Jackie Mittoo & the Soul Brothers The Light of Saba Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sure it can. Two recent reissues on British labels should give hope to everyone ever disappointed by Weather Report. On the evidence of these discs Jamaica in the 1960s and ’70s was a place where fusion–defined for the sake of argument as a simultaneous mastery of multiple genre forms and indifference to genre boundaries–had reached an acme....
Irene Moon, a grad student at the University of Kentucky’s entomology department, relishes the thought of science as an intrusion on and explanation for instinct, compulsion, and life’s most intimate moments. Her “lectographies” attempt to educate the audience on the beauty of the insect world, incorporating film, handouts, slides, pop quizzes, PowerPoint presentations, and dance moves (both geriatric and epileptic) in cut-and-paste sound collages. Sometimes she shows off preserved specimens; during one performance, she brought out a collection of dead moths she’d dressed in homemade clothing....
Does Liz Armstrong only write profiles of bands that claim to engage in acts of violence against women? The two articles I’ve seen by her were about bands that supposedly like to body slam dudes onto unsuspecting chicks or punch Kathleen Hanna in the face for fun. I guess wearing stupid fucking costumes and playing confrontational antimusic just doesn’t seem dangerous by itself anymore; time to up the ante. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Eight of us came here one night. They have a Captain Morgan’s Balls drink special, and I’m like, “What is this, is it good? I have to order two.” So we’re drinking, drinking, drinking. They have this great selection of games, including Jenga. This is the dirtiest Jenga ever, because whoever comes to the bar writes in the stuff that you have to do when you pick a piece. So over the next two hours there’s a demonstration of–well, you name it: Our favorite sex position, which is called the wheelbarrow (I ended up riding my friend Sarah)....
Bad songs covered badly can be amusing–and Romuva Productions’ cabaret-theater piece, which includes such gems as “Physical” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” certainly has that going for it. Len Jenkin’s script is a mishmash of hallucinatory images that range from dull to disturbing as Spin and Marlene Milton, a divorced couple, do their thing in small bars off isolated highways; the brightest part of their tired, lonely existence is their Vegas-style spangled costumery (by Jana Stauffer)....
The Tipping Point Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We realized it was unusual. In my heart of hearts I thought ‘this is not quite right,’” Sorensen says. “But it was an environment where you don’t question. Most of us just went ‘That’s the way it is’ and turned [the tips] in.” Now a lawsuit filed by Sorensen and four other former employees–Paul Larson, Sarah Brown, John Winterman, and Belinda Chang–alleges that Trotter’s regularly shortchanged waitstaff on hourly pay and overtime and illegally kept millions of dollars in tips....
Rock, Pop, etc. C5 New works by members of the Columbia College Chicago Composers’ Collective will be performed under the direction of James MacDonald. The program includes works by Jeff Abell, Joe Cerqua, Joseph Cancellaro, Scott Hall, Sebastian Huydts, Gustavo Leone, Doug Lofstrom, Kim McCarthy, Howard Sandroff, Philip Seward, Richard Woodbury & Gary Yerkins. Fri 12/6, 8 PM, Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan. 312-344-8300. JAMES CHRISTIE, NANCY CONNELLY, GARRETT LANE perform at “Tainted Chicken....
Rock, Pop, Etc. TONY BENNETT Sat 8/30 and Sun 8/31, 8 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay & Lake Cook Rds., Highland Park. 847-266-5100. STEVE COOPER ORCHESTRA performs at Chicago SummerDance, preceded by dance lessons with Louie Stallone at 4 PM. Sun 8/31, 5 PM, Spirit of Music Garden, Grant Park, Michigan between Harrison & Balbo. 312-742-4007. KING FLEMING Free piano concert. Fri 9/5, 11:30 AM, Chicago Water Works Visitor Center, 163 E....
In 1992, Swedish-Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski, a one-time student of Iannis Xenakis, accused his peers of having lost touch with reality: “The so-called art music written today must be taken in a large cultural setting as a revolt against certain kinds of tradition. It doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning and as a consequence in order to understand it a listener has to have an extensive knowledge of Western culture and particularly of the trends in Western art music over the last few decades,” he wrote....
12RODS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After making its debut on V2 with the self-produced Split Personalities (1998), this Minneapolis synth-pop outfit retreated to Hawaii to record Separation Anxieties (2000) with Todd Rundgren, a producer known for his mastery of studio detail. “Todd never really gave us answers,” the guitarist and keyboardist known as Ev says on the band’s Web site. “He simply presented issues to us and said, ‘OK, you solve it....
