Local saxist Brad Wheeler plays with an infectious passion, but it’s rooted as much in musical intellect as it is in his broad, swaggering tone on both tenor and soprano. Wheeler’s name might ring a bell: he grew up in the Chicago suburbs and hit the local scene hard and fast in the 80s, but after he moved to Paris in 1990 his work all but vanished from these shores (though he did appear on a couple of Kurt Elling’s Blue Note albums)....
Set in 1950 Brooklyn, Lynn Nottage’s vibrant comedy sets a coming-of-age story against a web of racial, sexual, and political conflicts. It tells of two African-American teenagers whose recently widowed father is torn between born-again Christian morals and attraction to his sister-in-law, a hard-drinking Harlemite who preaches communism and feminism as the salvation of blacks. The tension escalates when he marries a white German haunted by memories of World War II....
The first word in the title of Pere Portabella’s ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both “worm’s tail” and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. The film is a silent black-and-white documentary about the shooting of Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula, with Christopher Lee, that becomes much more: the lush, high-contrast cinematography evokes deteriorating prints of Nosferatu and Vampyr, and the extraordinary sound track by composer Carles Santos intersperses the sounds of jet planes, drills, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic music, all of which ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world....
Rennie Harris Puremovement last appeared in DanceAfrica Chicago seven years ago. True, the Philadelphia-based company came through town in 2001 with the ingenious, explosive, Bessie-winning Rome & Jewels, a hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But that was presented in the rarefied confines of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Now the group, which has performed throughout this country and Europe, returns to the DanceAfrica stage as part of a program that celebrates some of the best of the festival’s 15-year history....
JANUARY The Field Museum’s ongoing Year of Biodiversity and Conservation program is currently featuring exhibits on the New World tropics, which run from Mexico down to the southern tip of Argentina and are home to nearly a quarter of all the plant and animal species on earth–with dozens of new ones being discovered every year. Today’s kickoff events for Biodiversity in the Neotropics include a roundtable discussion at 2 with museum scientists Bruce Patterson (curator of mammals), Barry Chernoff (curator of fish), and conservation ecologists Doug Stotz and Robin Foster....
The Cubs began the season looking farther than ever from their 2003 high-water mark: five outs from the World Series. Mark Prior and Kerry Wood, the two “horses” who carried them to those heights, were once again on the disabled list with arm woes, which is where they’ve spent much of their time since manager Dusty Baker rode them so hard three years ago. The team had finally acquired a leadoff man in center fielder Juan Pierre–at the cost of some highly regarded pitching prospects sent to the Florida Marlins–but failed during yet another off-season to entice a high-priced free agent to replace Sammy Sosa....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Chicago skyline in chocolate chip cookies is the centerpiece of the AIDS Foundation’s annual World of Chocolate fund-raiser this Thursday from 5:30-9 PM at the Hilton Chicago. Chocolate also shows up here in cheesecake, martinis, and even seafood dishes: China Grill is offering a chocolate Thai shrimp cake with cactus-mango salsa, and the Sheraton will be serving chocolate-crusted tuna with a white chocolate reduction....
This fall the entire first floor of the Merchandise Mart, previously home to GNC and Casual Corner, became LuxeHome, the World’s Largest Collection of Luxury Boutiques for Home Building and Renovation. Talk about a makeover–the Mart’s art deco corridors feel almost plain compared to the sleek, shiny kitchens that make up LuxeHome. They’re kitchens as stage sets, as glamorous and as unreal as the nightclubs in old Fred Astaire movies....
“Sympathy for the Devil,” the new rock ‘n’ roll exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is getting a distinctly unsympathetic response from certain quarters. Subtitled “Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,” the show’s intended to examine the “dynamic relationship” between rockers and artists, and it includes art from all over the world. But it’s organized in geographic chunks, so it’s instantly clear that while there’s lots of art from Los Angeles, lots from New York, and a good deal from the United Kingdom, there’s very little from Chicago....
Last week Empty Bottle owner Bruce Finkelman had four employees studying homemade flash cards labeled with various denominations of Norwegian currency. They’ll need to be able to count kroner: when they arrive in Oslo with a crew of local musicians later this week, they’ll be staffing a club called Bla for a night in a most unusual form of cultural exchange. “It’s all about trying to bring a little piece of the Empty Bottle to Oslo,” Finkelman says....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Pollan makes much of the energy costs incurred by the long food-supply chains of American grocery stores. It may look like we are eating Chilean grapes, he argues, but in fact, once we consider transportation costs, we are guzzling petroleum. This isn’t the last word, of course. Economists are prone to assume that the product being shipped is like a bunch of unbreakable billiard balls....
On a corner of Ohio Street in Ukrainian Village, there’s a classic Chicago building, three stories of red brick with a stiff white turret jutting skyward. You see versions of it on countless streets in the city, but nowhere does it look quite as much like a building with a boner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ornamentation is rare anywhere in the house. The kitchen has simple oak cabinets, with stainless steel appliances and steel countertops, chosen by Zola to keep the variety of surfaces to a minimum; only in the library are there any signs of clutter....
Formed in Poland in 1986 and often credited as one of the first eastern European bands to get heard beyond the iron curtain, Vader has released an album every single year since it signed to Earache in 1992. That’s a particularly impressive feat given their sound: punishingly dense metal with an architectural sensibility isn’t something you just crank out. According to their Web site, a new full-length won’t be ready until late 2006, but I can’t blame them for taking a break from the studio after making last year’s The Beast (Metal Blade)....
‘S Perilous Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t confuse WFMT Radio Network with Network Chicago, the misguided recent attempt to brand and expand the local media conglomerate made up of WTTW Channel 11, WFMT, a Web site, and a short-lived weekly publication, CityTalk. The radio network is the syndication and production arm of WFMT 98.7 FM, Chicago’s esteemed classical music station, an odd duck that has the advantage of being both commercial and nonprofit, running ads right along with its pledge drives....
Just before 6 AM on March 17 Pong Khumdee awoke to persistent knocking at the front door of her Pilsen loft. When she opened the door she saw nine FBI agents, “white guys in jeans and bulletproof vests,” who handed her a search warrant and fanned out through the apartment. They were looking for evidence that her boyfriend, Jeremy Hammond, a 20-year-old self-described “hacktivist,” had hacked into a conservative Web site called ProtestWarrior and stolen credit-card numbers, intending to use them to charge donations to liberal and radical groups such as the ACLU and the Communist Party USA....
The wistful, skillfully orchestrated pop on Let’s Get Out of This Country (Merge), the new disc from Scotland’s CAMERA OBSCURA, would sound perfect through the green-glowing dashboard radio of a 1962 Impala–baroque but not overwrought, twee but not cutesy, it confidently appropriates vintage American sounds from Motown to Bacharach. The word “country” in the title works on a couple different levels: it refers to American country music, with its recurring theme of escape from dead-end small-town life, and the album’s lyrics connect that theme to the rural ennui and stifling national culture of the band’s own country....
Anyone who still thinks of the Deadly Snakes as a garage band either isn’t listening or has way more tools in his garage than most people. Porcella (In the Red), the latest from this ten-year-old sextet, is a masterpiece of sprawling, indulgent, and ambitious songwriting that puts various flavors of underground Americana through a meat grinder; somehow they come out sounding beautiful on the other end. It’s comparable to the sort of thing the Bad Seeds can do at their best....
Presidents’ wives are whining, inconsequential ninnies with few thoughts of their own in Michael John LaChiusa’s chamber opera, now receiving a stultifying staging by Shifra Wench. In these fanciful vignettes, Mamie Eisenhower (the humorous Elizabeth Haley) travels to Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1957 school-integration crisis, then time-travels to Algiers to catch Ike in the middle of an affair; the secretaries of Jack and Jackie Kennedy fuss over their jobs as they fly to a rendezvous with fate in Dallas; and, in the strongest scene, Eleanor Roosevelt flirts with Amelia Earhart while Roosevelt’s lover, Lorena “Hick” Hickok (a gloriously strong Jenny Fitts Reynolds), watches in frustration....
When the mayor introduced a skunk of a revision to the public art ordinance this spring and the City Council took a deep breath and adopted it, there was the usual five minutes of outrage. The revised ordinance pushed the public out of the public art program with all the subtlety of bulldozers cruising Meigs Field, usurping every bit of citizen decision-making power and, even more alarming, dispensing with the public’s right to observe the process....
With his pleasant light baritone, cabaret artist Justin Hayford is an appealing but unexceptional crooner; his piano playing is sophisticated but not virtuosic. What distinguishes Hayford is his affinity for quirky and neglected material and the simple honesty with which he performs it. His show “Look Who’s Been Dreaming,” timed to promote a new CD of the same name, features 18 obscure but delightful numbers by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen, and other masters from the golden age of the Hollywood musical....
