One of the greatest songwriters the south ever produced, Dan Penn has racked up hits for the likes of James Carr (“The Dark End of the Street”), James & Bobby Purify (“I’m Your Puppet”), and Aretha Franklin (“Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”), among many others. His knack for elegant melodies and poetic, concise lyrics helped make him a key figure in the Memphis country-soul scene during the 60s and early 70s, but he’s only intermittently made albums on his own....
Off in a lonely corner at River North’s Brehon Pub two Saturdays ago a guy in baggy jeans and a T-shirt twiddled away at a Golden Tee arcade game. “See that guy over there?” Michael Burke asked me. “He’s our target audience.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They recommend, before it’s too late, expensive trips to the Virgin Islands, Prague, Puerto Rico, Quebec, New York, Georgia, Munich, Key West, Cannes, Barcelona, Thailand, Los Angeles, Belize, the Cayman Islands, and Rhode Island for resorts and sex festivals and sports events....
On an inauspicious stretch of North Clark, tucked between G’s Dawg ‘n Burger and Celtic Crossings, chefs Arun Sampanthavivat (Arun’s) and Roland Liccioni (Les Nomades) are embarking on Chicago’s most anticipated culinary collaboration. The project, called Le Lan, is at once a marriage of equals–two four-star chefs who both happen to be from Southeast Asia–and a balancing act. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Liccioni was born in Ho Chi Min City to a French father and a Vietnamese mother in 1954; his family moved to southwestern France when he was two....
Though he has two gold records to his name, Raekwon has faded into the background a bit over the past ten years, sitting at the deep end of the Wu-Tang bench and playing backup to Ghostface Killah (appearing on roughly half of Fishscale). But his 1995 solo debut, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, is a bona fide classic, a trafficking epic that paved the way for the current trap-rap phase. Raekwon’s only mustered a couple of uneven LPs since, but early next year he’s supposed to drop Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II (Aftermath)–and the early word is that not only will it put him back on the map, it may go down as one of the best Wu solo albums, period....
I still have vivid memories of Steve Dawson onstage one night at the Lounge Ax with his first band, Stump the Host. Killing time while some guitar strings got changed, he sang an impromptu version of “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman”–lost in the tune, his eyes closed, he made the gender flip irrelevant. Dawson understood that soul singing isn’t about bombast and flash but careful shading and deep intuition, and he understands that even better now–he’s always sounded a bit like Van Morrison, but he’s learned to avoid Van’s marble-mouthed excesses....
Local vocalist Sue Conway is a well-respected gospel singer both here and abroad–her Victory Singers performed at La Scala in Milan in 1999–but she’s also carved a niche for herself as a versatile pop-jazz stylist. On her sole full-length, an eponymous disc she put out herself in 2004, she wraps her smoky alto around standards like “Nature Boy” and “The Look of Love” as well as more contemporary tunes like Harry Connick Jr....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ralph Luker of History News Network’s Cliopatria group blog quotes this and links to the original translation: “Since 1948, the number of Muslims killed by the Americans and Israelis combined is still less than the number killed by the French. And the number of Muslims killed by the French, Israelis, and Americans combined is still less than the number killed by the Soviets/Russians....
The Pen Is Mightier Than the Mouse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Calabash stayed away from Saturday morning cartoons–“a tough market, where they’re always looking for ways to cut corners,” Kendall says. Most of the work on those shows is done in places like Korea, China, and the Philippines. But in 1990, Fleischer gave it a whirl. He went to work as a technical director for StarToons, a new outfit in south-suburban Homewood....
Chicago International Film Festival ADVANCE SALES Cinema/Chicago, 30 E. Adams, suite 800; Borders, 2817 N. Clark and 830 N. Michigan. By fax: 312-683-0122. By phone: 312-332-3456; Ticketmaster, 312-902-1500. This documentary by Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price (American Movie) follows 90 kids at a Wisconsin nature camp; with music by the Flaming Lips. 85 min. aRiver East, 4 PM The Magicians Six short works from the U.S., Brazil, Chile, Iceland, and Spain....
It’s 1910, and scandal erupts when a German housewife’s underpants drop during a royal parade, enraging her straight-arrow husband and intoxicating two gentlemen, who rent a spare bedroom in the couple’s apartment to be nearer to the unwitting temptress. After a successful Chicago run last fall, Noble Fool Theater Company has exported this production of Steve Martin’s adaptation of Carl Sternheim’s 1911 expressionist comedy to the suburbs. Two-thirds of the cast remain, and their familiarity with the material pays off grandly for the show: over time the actors have developed the character details, physical business, timing, and shtick on which the comedy depends (special kudos to Meighan Gerachis as the lovesick, voyeuristic spinster living upstairs)....
His name is bolted onto the short list of greatest living American songwriters, he has a voice so recognizable he’s successfully sued companies for using soundalikes in commercials, and he’s enjoyed an acting career that would be respectable even if he’d never had his day job. But Tom Waits’s neatest trick has been constructing a persona that’s as inexplicably stubborn, poetically compulsive, and cussedly elusive as any character he’s created–“What’s He Building?...
Rock, Pop, Etc. ANONYMOUS 4 Wed 1/7, 8 PM, McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, Park & Fawell, Glen Ellyn. 630-942-4000. BETH GILLIS Free in-store performance. Fri 1/2, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1 N. La Grange Rd., La Grange. 708-579-9660. TOM MICHAEL, BECKIE MENZIE, CORY JAMISON, DARYL NITZ, AUDREY MORRIS perform “Peel Me a Grape: A Celebration of Supper and Song.” Thu 1/8 and Fri 1/9, 7 PM, Maxim’s, 24 E....
The Well-Appointed Room The first piece, “Nostalgia,” reminds me of a classic George Booth cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in 1970. A writer sits at his Royal manual; his wife stands by, holding a sandwich on a plate, and says, “I’ve got an idea for a story: Gus and Ethel live on Long Island, on the North Shore. He works sixteen hours a day writing fiction. Ethel never goes out, never does anything except fix Gus sandwiches, and in the end she becomes a nympho-lesbo-killer-whore....
However sparkling a performer, Noah Rawitz hasn’t developed the comic subtlety or dialect skills to play Neil Simon’s pubescent alter ego in the first installment of his autobiographical trilogy. But because all Rawitz’s scenery chewing stifles the comedy, the family’s struggle to hold together during the Great Depression and the dawn of World War II becomes even more poignant. Simon is a gifted illustrator of a bygone ethic in which members of an extended family living under the same roof support and rely on one another....
Chicago has loads of galleries, and museums (see listings in Section 2), and fall is a great time to explore them because of all the openings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Other places on the second floor include Bodybuilder & Sportsman (312-492-7261), Chicago’s blue-chip independent space. Started by Tony Wight nearly a decade ago, Bodybuilder showcases what I call Chicago’s “carny” style–art that’s often scuffed, gloopy, and crowded with detail....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The one bookstore we do have, Women & Children First [“Breaking the Chains,” June 4], is a decent place to turn if you want to stock up on Andrea Dworkin or pick up the latest issue of Bust, but pretty much useless if your tastes range beyond the limits of the store owners’ admittedly specialized sensibilities....
Twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher Martin Kimbell blew into town from upstate New York in 1836. Andrew Jackson was president, the Potawatomi had been fought out and bought out of northern Illinois, and footloose young Yankees were turning Chicago into a go-getter city. Kimbell supposedly rejected land at Dearborn and Lake as “a damned mudhole”—the story’s so good I fear for its truth—and instead staked his claim to 160 acres five miles northwest. There he raised a crop of hay, the gasoline of the 1836 transportation system, and that was the start of what we now call Logan Square....
Power Surge On Sunday Magnolia Electric Co. plays Schubas, and Molina will return to the club for a solo set every Monday in February. “It’ll give me time to work out some of the newer songs that I haven’t really had a chance to run by the band yet,” he says, “and a lot of the older material that isn’t really conducive to the group format.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Jeremy Hotz lives in Los Angeles and frequently works in Las Vegas, but there’s nothing slick about his act. In fact his sometimes topical, rarely racy humor is often self-deprecating: he derides the political weakness of his native Canada and mocks his looks (he says is nose “is like an elbow stuck to my face”). What’s most hilarious about his routine, though, is an odd, endlessly entertaining shtick: during jokes he moves his cupped right hand to his face and at punch lines quickly raises his voice, like an incredulous friend telling a story so crazy he can’t finish it without shrieking....
I Love You More Than You Know Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ames is disgusted by lots of things–the wart on his cock, the itch in his ass, a giant zit that oozes in the night, his cruddy toothbrush, his irritable bowel syndrome, his nose picking. I Love You More Than You Know chronicles those and other bodily, emotional, and material failings in unaffected comic prose....
