Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism Charles Fishman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although it’s got all the hallmarks of agitprop–tabloid urgency, arguments that don’t always hold up under scrutiny–The High Cost of Low Price effectively uses the stories of people like Esry to make its point: Wal-Mart is bad for the country in ways that can’t simply be explained away by free-market economics....
Wolfbait & B-girls Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Chicago, way more than New York or LA, is an eclectic city,” says Wolfbait & B-girls co-owner Shirley Novak. “It’s more about standing out than fitting in.” She and her business partner, Jenny Stadler, take such pride in the city’s specialness that they’ve hung a Chicago flag in their Logan Square space and printed it on all their store tags....
Rock Star: INXS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The premise is this: 15 singers are brought to a Hollywood mansion where they socialize, participate in clinics, and rehearse. Every week, each performs a cover in a rock club in front of a live audience; former Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, their “rock mentor”; and a panel made up of the surviving members of INXS....
Skillet Productions’ tragicomic exploration of a dissolving showbiz duo exceeds Atom Egoyan’s 2005 film on the same subject, Where the Truth Lies. Writer-performers Dave Lykins and James Yeater are superb as a 60s-era comedy team between sets at a Catskills club, abusing and placating each other by turn. The dialogue is natural, the two have a war-buddies rapport, and director Don Hall keeps the tension high. But a brilliant prop upstages everything else in the production: an empty frame, suspended from the ceiling downstage, serves as a vanity mirror....
Now in its 39th year, this is billed as the longest-running bluegrass festival in the world, and there’s little doubt that it’s also the best for those enthralled by the style’s fundamental pleasures: soulful high-lonesome singing, hot-shit solos, and a classic repertoire. The festival’s unofficial star has long been Jimmy Martin, leader of the Sunny Mountain Boys, who got his start with bluegrass pioneer Monroe. Scheduled to headline this year, he died May 14 at the age of 77, a year after being diagnosed with bladder cancer....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s always been something a little hypothetical about this project, which was announced in July 2005 and which a lot of local developers doubt will ever come off. A new developer, Garrett Kelleher of Dublin, asked Calatrava for a redo that dropped the broadcast antenna, dropped the hotel component, and nearly tripled the number of condos. Kamin thinks Calatrava, “a superb architect by nearly everybody’s measure,” can come up with something better and will — if Kelleher and the city push him....
Friday 7/30 – Thursday 8/5 On Saturday the annual Bughouse Square Debates run from 1 to 5 PM with more soapbox rants, music, and poetry. Admission is free; call 312-255-3510. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’d rather read your rants than hear them, hop across the street for the Newberry’s 20th annual book fair, where more than 100,000 books, plus records, CDs, and videocassettes, are priced to move....
APRIL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Guild Complex’s tenth annual women writers conference, Click to Enter: Women and New Media, offers more than the usual mix of writing workshops and readings. Tonight at 7:30 poet Krista Franklin and cellist Alison Chesley will present a piece on Jimi Hendrix; they’ll be followed by performance artist Alexis O’Hara, who’ll use a loop pedal to incorporate recorded phrases and sound samples into her poetry....
A photo in the liner notes of the first album by Fog, aka Andrew Broder, pictured a thrift-store guitar leaning against a cheap amp and a jumble of ancient audio junk on a cinder-block-and-plywood shelving system. With such a casual attitude toward his rig, you had to wonder how Broder ever got signed to a high-profile electronica label like Ninja Tune, but they rereleased his debut in 2002 and have since put out two more of his experiments in romantic lo-fi chaos....
Avoiding the usual summer-concert fare, the Grant Park Music Festival presents a slate of mostly American contemporary music, beginning with Barbara Kolb’s 1993 All in Good Time. The oldest work on the program is Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto no. 1, from 1916: its lushness evokes Debussy, its chattering echoes Stravinsky. This isn’t an ego-gratifying piece for the soloist, who has to work for every scrap of glory, battling the orchestra almost the entire way before slipping out at the end on a soft high note....
As a rule, say Robert and Sonia Vogl of the Illinois Renewable Energy Association, people who buy fuel-efficient cars use them more and drive further than ever before. But, they point out, those days may soon be over. “If current energy, climate, and economic trends continue,” they wrote recently in the Rock River Times, “travel will move far down the list of what most people can afford. From necessity, our lives will become locally focused....
A-SET Hang Together for All Time (Stars/No Stars) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Big Buildings’ full-length debut, after last year’s ragged-but-right This Is the Bricks EP, is a sprawling 18-song set that frequently sounds like the record Uncle Tupelo never made–or maybe the album Wilco might’ve cut between A.M. and Being There. The band also takes stabs at modern southern rock a la the Drive-By Truckers (“Block by Block”), the dystopian country of Crazy Horse (“Words Can Paint a Picture”), and the power trash of the Replacements (“Uh Oh”)....
What was adapter-director Christine Mary Dunford thinking? Jan Potocki’s early-19th-century picaresque novel, which contains some 35 interlocking stories, is way too cumbersome to make a great play even when chopped down. True, it has some of the oriental themes of Lookingglass classics like Arabian Nights. But instead of taking flight into the supernatural, this adaptation remains mired in the prosaic: servants, cups of wine, gibbeted corpses, neglectful parents. There’s so much mirroring and repetition built into the source that even the lesbian-sister harem girls get old....
Mulgrew Miller is the quintessential mainstream jazz pianist, a musician of peerless technique and focus with a well-suppressed ego. He’s no innovator but rather a deft assimilator who’s forged a beguiling composite style over decades of hard-bop piano playing. A sideman for greats including Woody Shaw, Art Blakey, Betty Carter, and Tony Williams, Miller has appeared on more than 400 albums, a walloping testament to his flexibility and good taste. As demonstrated on last year’s Live at Yoshi’s Volume One (Maxjazz), his own groups thrive within jazz’s most fundamental framework–usually you get a solo intro, a theme statement, a round of solos, then a restatement to wind down–but they deliver each element with subtle twists....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An unarmed 37-year-old optometrist suspected of taking illegal sports bets was accidentally shot and killed in Fairfax, Virginia, in January when a SWAT unit descended on his house to execute a search warrant with guns drawn. Also in January prosecutors in Palmer Lake, Colorado (population 2,200), dropped charges against the last of 22 people who’d been arrested the previous April when a 52-officer SWAT team burst into a local restaurant to break up a poker game....
At 8:30 AM on a Saturday in April, the heartier members of the Peoria Motorcycle Club have been hard at work since sunup. The club’s biggest race is four months away, meaning the mostly over-50 bike fiends here have four months’ worth of fences to repair, drainage ditches to dig, and bumpy terrain to contour. Chris Tucker, a towering, tattooed man who was a wall of muscle until he developed Parkinson’s disease three years ago at the age of 66, is sweeping up dead ladybugs in the club’s VIP lodge, a wood-and-brick structure built into a hillside....
Beware. The Illinois men’s basketball team is spreading the latest strain of a lethal sports virus. Full of promise, but prone to losing it all under pressure, the Fighting Illini are the Cubs of college basketball, the allure of their self-destructiveness something Chicago fans uniquely succumb to. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So instead of checking up on the already infected at the United Center, where the Big Ten tournament was being played last weekend, I decided to head into the neighborhoods and study how deeply the virus had penetrated there, the better to treat it when the all-but-inevitable calamity strikes....
The 18th Polish Film Festival in America continues Friday, November 10, through Sunday, November 19, with screenings of contemporary features and TV documentaries. Veteran director Filip Bajon (Spring to Come) will appear at two weekend screenings of his new crime drama The Foundation (110 min.), about a con man planning a job while he’s being held as a suspect in another crime (Sat 11/11, 7 PM, Copernicus Center; Sun 11/12, 7 PM, Portage)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight’s show with the New Pornographers (including Neko Case) and Emma Pollock at Metro has to rate as the finest pop bill of the season—I hope you have tickets already, because the show is sold out. But even if don’t, both acts have terrific new albums that should be much easier to come by. Challengers (Matador), the latest from the New Pornographers, does an excellent job at balancing the melodic froth of the band’s early work with the more elaborate arrangements and less direct tunefulness that’s marked their last couple albums....
Fuck luck! This year’s White Sox are out to be just damn good. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » General manager Ken Williams had every right to be proud of the championship team he put together, yet in his off-season moves even he seemed to acknowledge that luck played a significant role. Instead of standing pat with fan favorites–much as the Boston Red Sox did the previous year, basking in the afterglow of their curse-killing title–he traded the popular Aaron Rowand to the Philadelphia Phillies for Jim Thome, an upgrade on thumper Frank Thomas because he’s slightly younger and slightly less injury-prone and especially because as a left-handed hitter he balances Paul Konerko and Jermaine Dye....
