WorldChanging, the book: The best environmental blog will soon give birth to a book, A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, complete with an intro by former president-elect Al Gore and sections on everything from biomimicry to women’s rights to green space exploration. The book’s not available ’til November 1, so you’ll have to content yourselves with the blog for now. (Hat tip to Kiki for pointing me to the blog in the first place....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At Wednesday’s talk Katz held forth for two hours on the wonderful world of fermented foods: wine, beer, mead, sourdough, cheese, kefir, kombucha, kraut, pickles, and fermented veggies of all ranks. (In other words, all the good stuff.) I wish I had taken notes so I could accurately recount tales of such creatures as the probiotic culture so strong that, when added to a full bowl of milk, it grows furiously enough to pull the liquid over the lip of the bowl, emptying it onto the counter overnight....
In 1998 a friend gave Tania Bruguera a copy of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, knowing that she was interested in “power issues, how power negotiates space and how power communicates,” Bruguera says. “I read it five times in a row and still didn’t understand a lot of things. At first I saw it in terms of power relationships between the two main characters. Now it seems more emotional, about a dysfunctional relationship....
This weekend the 20th annual Printers Row Book Fair will gather more than 160 exhibitors, including booksellers, publishers, and literary organizations, on Dearborn between Congress and Polk and along Polk between Plymouth Court and Clark. In addition to the new, used, and collectible books offered for sale, the fair features dozens of readings and signings by local and national authors, panel discussions, performances, and children’s activities; all are free. Events will be held at the Arts & Entertainment Stage, Dearborn and Harrison; Barnes & Noble Stage, 600 block of South Dearborn; Columbia College Residence Hall, 731 S....
“I swore I wouldn’t kvetch when you came up here,” Josephine Raciti Forsberg says, settling into an armchair in her Lincoln Park apartment. “But how many more interviews am I going to have? I wanted to clear the air, get the truth out there.” On May 5, Forsberg will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Chicago Improv Festival in recognition of her 35 years as an improv teacher, most of them at Second City....
The subjects of Mary Borgman’s larger-than-life charcoal portraits at Ann Nathan almost leap off the Mylar: her marks are forceful, and small details–like a cocked head–make each subject psychologically distinct. Formerly an interpreter for the deaf, Borgman has long been interested in physical expressions. Beginning at 18, she worked four summers at camps for disabled children. “Each kid had such odd quirks,” she says. “I enjoyed figuring them out to know how to comfort and please them....
After the gag-oriented Analyze This movies, director Harold Ramis gets a chance to show his dramatic range with this character-rich noir, adapted from a novel by Scott Phillips. John Cusack stars as a Wichita mob lawyer who conspires with a dodgy pal (Billy Bob Thornton) to embezzle $2 million from a Kansas City kingpin (Randy Quaid) on Christmas Eve. While they’re waiting to blow town, Cusack attends a holiday party and winds up ferrying home a wildly drunken buddy (Oliver Platt) who’s now married to his ex-wife and lives in his old home....
“We’ve been singing together since 1982,” says Janet Bean of her musical partnership with Catherine Irwin in Freakwater. “And what we do now is no different than what we did then.” For the new album Bean and Irwin, along with longtime bassist Dave Gay, brought in members of Califone to help reshape and color their music, and those additions help make the album arguably the strongest in their already impressive catalog....
TONY CONRAD is one of the few artists whose interviews and writings are as consistently rewarding as his work. None of it is easily digested, though. Last year he told an interviewer that at 65 he’s been thinking about the value of listening to old recordings versus making new ones and that he increasingly sees himself as an “animator”–someone who encourages other artists. He’s played that role teaching video and film at SUNY Buffalo and as a mentor to more than a few experimental musicians, but he’s not fading into the background just yet....
Sarah Krepp still recalls her surprise as a child at seeing how Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte changed as she got nearer to it. Now her own work, which looks smooth and flat from a distance, breaks up into seemingly countless details once you’re close. Her mixed-media pieces at Roy Boyd include photographs, rolled-up bits of paper, pieces of tire treads, and painted or drawn “texts” in a panoply of symbolic systems: braille, Morse code, eye charts, sheet music, engineering diagrams....
Pianist Michiel Braam is one of the most exciting and prolific composers in jazz, but like most of his peers on the Dutch scene he doesn’t hold his sheet music sacred. In fact, he seems to love running his songs through different permutations, both within a specific group and across formats, from solo to big band. He played here last year with his sextet, All Ears, and later this year his large group, Bik Bent Braam, will make its local debut at the Jazz Festival, but he may be best known in Chicago for his superb acoustic trio with bassist Wilbert de Joode and drummer Michael Vatcher....
This ambitious documentary by Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) opens with President Eisenhower’s prophetic 1961 farewell speech, which identified the military-industrial complex as a threat to democratic governance, and follows this premise through the events of 9/11 and the selling of the Iraq war. Jarecki listens respectfully to the right (Richard Perle, William Kristol) and the left (Gore Vidal, Charles Lewis) as they review 60 years of American realpolitik, but the movie’s most affecting observations come from the private individuals he picks up along the way, from an orphaned kid who enlists in the army because he can’t support himself to a Vietnamese refugee who designs bombing systems in Maryland to a retired New York City cop who lost his son on 9/11 and asked the Pentagon to inscribe the young man’s name on a missile headed for Iraq....
On tenor saxophone Boris Hauf has played hair-raising solos with local prog-punks Lozenge and abstract Braxtonian bebop with vocalist Ruth Weiss; in the electroacoustic quartet Efzeg he sometimes switches to laptop, jumping between fine-grained multiphonics on the horn and piercing drones on the computer. But he always maintains a perfect attunement to context–whether he’s blowing his lungs out over a corkscrewing riff or adding cricketlike chirps to a thicket of sine waves, he plays exactly what the music requires....
CHICAGOAN AND FORMER FCC chair Newton Minow famously characterized television as a “vast wasteland,” but there’s plenty of life on the prairie. Shows have been made here since TV’s beginnings, from the first soap opera (These Are My Children, in 1949) to Kukla, Fran and Ollie toUnsolved Mysteries to Prison Break. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is, however, a lot of made-in-Chicago TV filling the national airwaves....
In a recent radio interview, trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas explained his plan to get focused like so: he’s going to stick to two or three projects at a time, instead of juggling the six or eight that have filled his schedule till now. Those range from the intimate and freewheeling Tiny Bell Trio (with its bizarre instrumentation of trumpet, guitar, and drums) to the musicopolitical statement Witness to his reexaminations of oeuvres as disparate as Mary Lou Williams’s swing-era compositions and Wayne Shorter’s distilled hard bop of the 60s....
The ninth European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 17, through Thursday, March 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are films screening through Thursday, March 23; for a full festival schedule visit www.chicagoreader.com. This quirky, ambling 2004 comedy–the feature debut of writer-director Borkur Gunnarsson–examines the shifting relationships among two young Prague couples and the people they encounter on a rocky vacation in the country....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So, I went to see Fast Food Nation. And, wow, it’s kind of a mess–though a well-meaning one, a tangle of half-developed plots and cardboard characters all marshaled not so much to tell a story as bolster the bullet points of Eric Schlosser ‘s original muckraking brilliance. The fast-food industry cares more about profits than people–thus Greg Kinnear’s corporate patsy, who may mean well but is so fundamentally corrupt he watches bad girl-on-girl porn in his hotel room!...
There’s probably nobody who’s done more to popularize eastern European Gypsy music than Goran Bregovic: his sound tracks to Emir Kusturica films like Time of the Gypsies and Underground introduced the region’s classic melodies (and its brass-band tradition) to the West. But in Garth Cartwright’s book, Princes Amongst Men, three prominent Gypsy artists (Boban Markovic, Esma Redzepova, and Saban Bajramovic) have little but scorn for the man, accusing him of taking full credit for songs he cowrote with them....
Some events require advance registration or reservations; please call ahead to confirm. Disturbed II Oracle’s theater space becomes a haunted house again, with live-action and multimedia scares, “intellectual content, and explicit themes.” a 10/12-10/28: Thu-Sun 8-11:30 PM, also Mon-Wed 10/29-10/31 (shows every 30 minutes), Oracle Productions, 3809 N. Broadway, 773-244-2980, $7-$9, reservations recommended, 18+. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » sunday14 La Catrina Installation by Bonnie Lopez celebrating Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival....
Listings of holiday craft fairs, trunk shows, open studios, and special gallery events will run through December. Send information to artlistings@chicagoreader.com. Holiday Bazaar Hundreds of fine crafts from more than 60 artisans, priced from $5 to $1,000. a Opening reception Fri 12/1, 6-9 PM. Through Sat 12/23: Wed-Fri noon-7 PM, Sat-Sun noon-4 PM, Woman Made and Artisan Gallery, 685 N. Milwaukee, 312-738-0400. Friday1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cornelia Arts Building Holiday Show and Sale Fine arts from more than 50 artists....
