Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s say you are some multinational shoe boss guy in charge of athletic shoes and apparel, and you’re looking to exand into some a new market. Maybe you saw Garden State or your daughter just started spending half her waking hours reading blogs, and so you decide that this new “indie rock” market is what you wanna go after....
In the bunkerlike sanctuary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston hang 14 enormous canvases painted almost totally black. Every group of visitors seems to include one guy who can’t resist saying he could’ve painted them himself–the same sort of philistine, I’m sure, who thinks he could duplicate SUNN 0)))’s music by leaning a few guitars against some big honkin’ amps and occasionally kicking something. But people with eyes and ears know better: if you want to commune with the infinite in world-class nondenominational style, you go to Rothko, and if you want guys in druid robes to pound you into jelly with doom-metal riffs as huge and ponderous as aircraft carriers, you go to Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson....
Miyoko Ito Lure: Richard C. Lange, John Slavik, and Shawn Slavik Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The gentle, almost pastel colors in this show undermine the shapes’ power, as do such details as the oddly curved window. In Euphoria (c 1970) a reddish heartlike blob floats before a brown field, but a few extra protuberances and indentations prevent us from reading it as a realistic heart....
Brien Comerford can be counted on to take the bait. All kinds of bait. Whenever animals, the environment, or vegetarianism come up in a publication, he’s sure to fire off a letter. Over the last dozen years he’s written 15 to 30 missives a week lashing out at what he considers the mistreatment of animals. “I love to write, so I just decided I’m going to respond to whatever I read....
The latest HeadCheese sketch revue is in a variety show style reminiscent of Monty Python. Silent interludes and songs alternate with a hodgepodge of wisecracking scenes about historical and current events, gender differences, and contemporary culture. Not all the material is fresh–Tyler Bohne and Patrick Zielinski’s “British Insult Theatre” was done years ago, and got bigger laughs then–and some scenes (particularly the final one) fall flat. Yet this quick-paced hour-long show, written and performed by an ensemble of seven, is often sharp-witted....
When Jimmy Freund’s cell phone rang on August 19, he didn’t want to answer. Freund, the managing director of Terrapin Theatre, was in a meeting with the director of the company’s next play, and he was pretty sure it was his girlfriend calling. The medical examiner would rule Brad Winters’s death a homicide by stabbing, with strangulation a contributing factor. He was 38, a short, impish man with an alabaster complexion and strawberry blonde hair....
In 2003, Chicago artist Brett Bloom became the first resident of Seattle’s Cottage Park, a cluster of three rehabbed cottages next to a community garden in the city’s Belltown neighborhood. Formerly dominated by dive bars, missions, and low-income housing, Belltown underwent rapid gentrification during the city’s mid-90s economic boom. The garden and the cottages, which now serve as a community center and housing for writers, are part of an inventive land-use initiative that’s as much public art as civic planning....
Proudly claiming to be “endorsed” by Clif Bar (“Ever wondered how Cattle D stays so gore night after night after night?”) and selling a new Spinal Tap homage T-shirt (inspired by “recent drummer shenanigans”–now enthroned is Kevin Talley of Dying Fetus and Chimaira fame), San Diego’s Cattle Decapitation occasionally flash a lighter sense of humor than their relentlessly brutal antihuman/provegetarian lyrics might suggest. And even the viscera and scatology don’t always come across as particularly dark: the cover of 2004’s Humanure took them to such ridiculous heights it was funny in a hysterical sort of way....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But neither the station nor Image Union had ever committed to airing the winning film in the Reporter competition — IU simply agreed to select one of the entries and show it. What’s more, WTTW’s senior vice president of TV content, Dan Soles, told me that if Beyondmedia sent him the full 53-minute film, he’d watch it and consider it....
The new Upstart Theatre Group’s ensemble-created hour-long performance collage explores human competition and cooperation. Directed by Courtney Davis and Ian Hannan, the piece has some clever and evocative moments: in one humorous interlude, someone enamored of her red rubber ball decides, in the spirit of the old poster, to set the thing she loves free. It also has a fair number of hoary observations–territorialism can lead to violent conflict, we mate with those we find attractive, etc....
Twentysomething Swede Gustav Ejstes was born years after the heyday of the music he reworks under the name Dungen, but though his songs constantly reference 60s psychedelia it never sounds like he’s imitating anybody. Dungen’s third album, Ta det lungt, released last year on the Swedish label Subliminal Sounds and out next month on Kemado, is a powerful dose of multitracked pop-folk melodies set within a dense barrage of screaming leads, heavy but swinging rhythms, and folk-prog flourishes played by Ejstes on violin....
Mayor Richard M. Daley has never had less control over the City Council. Heightening the tension is the municipal election in February. This time around, thanks to federal investigators and a court-appointed monitor over city hiring, the mayor won’t have as many jobs to give out or as many patronage workers to do campaign work. This means aldermen no longer need to fear as many repercussions for crossing Daley, but it also leaves those with weak political organizations trying to figure out how to fend off challengers on their own....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January in Vancouver, Washington, 24-year-old Trilane A. Ludwig called his mother from jail and told her to fetch $500 from his wallet, which the police had given her for safekeeping, and come bail him out. The money was all in shoddy counterfeit bills (they were actually the wrong size), but both Ludwig and his mother claimed they hadn’t known it was fake–he said he’d got the cash from a man who’d bought a car from him, but when pressed he couldn’t come up with the buyer’s name....
At his best, Percy Sledge combines a keening, tear-swollen tenor and an unreconstructed backwoods drawl to express an abjection so deep it sounds almost sainted. That vulnerability is famously on display in his breakout 1966 hit, “When a Man Loves a Woman,” but it’s there in lesser-known gems too, like his 1967 take on the sublime Dan Penn-Spooner Oldham ballad “Out of Left Field” and an epic rendition of David Egan and Buddy Flett’s “First You Cry,” from his 1995 comeback album, Blue Night....
No one needs a new Rolling Stones album, of course. But for those who want one–even those who aren’t named Jann Wenner–A Bigger Bang (Virgin) is the first real deal since . . . um, Steel Wheels? Tattoo You? Some Girls? Those late-period touchstones are beside the point, actually: the new album is noisier and grimier than classic Stones, and the requisite arena-sized production wallop never smooths over the tangled funk underneath....
QI think my five-year-old nephew is probably gay. Most of the reasons are superficial (he says that Zac Efron is really cute), but I also have a hunch. If he is gay, it’s cool by me. The problem is my brother also thinks his son might be gay and he is NOT cool with it. He’s “nice” about it, but he has taken to prohibiting most of the things my nephew loves to do: putting on makeup, watching and dancing along to musicals with vampy women (like Chicago), playing dress-up....
I’m a straight male foot fetishist and, like any other American male, I regularly google my fetish. Last night I ran across a Web site promoting foot-fetish parties in New York City: www.foot-worship-party.com. Have you heard of this event? Is it legit? Is it legal? For a guy with a foot fetish, it seems almost too good to be true–which is why I’m worried. On the other hand, it seems like a great time for someone like me....
Smart Guy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first blush this coup for the Smart looks like a step down for Hirschel. At the Indianapolis museum–one of the largest in the country, with a 50,000-object collection, 152 acres of grounds, and a $20 million annual budget–he headed a staff of 260. At the Smart–launched just 30 years ago with a $1 million gift from the family foundation of Esquire magazine founder David Smart–he’ll have a collection of 7,000 objects and a staff of 15....
I find it astonishing that writer Michael Miner would use such slipshod journalism in his column disparaging another publication’s journalistic methodology [Hot Type, October 20]. Miner did make one lackluster effort to contact me, but then did not respond to my returned phone call. He made no effort whatsoever to contact the person most qualified to correct several inaccuracies: CEO Christopher Miglino. Willie Gault is neither an owner of Conscious Choice nor Charles Shaw’s boss....
This Iowa native passed through town on Valentine’s Day last year, and his country death songs cut through its pink patina of hearts ‘n’ flowers like turpentine. He’s too late to rescue us from the goopiest day of the year this time around, but he’s got a new album in tow, so I forgive him: Ashes to Dust (Southern), his second disc, comes out February 21. He sings in a hoarse, cracked drawl, strums an acoustic guitar or picks a banjo, and sometimes provides his own percussion by stamping his foot; the occasional overdub of slide guitar or tambourine feels superfluous, like a fresh coat of paint on a gallows....
