SAY THAT JERK falls off his bar stool after you barely even punch him and wants to make a federal case out of it. Or you forget to check out at Dominick’s, and the security guard thinks you meant to steal that six-pack. Or you’re careless enough to smoke your joint in public and a squad car happens by. The long arm of the Chicago Police Department is about to grab your collar....
“Health is an illusion,” crows Dr. Knock, who believes that everyone is a patient who just doesn’t know it yet. “We are all ill.” This quack storms into a French hamlet and takes its healthy (and surprisingly wealthy) residents firmly in hand, cowing them through his bluster and confidence until he’s created a tidy cult of hypochondria. Though the idea that the medical establishment wants us to be sick is an interesting one, Richard Hesler’s clumsy adaptation and direction of Jules Romains’ 1923 French farce lacks bite, style, and impact....
There’s nothing unusual about journalists winning awards for work done at places they’ve since left. But Scott Nychay is a special case. The idea that the Herald would take away his job as editorial cartoonist, say nothing about it to readers, and continue to use him to promote itself stuck in Nychay’s craw. Earlier this year a cousin had told him about an ad the Herald was running early mornings on Channel Two that touted his work, though he’d been fired months before....
My Dad Is Dead Edwards’s 1986 debut, My Dad Is Dead . . . and He’s Not Gonna Take It Anymore, established a template for his early records, combining the chilly, hypnotic rhythms of Joy Division and the churning riffs of Killing Joke with the chiming arpeggios of the Smiths. His guitar sounded desperate, haunted, even guilty, and his lyrics, sung to simple, plaintive melodies in an almost conversational voice, were punishingly gloomy....
O’Neill’s Talking, but Nobody’s Listening “Thank you, Paul O’Neill,” wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Philadelphia Inquirer asserted, “Sadly, too much rings true in O’Neill’s shocking account of cabinet meetings that were ‘like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.’” The San Francisco Chronicle cited The Price of Loyalty for seconding “the Carnegie report’s call for an independent commission to investigate the administration’s alleged misuse of intelligence evidence.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
In 1980 Pat Martino underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm; although the operation saved his life, it robbed him of his memories and motor skills. But he managed to relearn his instrument through painstaking study of his own recordings from the 70s, and he may be a better musician for it. His last two releases for Blue Note, 2001’s Live at Yoshi’s and last year’s Think Tank (with an all-star quintet featuring saxist Joe Lovano and pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba), each got a pair of Grammy nominations and set off a buzz among not just guitarists but musicians in general....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wrigley Field fans got their first glimpse of top draft pick Josh Vitters in a Cub uniform on Friday — but only the earliest arrivals before the game with the Cardinals got to see him, and they probably didn’t even realize what they were looking at. Vitters, the 17-year-old third baseman chosen third overall by the Cubs in the June draft out of Cypress, California, was still in town after signing his contract earlier this week and took batting practice with the scrubeenies in the Cubs’ last group Friday morning just as the gates were opening....
Public Art Goes Public Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In order to effectuate these changes I had to put [the department] at risk,” Hodes says. “And the at-risk piece of that lawsuit was the nexus with Gallery 37.” He discovered it thanks to a suit he settled with the city three years ago. In that settlement Cultural Affairs agreed to publish an annual financial report for the public art program, which is funded–to the tune of millions–by a 1....
A powerful Christian parable, painful but illuminating, about crime and redemption, adapted by John Burnham Schwartz from his own novel with the help of director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda). A Connecticut lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) kills the son of a local professor (Joaquin Phoenix) in a hit-and-run accident and struggles to work up the courage to turn himself in, while the grief-stricken father, frustrated by the police’s inability to find the culprit and bent on revenge, hires the lawyer to pursue the possibility of a civil suit....
It’s a pity I didn’t really sink into Arrived in Gold (Load), the fourth album by this New York trio, until recently. If I’d been more aware of it while I was compiling my top-ten list of 2004 albums, it would’ve had a hell of a shot. Sightings play chaotic, ever-climaxing soundscape eruptions and explorations with primal simplicity but mesmerizing richness. By rights they shouldn’t be able to do this with just guitar, bass, and drums, but there it is: it’s like being able to hear every groaning pipe and every clang of gritty machinery in the bowels of the city and the rush of the oceans slowly eating away the shores....
Although based in Urbana-Champaign, the Fighting Illini men’s basketball team fits perfectly into the Chicago sports continuum. Ever since Lou Henson revitalized the program 25 years ago, it has been known for producing talented teams and players who never quite live up to their promise. They’re soft; they’re fragile; they’re brittle; they are, in Kerry Wood’s word of choice, chokers. Henson was known for being a defense-oriented coach, almost anally compulsive on the offensive end, thus putting a bad case of the shakes into coulda-been stars like Bruce Douglas....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How’d she score the big one? This Drudge bait: “At another stop, in Atlantic, Michelle said she travels with her husband in part ‘to model what it means to have family values,’ adding ‘if you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.’ She didn’t elaborate, but it could be interpreted as a swipe at the Clintons....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at the Hideout the Engines play two sets to announce the release of the their recent eponymous debut for Okka Disk. The quartet features some names familiar to those who keep abreast of the local free jazz scene—trombonist Jeb Bishop, reedist Dave Rempis, bassist Nate McBride, and drummer Tim Daisy. Just about all the press I’ve read on the band elucidates the various connections the musicians all have to Ken Vandermark, and the intense energy of the quartet certainly recalls the knockdown blowouts of the V5, which all but McBride have played in....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Like almost every boy in my class [during World War II], I did such things as collected and rolled tin foil into supposedly usable balls and when in the country, had a small “victory garden” where I raised a few radishes. My mother rolled bandages down at the Red Cross. My uncles were either in war-related businesses (the silk business which was involved in parachute making) or volunteering their time at the Office of Price Administration....
In his introduction to the new anthology Chicago Noir, editor Neal Pollack mourns a city he remembers from back in the day, when he labored in the trenches as a staff writer for this paper. Pollack’s ideal Chicago is a city pocked with old-man bars and dubious ethnic restaurants, “weird little museums” and empty storefronts–a city that’s disappearing as planters replace potholes and tourists replace workers. His goal in putting together the collection, one of a dozen regional tomes in the series Akashic Books launched last year with Brooklyn Noir, is to pay homage to that city....
Few Shakespeare productions gallop at half the pace director Jeff Harnish sets in this Velvet Willies production. That swiftness gives an apt giddiness to Helena’s headlong quest to wed the haughty Bertram, who flees the country after being betrothed to her by the king. But keeping the show on fast-forward not only creates a uniform energy and an ultimately wearying avalanche of words, it also obscures the troubling question that gives the play psychological weight: why can’t the seemingly insightful Helena let go of a self-serving, inconstant lech?...
This festival of work by black artists from around the world continues Friday, August 11, through Thursday, August 31, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Following is the schedule for August 11 through 17; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this 2005 musical based on “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a “Zerbo” man with a “Krowa” wife (reference to Serbs and Croats intended) is made a provincial governor in Africa, and schemers try to use the feud between these ethnic groups to oust him....
Friday 3/12 – Thursday 3/18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 13 SATURDAY The vague promise of warmer temperatures makes you want to cast off your winter coat and shimmy in the sun–but where? Well, there won’t be any tanning opportunities at tonight’s Carnaval, but the artists behind the nonprofit arts organization Collaboraction are doing their best to bring a bit of South America to the midwest....
The fourth annual Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival, presented by Lukaba Productions, features more than 80 local and out-of-town ensembles, including folks from Toronto, Vancouver, New York, LA, Seattle, Cleveland, Portland, Dallas, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Some well established, some new to the scene, they represent a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints. SketchFest runs 1/6-1/16 at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, in the venue’s west, south, and north theaters....
The Epoxies don’t do a thing that wasn’t done to death by 1987, but if you still care about that after you’ve heard them, you’re too jaded for your own good. These Portland neo-new wavers play pop punk splashed with Doctor Who synths and space-laser noises, and their sci-fi-influenced lyrics attack consumerism, crummy jobs, and the media conspiracy to brainwash the kids. Sure, TV-mall madness has been a punk-rock whipping boy for decades, but the Epoxies tear into it with fresh rage....
