Friday 10 CORDERO, HIGH HAWK Great news: New York’s CORDERO has signed to Bloodshot, which will release their latest album, En Este Momento, on Tuesday–hopefully that means we’ll see them around more often. Cordero’s named for Ani Cordero, who started the group in the late 90s with the help of Howe Gelb and Joey Burns; after moving to New York she teamed up with her husband, Chris Verene, late of DQE and the RockaTeens....
For years 47th Ward alderman Eugene Schulter has been among the herd of aldermen approving Mayor Daley’s proposed tax increment financing districts, but recently he broke ranks. No, Schulter didn’t come out against the LaSalle Central TIF, the mayor’s latest boondoggle–he says he’s still studying that proposal. But he did do something few other aldermen have braved. Addressing top Daley aides at an October 3 meeting of the City Council’s finance committee, Schulter blistered the administration for breaking its promises about how TIF funds are to be spent....
Miracle With Kurt Russell, Patricia Clarkson, Noah Emmerich, Eddie Cahill, Michael Mantenuto, and Nathan West. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re in the movie’s target audience of children and young teens it may have, but I don’t feel any great need to wrap myself in the flag over a 24-year-old hockey game, especially now that the Soviet Union is history and the U....
Last month the national behemoth Tower Records announced that it was shuttering its stores. This month it’s a local mom-and-pop: Hi-Fi Records on Clark Street. Hi-Fi opened about a decade ago, emphasizing vinyl before vinyl made its comeback. (Even if it never threatened to return as a widespread format, I bet the shift led a lot of old record-store owners to curse themselves for dumping their inventory in the 90s.) The store eventually beefed up its CD selection, too, mixing a variety of new releases in with the voluminous used goods....
Tomorrow at a Hollywood bookstore, there’ll be a release party for the new book Bomp! Saving the World One Record at a Time, on Ammo Press. It collects writings from the 1960s-’70s run of Bomp! magazine, a worthy competitor of Creem and Crawdaddy as a rock mag that’s still fun to read in 35-year-old back issues. The book does great honor to the memory of superfan Greg Shaw, who steered the Bomp!...
Califone has always thrived on odd juxtapositions of sound and style, and their new Roots & Crowns (Thrill Jockey) is the apotheosis of that approach–it reminds me of those marvelous accidents where the noise of a radio stuck between stations is more interesting than any one broadcast could be. Even so, it’s their most polished recording: engineer and onetime member Brian Deck gives each of the individually processed sounds its own place, but they never take precedence over the tunes, which are as sturdy and memorable as centuries-old folk songs....
Downtown, the only goat you’ll find is goat cheese, but in almost every surrounding neighborhood, restaurants serve the meat itself. There’s nothing strange about that: more than three-quarters of the world’s population eats goat, and the low-fat meat makes up two-thirds of all red meat worldwide. In the United States goat farmers are trying to satisfy the immigrant demand that’s more than quadrupled goat consumption over the last 20 years. A few days after the end of Ramadan, a holiday that’s often celebrated with the slaughter of a few goats, here’s a short tour de goat exploring the other red meat....
This touring program of films drawn from the New York and London versions of the Human Rights Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, May 7 through 13. All screenings will be projected from Beta SP video at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $9, $5 for members; for more information call 773-281-4114. Films marked with an asterisk (*) are highly recommended. *Rana’s Wedding Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A soulful Palestinian beauty (Clara Khoury) in occupied East Jerusalem receives an ultimatum from her father: if she hasn’t married by the following afternoon, she’ll have to accompany him to Egypt....
GayCo Productions’ latest sketch revue looks and sounds a lot like a Second City main-stage show. But the company’s beautiful, spacious new theater, impressive set, piano accompanist, and high-tech lighting and sound can’t give this performance SC’s snap and satirical bite. On the other hand, SC doesn’t delve as candidly into gay issues, like motherhood for lesbians (“even Jesus came from donated sperm”). And though the players here are not hilarious throughout, they’re pretty charming....
A few years ago Shawn Shiflett went back to Puerto Escondido, the gritty Mexican beach town where he spent some time in the 70s. He was doing research for his new novel, Hidden Place, and wanted to make sure he had the lay of the land right. Back then the place was often referred to as the next Acapulco, a coastal refuge for traveling college kids and other ne’er-do-wells. Twenty-five years later, where once a single dirt road wound its way down to the beach from the campsite where hippies used to hang out, there were now paved roads, hotels, and shops....
China is the next USA. Minus the democracy, of course. And the property rights. And the compunctions about slave labor. What we were to the world at the beginning of the last century–an energetic, expansive, economically irresistible force, the next big thing–1.3 billion Chinese are now. The mainland miracle inspires enormous trepidation and enthusiastic trade. We embrace its promise of low-cost plenty even as we’re sent reeling by it. Consider the phenomenon of Wal-Mart providing Chinese-made bargains to the same people it’s helped throw out of work....
Rarely screened, this is the 90-minute centerpiece to Jacques Rivette’s three-part TV documentary Jean Renoir, the Boss (1966), made just before Rivette discovered improvisation in his fictional L’Amour Fou, Out 1, and Celine and Julie Go Boating. The full on-screen title is “Michel Simon as Seen by Jean Renoir or Jean Renoir as Seen by Michel Simon or The Direction of Actors,” and the raw record of after-dinner talk between the great director and his greatest actor, both in their early 70s, is punctuated with relevant clips from Tire-au-Flanc (1928), On Purge Bebe (1931), La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), and Tosca (1941)....
The press materials say the Thresholds Theatre Arts Project offers performers and writers a chance to “express complex experiences, thoughts, and emotions about their mental illness.” Yet few complexities are on display in this hour-long show featuring 16 performers reflecting on illness, childhood and adult traumas, or beauty in music, movement, dance, and monologues. Sharing personal recollections and self-affirmation may be therapeutic, and the company’s intense effort is admirable. But the stories barely scratch the surface of what it’s like to feel different or alone, and the production seldom succeeds as theater....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On September 11 Crammed Discs is releasing Live at Couleur Café by the Congolese band Konono No. 1, a burning concert recorded in Brussels. It follows on the heels of the digital-only Live in Tokyo EP—in fact, the artwork for both releases is practically identical. The band is in good form, its deeply hypnotic likembe patterns sounding cleaner than on the group’s celebrated Congotronics album, where the thumb piano licks were crusted with nasty distortion....
Lusia Strus’s one-woman show It Ain’t No Fairy Tale is a riveting story of addiction, destruction, and devotion inspired by her parents’ marriage and her own. Telling the tale in a sardonic, raspy voice, Strus combines matter-of-factness with wry amusement to deliver a funny, interesting, captivating piece. Chloe Johnston’s I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes is more typically Neo-Futurist. She uses props–a ukulele and a few naked lightbulbs–and whimsical asides on the physics of airplane lift and radio waves to tell the melancholy story of Sara Carter, a member of country music’s Carter Family, and her passionate romance with her husband’s cousin....
Twenty-seven-year-old Dolan Geiman, a charming, well-mannered, and extremely handsome Shenandoah Valley expat (and man, does he milk that), is a regular Renaissance boy–he silk-screens, he collages, he paints, he reconstructs clothing, and he creates art for shops and bars on a for-hire basis. On March 7 he launched an e-commerce site, dolangeimanartist.com, and the next night he threw a party at Rockit Bar & Grill (where he designed back bars and frames for the TV) to promote it, focusing on his Rescued Clothing line....
A program note says that Actors Revolution Theatre aims to emphasize text and character work above all else. In choosing to produce Richard II, the young company has picked a play highly amenable to this treatment. Eschewing battle scenes and complicated plots, Shakespeare concentrates primarily on language and the character development of King Richard, a kind of proto-Hamlet given to loquacity, melancholy, and inertia. The cast’s work in Robert G. Anderson’s modern-dress production yields mixed results....
I’m a 34-year-old woman. I recently became reacquainted with a boyfriend from college, and we e-mail each other daily. He lives in Alaska, and I live on the east coast. We hadn’t seen each other since 1993, but we’d carried on a snail-mail and e-mail correspondence on and off for all those years. I always ended it, usually because of my being involved with other men, but he’d pursue it again several months later and I would cave....
My stepdad is gay. He fell in love with and married my mom anyway, and they appear to have a strong relationship despite his sexual preference–they love each other, had a baby together, and seem to be committed. A few days ago I found a search for “men seeking men” on his computer. I brought up the subject of their relationship with my mom without telling her what I found, and she said that they’re currently monogamous....
Screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park, Vanity Fair) makes his directing debut with this devastating drama about a hit-and-run in a country village that takes the life of an old man and forever changes a coldhearted London solicitor (Tom Wilkinson), his beautiful wife (Emily Watson), and their blue-blooded neighbor (Rupert Everett). At 85 minutes the movie is beautifully focused, reaching deep into its characters as they confront terrible secrets but never sacrificing momentum as the mystery unravels....
