The story of two friends, teens in Brooklyn during World War II, flourishes in Chaim Potok and Aaron Posner’s adaptation of Potok’s beloved 1967 novel. In this moving tale of good people on opposite sides of an ideological battle, Reuven is the Orthodox son of a Zionist, Danny the son of a Hasidic rabbi bitterly opposed to a secular Jewish state. Honest performances by Jurgen Hooper and Nicholas Cimino enliven the tricky shifts in the boys’ relationship....
Yes, she’s the title character, and it’s her secret marriage to a commoner that triggers the play’s extravagantly long daisy chain of murders. But the duchess isn’t the real heart of John Webster’s Jacobean classic. That would be Bosola, the hapless soldier who finds himself committing horrific crimes out of–well, it’s complicated, but it has to do with following orders. Funny, sympathetic, weirdly decent, utterly damned, Bosola is the prototype of the modern war criminal: a circumstantial monster....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It is with a tremendous sense of gratitude and relief that I have successfully completed my course of therapy at the University of Chicago. It was incredibly important to me to remain as engaged as possible at Alinea while receiving treatment, and during that time I only missed 14 services. I continue to stand committed to innovating fine dining long into the future....
John Peterson has been known to drive his tractor wearing a close-fitting, sleeveless yellow-and-orange bodysuit with an orange boa around his neck. Filmmaker Taggart Siegel, an old friend of Peterson, thought that would make for some good footage, and early on in his engrossing documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John the camera moves from the tractor’s big wheels and dual headlights to Peterson’s getup–a sequence that’s worth the price of admission....
Director Robert Altman and screenwriter Garrison Keillor have turned the beloved old-timey radio revue A Prairie Home Companion into an enormously entertaining backstage comedy that’s wall-to-wall with country-and-western music. The movie takes place during the fictional last performance of the show, which has been canceled by a Texas media conglomerate, and as the numbers play out onstage, an angel of death in a white trench coat (Virginia Madsen) wanders the wings searching for her prey....
Somewhere between wacky and wack you’ll find Alexis Gideon, formerly just Alexis. Better known as half of the local duo Princess, who specialize in a ridiculous collision of fucky hip-hop and skinny-butt dance music, he’s putting out his first solo CD, Welcome Song, early next year on Sickroom, and it’s like a pilled-up, discolored kiddie bedsheet at a thrift store: kinda cute but totally creepy. Zany porno synths–like the sound track to a splosh flick shot in a school cafeteria–zigzag through butter-churning twang (banjo?...
Dihydrogen monoxide–threat or menace? The city council of Aliso Viejo, California, almost voted to ban dihydrogen monoxide–H2O, aka water–after being informed that it was an odorless, tasteless compound that could kill you if you breathed it in. A March 14 Associated Press story quoted the city manager, who blamed the fiasco on “a paralegal who did bad research.” No word on whether anyone in the local government ever passed high school chemistry....
This program by the Contemporary Chamber Players demonstrates the continuing vitality of modernism. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet 1931 was written three years after she moved away from Chicago, where she was a founding member of the local chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (she’d later become a renowned transcriber of American folk songs; Pete Seeger is her stepson). The quartet has modernism’s usual jagged shapes, but the smooth edges of the third movement and the muted argument of the fourth set it apart....
This busily bizarre Montreal-based synth-pop duo (or trio, if they’re playing with a live drummer) suffers from a glamorous affliction: excess imagination. Tossing out ideas in an anxious frenzy to clear their heads, they create all sorts of improbable new genres–bubblegum ragtime humpcore, Ren Faire industrial cabaret, avant-unitard noise. They say they “want to boogie” with the urgency and malice of a street hood trying to goad you into a knife fight....
Chicago’s killer heat wave of 1995 deserves more than remembrance–it deserves to be understood. In his 2002 book, Heat Wave (University of Chicago Press), sociologist Eric Klinenberg, now at NYU, sought to explain why hundreds of Chicagoans–disproportionately elderly, black, poor, and male–died ten years ago in one blistering July week. He identified a collection of policies and problems that made the extreme heat deadlier than it had to be, including social isolation, dangerous neighborhoods, social service cuts, misleading media coverage, and a city government that blamed victims and messengers instead of taking forceful action....
Most of Francisco Lopez’s CDs are packaged in clear slimline cases and come without recording information or titles. It’s not because he’s on a budget: the Spaniard insists that his pieces are pure sonic experience, free of any larger meaning: “I want to be flowing inside the sound instead of listening to it,” he’s said. Lopez draws from diverse sources–field recordings (often made in Latin American jungles), the work of fellow experimentalists, the occasional heavy-metal album–then manipulates the sounds beyond recognition....
After the paranoid lyrics and sluggish tempos of 2004’s The Pretty Toney Album, Ghostface Killah’s new Fishscale (Def Jam) comes on like a shiny party record. The lead single, “Back Like That,” is big-budget bounce slicked up with multitracked R & B ooohs and romantic piano, with Ghost sounding rough and hurt, hollering about his ex-girl swallowing the kids of her new man. It might be the most linear narrative he’s ever written: the press release for the album notes that Ghost’s been “free of intoxicants” for two years, which might explain why his hallucinatory flow now sounds so focused, especially in comparison to older tracks like “Nutmeg,” which boasted strings of lines like “Scooby snack jurassic plastic gas booby trap....
In late 2002 Harris Eisenstadt spent a couple months studying with traditional Mandinka percussionists in Gambia and became fascinated by the horn-and-drum music he heard there. Rather than assign the melody to a lead voice, the Gambian ensembles–made up mostly of single-pitched bone, wood, or metal instruments–use a technique called hocketing: several musicians trade notes in rapid succession, so that their total output forms a melodic shape. On Eisenstadt’s new recording, Jalolu (CIMP), the LA-based drummer presents his own audacious take on this technique....
From the start, Ken Vandermark conceived the Territory Band as a forum where local free-jazz musicians and European free improvisers of different generations (such as veteran percussionist Paul Lytton and younger trumpet radical Axel Dorner) could coexist without compromising their respective aesthetic imperatives. The ensemble convenes roughly once a year, and over time it’s gotten larger and less American. Musically it’s explored several kinds of tension–between near silence and dense sonority, between measured time and boundless abstraction, between acoustic and electronic sound–and this development has outpaced its CD-release schedule; the group’s most recent album, last year’s Company Switch (Okka Disk), was recorded by Territory Band 4, but the 13-piece lineup performing this week is version 6....
Veteran SoCal rapper MED (formerly Medaphoar) rounded up some impressive company on his debut album, Push Comes to Shove (Stones Throw), and the guests wind up outshining the host. Most of the tracks were produced by Madlib, who brings his trademark mix of clipped, bumping beats, soul and jazz samples, and digitized slicing and dicing; J Dilla, Just Blaze, and Oh No contribute some fine grooves of their own as well....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fertility experts interviewed for a September article in London’s Daily Telegraph said a growing number of women were seeking in vitro fertilization not because they were having trouble conceiving through intercourse but because the greater efficiency and superior odds offered by IVF better fit their busy schedules. (Said one clinician, “Some people are horrified by the idea that they have to have sex two to three times a week....
The title cut of the Rempis Percussion Quartet’s first studio album, Rip Tear Crunch (482 Music), kicks off with a honking R & B figure solid enough to riff on or even work into a finished song, but for this local crew it’s just a starting point. They’re committed to “total improvisation”–the shorthand term saxophonist and bandleader Dave Rempis uses for improv with no composed or premeditated elements–and the 28-minute “Rip Tear Crunch” demonstrates how expertly they can articulate a strong sense of organization and forward momentum on the fly....
Until recently my shopping experiences in Wisconsin had been limited to stops for gas and the occasional bag of cheese curds while driving up to my native Minneapolis. But I’m a thrift-store hound, and figuring there might be better pickings if I got out of Chicago and into a vast hipster-free zone, I scoured the Internet and assembled a Wisconsin quest. Lutheran Counseling & Family Services of Wisconsin (lcfswi.org), which runs six thrift outlets....
There was a piece in the New York Times recently about the debate in the lesbian community over gender-reassignment surgery. Lots of formerly butch lesbians now identify as “transmen.” The strangest revelation was that after one member of a lesbian couple became a man, they were able to get legally married in California. Doesn’t the fact that a marriage is legal if one partner gets a sex change kind of turn all the antigay-marriage arguments on their head?...
Aside from the never-ending Lil Wayne downloads and minute-by-minute beef updates, the best thing about hip-hop blogs is reading the kind of scathing takedowns that can come only from the most dedicated fans. Bill O’Reilly’s got nothing on the cranks at Oh Word, whose jokey forgery of a Cam’ron notebook–complete with a seventh grade-stoner-style drawing of his dream car, the “Camborghini”–was gleefully reposted by pretty much every hip-hop site on the Internet....
