There’s the art of fashion, and then there’s fashion as art. In this issue we’re highlighting 13 Chicagoans who think about the body less as a hanger than as a springboard for personal expression, resculpting or renovating the human form with garments and accessories that for the most part definitely can’t be worn with jeans. They include sculptors, painters, an architect, and a graphic designer and range in experience from student to professional....
At the Map Room, a Bucktown bar with a tap list the length of a novel, the beers of Bell’s Brewery are suddenly what everyone wants. “They’ve never been more popular,” says bar owner Laura Blasingame. “If you can’t have it, you really want it.” And Bell isn’t the only brewer who feels hamstrung. Many industry experts say the law keeps small brewers out of Chicago, already a notoriously competitive market, and constrains those who are already here....
Plenty of hicksploitationists have tried to mine Americana for the sake of snarkiness–I doubt the stereotype of the hairy hillbilly carries any real menace anymore, considering how much it’s been sillified. So bless the pan-southern, Nashville-based Legendary Shack Shakers for sounding like they drink real esophagus-searing moonshine, handle real rattlesnakes, and take pride in being part of the reason why urbanites get scared when they hear a banjo in the woods....
And maybe it’s OK that Zell doesn’t give a damn about newspapers. The people who like them a lot are beginning to resemble the people who really like passenger trains. —Hot Type, November 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are people of every faith, that say, act, and do things that are contradictory to the teachings of the faith they claim. Yet, this should not be interpreted to mean that their weaknesses and shortcomings are representative of the whole community and instructions of God [“The Aging of the Moors” by Tasneem Paghdiwala, November 15]....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In separate incidents on Tuesday, July 26, mothers in Virginia and Florida punished their young sons (ages four and seven respectively) by making them get out of the car on busy thoroughfares, then driving away. According to Virginia state troopers, Channoah Green, 22, abandoned her son on the Capital Beltway near Falls Church because he wouldn’t stay in his seat....
High on two espressos and having just purchased a book from Myopic called Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, Victor Grigas sat down at a computer lab last Thursday at Columbia College, where he’s a film student, and started to rant. “I used to live in a neighborhood of human beings who happened to be black,” he wrote on the Conversation, a Lumpen-affiliated message board, “and the taxes were reasonable....
Make Believe drummer Nate Kinsella probably wishes he’d kept his pants on. According to a police affidavit, at a Christian rock venue in Oklahoma in June he dropped his shorts in front of the crowd, then wrung the sweat from them over the heads of audience members. He’s now facing a charge of indecent exposure, a felony that carries penalties of up to $20,000 in fines and ten years in prison....
Tossing her perky red bob and casting coy come-hither glances from behind a painted-on mask, stripper Demonica Valentine slithers downstage at the Loop Theater and twitches her eyes to the beat of George Michael’s “Freek.” Clad in layers of black vinyl and satin, she’s an odd mix of twee and goth–an unsettling blend of cutie-pie, sex bomb, and creep. That’s the idea, says Annie Terrell, Demonica’s offstage alter ego: the Hellcat Hussies, her fledgling burlesque troupe, live to unsettle....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been off of my “rappers’ official Web sites” game recently, half out of boredom and half because the new Firefox has been acting buggy with me and doesn’t always get along with Flash. (One of the rules of putting together an official Web site for a rapper is that is must use eight times more Flash than necessary....
HABIB KOITE & BAMADA 2/20, OLD TOWN SCHOOL OF FOLK MUSIC Guitarist and singer Habib Koite, a griot’s kid from western Mali, is currently leading his ensemble on a monthlong sweep of U.S. cultural capitals and college towns in support of the new Foly! Live Around the World (World Village). On the double CD (recorded, despite the title, at shows in Europe) the six-piece band consistently finds its way to a meditative zone, often stretching songs to twice their studio length....
Half the 16 dancers here have done Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s 30s and 40s revue on Broadway or in a national tour, and it shows: the performances are top-notch. And occasionally the take on a standard is clever, as when Roberta Duchak sings “Cry Me a River” accusingly to an onstage trombonist–who replies. The dancing can be impressive, especially when executed by choreographers Beverly Durand and Mark Stuart Eckstein (director Marc Robin is the third): Durand, who appeared in Forever Tango, slices the air like a knife....
In what is perhaps the country’s best improv city, this is perhaps the best ongoing improv show, long-form or otherwise. T.J. and Dave hasn’t changed much since its debut in February 2002: same stage, time slot, and price, same opening Ike Reilly songs and introductory caveat, “Trust us, this is all made up.” There’s still no director or show description. Yet the show about nothing has a healthy cult following. T....
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness Number among those few, however, Virginia Postrel, the former editor of Reason magazine. She revels in such billboard moments when everything comes together: impeccable design, the triumph of style over crass utility, and our seemingly shrewd detachment from the ads that succeed in winning us over. And she’s prepared to renounce others among those same few who would lament all of this as so much frivolity, characterizing them as paternalistic fuddy-duddies and cynics who want to paint the world in drab, egalitarian monochrome because they think they know what’s best for us....
Thank you for the story on Frank Coconate and the city of Chicago’s employees [“The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker,” August 5]. I moved here in October from California after growing up in Hawaii and can sympathize with the feeling of helplessness that a lot of people here feel when confronted with corruption in politics. I do hope that the city workers do not lose sight of the power that they wield....
The self-absorbed insularity of Tolstoy’s romantic protagonists makes this novel resistant to stage adaptation. But Helen Edmundson cleverly has Anna and gentleman farmer Levin recount their stories from the afterlife, an expressionistic conceit that not only facilitates the transitions from scene to scene but forces us to view the events from their vantage points. And director Elizabeth Carlin-Metz’s visual metaphor of life as a dance (courtesy of Jennifer L. Smith’s choreography to Gregor Mortis’s meticulously selected waltzes and peasant songs) conveys with vivid elegance the passions simmering beneath the placid social facade....
This annual event, running 9/8-9/10, showcases the work of emerging artists in Chicago’s Wicker Park/Bucktown area. Theater, performance, spoken word, literary readings, dance, music, film and video, and visual art are all represented in the 17th edition of the festival. Plays are presented at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division; Spa Soak, 1733 N. Milwaukee; Davenport’s, 1383 N. Milwaukee; and Wicker Park, 1425 N. Damen. Dance and literary readings are at the Vittum Theater, 1012 N....
Comedically capturing the frustration and self-absorption of teenagers, Band Geeks is an amalgam of teen angst and sports movie tropes with some Revenge of the Nerds-style raging-hormones humor thrown in for the late-night crowd. Becky Eldridge and Amy Petersen’s thin book plays on 80s stereotypes and the antagonism between music geeks and jocks, while Andy Eninger, who also directs, provides clunky keyboard-heavy songs. Yet somehow this show still manages to be entertaining....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 10th anniversary festivities for the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet continue this week with performances by a number of killer spin-off projects. On Wednesday at the Hideout the superb reeds trio called Sonore (pictured) reconvenes. Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, and Mats Gustafsson formed this configuration about four years ago and recorded an excellent album called No One Ever Works Alone (Okka Disk, 2004) that challenged the status quo of the all-saxophone group, keeping things fully improvised but generating pieces marked by the kind of compositional logic that arises when musicians share sensibilities and thoroughly understand one another’s art....
For the past few months Bob Bank has been looking for votes as he challenges the incumbent in the March 16 election for Democratic committeeman of the 45th Ward, Thomas Lyons. In retrospect, Bank wonders if he should have spent more time challenging Lyons’s lawyer, Tom Jaconetty, who’s trying to get Bank removed from the ballot. “Jaconetty’s tying me in knots with this case,” he says. “It’s classic machine tactics–he’s trying to divert all my time and energy from campaigning against Lyons....
Cecilia Gonzalez was laid off two weeks ago, and three of her five children are home sick with the flu. But the 29-year-old has bigger problems on her hands: according to the terms of a summary judgment handed down last month, she owes five major record companies a total of $22,500 for illegally downloading 30 songs off the Internet. Sony Music, BMG, Universal Music Group, the Atlantic Recording Corporation, and Latin-music giant Fonovisa are after her for more than three-fourths of what she made last year as a secretary....
