A couple weeks ago an emotionally intense road trip with my roommate, Hilary, and two brand-new girlfriends, Jamie and Natasha, ended in Los Angeles. While we were walking from our car to a superchic cafe in Hollywood where a cup of tea can run upward of eight bucks, a guy in slick sunglasses rolled up next to us in a shiny black Mercedes. “Hey,” he called. “Are you girls in a band?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s what Ellen Shepard (executive director of the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce) and Michael Shuman (author of The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition) propose with regard to the big-box wage ordinance. It was a no-win decision: pass the bill and lose jobs to the burbs, or veto the bill and endorse poverty-wage jobs. “This quandary could have been avoided,” they write, “if the city’s eggs had been in the right basket all along–with an economic development policy emphasizing locally owned business....
Rem Koolhaas didn’t stay dead for long. Just last fall the Dutch architect looked like roadkill. His student center at IIT had opened to (misguidedly) mixed reviews, and one by one a series of high-profile clients had canceled projects–he lost a billion dollars’ worth of work for Universal Vivendi, New York hotelman Ian Schrager, the Whitney Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Art. In their wake Koolhaas issued a series of sour statements expressing disgust with his American experience....
There have been three major reasons why punk bands have re-formed over the past decade or so: the chance to cash in, the chance for a Big Chill-style reunion, or the chance to finally reap some long-overdue accolades. You could say that all of the above apply to the legendary Slits, who recently reemerged after a quarter century of deep freeze with only two original members–vocalist Ari Up and bassist Tessa Pollitt....
Mention “Chicago style” and more people will still think of pizza, hot dogs, or grammar and punctuation than sartorial flair. But the profile of designers who choose to base themselves here has never been higher–the New York Times and The Today Show covered the growing local industry this summer, Elle featured Lara Miller on its Web site, and Lucky is in love with Eskell. A number of local designers are opening their own boutiques, including jewelry artist Erin Gallagher in the West Loop and clothing designers Vika Brown in Lincoln Park and Beth Lambert of Scarlet Designs on Oak Street....
Half Nelson **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Ryan Fleck | Written by Anna Boden and Fleck | With Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Karen Chilton, and Tina Holmes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hero of Half Nelson–finally opening here this week–is Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a dedicated history teacher and basketball coach at a junior high school in Brooklyn who’s also a crack addict–a combo that, according to any Manichaean view of the universe, couldn’t possibly exist....
Religious ecstasy figures prominently in the liturgy of the Shakers. But visions don’t. So on an afternoon in 1838, when one female adherent claims to have seen angels, her peers respond at first with bemused skepticism. But as others begin to experience these ecstatic spells, the elders worry about their disruptive effect on the community. Playwright Arlene Hutton rejects the temptation to sensationalize the dynamic of cloistered women, choosing instead to highlight the tolerance and compassion practiced by this now nearly extinct sect....
Until recently Charles Wilson has hewed to a mainstream contemporary soul/blues sound–synthesized rhythm tracks, plenty of dance numbers, and cheating songs with titles like “Why Should I Get Married When My Neighbor’s Got a Wife?”–but this year the Chicago-born vocalist released the electronics-free If Heartaches Were Nickels (Delmark) in an apparent bid to break into the now predominantly white market for “authentic” blues and deep soul. Wilson’s keening tenor imbues the fatback horn charts and funk rhythms with churchy emotion, and he brings a winning energy to some well-traveled material....
Henning Mankell’s region of Skane, in the coastal badlands of southern Sweden, is a great place to hide. Evildoers flock there from overseas, and hometown baddies–war criminals, sex traders, domestic abusers–are a dime a dozen. In Skane, the long arm of the law must flex and stretch a little further despite sleepless nights, chest pains, and the occasional hangover. No wonder Kurt Wallander, Mankell’s irritable and weary police inspector, wants to escape....
When pianist Mike Kocour left the faculty of the Northwestern University School of Music last year to move to Tempe, Arizona, his departure did more than just weaken the department’s jazz studies program–it deprived Chicago of an especially well respected musician who was often requested by out-of-town headliners. Now that Kocour runs the jazz program at Arizona State University, we’re missing his Monday-night trio dates at Pete Miller’s, his sunlit soloing behind James Moody or Ira Sullivan at the Jazz Showcase, and his heady, hearty organ playing in the two-keyboard trio Monk’s Dream....
Christopher Durang’s latest is a wan little affair about severely anhedonic Miss Witherspoon, who’s stuck in a sort of purgatory but who resists being reincarnated–not always successfully. Even at 80 minutes Jason Loewith’s staging feels slow, in part because of Diane D. Fairchild’s dour lighting, but mostly because Durang spins his metaphysical wheels on the troubling question of how to choose life in a world filled with terror. Linda Kimbrough’s performance as the acerbic apostate of the afterlife is nearly pitch-perfect, but the rest of the cast is stuck with thankless, toothless stereotypes, particularly Kirsten Fitzgerald and Joseph Wycoff as a trailer-trash druggie couple who become Miss Witherspoon’s parents in one horrific reincarnation....
Incendiary live performances from the first wave of American punk, captured on video by Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong for their New York public-access show Nightclubbing. The real gold is five songs by the original Heartbreakers, featuring Richard Hell of Television and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls: slamming through “Blank Generation” and “I Wanna Be Loved” at CBGB in 1975, the band just about collapses the stage. Four more songs follow, recorded after Hell quit, though a 1980 performance of “Too Much Junkie Business” proves the song was no joke....
Your advice to Femme Teasing Mask, the woman who wrote in about her cross-dressing, female-latex-mask-wearing boyfriend, was bullshit. You told her to break up with him, “[but] don’t tell him the real reason why you’re leaving….Let him think that it’s not the cross-dressing and the latex masks but his breath or his fashion sense….Leave him, FTM–just leave him with his newfound sense of pleasure in his fetish, OK?” Why the hell should she do that?...
I’m a 22-year-old woman with a 21-year-old live-in boyfriend of 11 months. My boyfriend loves eating my ass. He goes for my ass when I wake up, after I get out of the shower, when I get home from work. At first it felt good as hell, but now it’s too freaky–I can’t imagine that anyone’s ass tastes that good. We haven’t had vaginal sex or cunnilingus for a month! I made up every excuse possible for him not to do it, but he became violent and went into a rage, accusing me of infidelity....
This ferocious three-woman sketch troupe blows through pretensions with sharp scenes culled from its previous shows. Rebecca Fox, Laura Grey, and Heather Simms skewer mundane jobs, casual racism, exclusive organizations with arbitrary rules, and sex- and violence-oriented television journalism. As directed by Gary Ashwal, Tara DeFrancisco, Joe Janes, and Megan Kellie, these sketches are wildly creative and laugh-out-loud funny. In one, a graphic artist tells her roommate that she’s a gerbil because she’s so embarrassed at spending her days designing macaroni and cheese boxes; in another, the three become creepy goth-rocker “equal-opportunity ghosts” who insist that prejudice is silly because all souls taste the same....
In 2002, as deputy assistant attorney general to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo was the principal author of the notorious series of briefs now known as the “torture memos.” The briefs made the case that prisoners captured in the course of the war on terror were exempt from the Geneva Conventions, laying the groundwork for the Bush administration’s program of “extraordinary rendition,” which outsources the interrogation of suspected terrorists to torture-friendly countries such as Syria and Egypt, and for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and, most likely, Guantanamo Bay and whatever covert “black sites” the CIA has....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I found it telling that Lynn Becker [“Lofty Goals,” April 9] would remark: “Of the 86 structures added to Emporis’s list of the world’s 200 tallest buildings over the last ten years, the United States accounts for just 10.” Emphasis mine. Does this reflect on his own ego, his second justification, as well as that of the designers and builders elsewhere who “succeed” in getting big monstrosities made?...
Over the past few years WOODEN WAND (aka James Toth) and a revolving cast of associates called the Vanishing Voice have put out about a dozen releases, each filled with loose amalgams of folk, blues, and electronic noise that sound like the band’s lost somewhere between a catatonic trance and a psychedelic haze. It’s maddeningly inconsistent music that’s probably more fun to play than listen to–the songs don’t progress so much as wobble forward, and Toth’s more fascinated with rickety sounds than focused songcraft....
You Can Fool All of the People Some of the Time In the fall of 2003 Brenner became editor of the Egyptian, and Kodee’s colorfully misspelled letters to the paper were turned into a popular column; the little girl who longed for her warrior father was a voice of the war. “Dear Mr. Presadent,” she wrote. “I’m rily mad at you and you make my hart hurt. I don’t think your doing a very good job....
Aside from the solid musical backdrop of carols arranged by Valerie Maze, the pillar of this Provision Theater Company staging of Dickens’s classic, adapted by David Bell and director Tim Gregory, is Brad Armacost as Ebenezer. No twinkling, giggling curmudgeon, Armacost is just the Scrooge the Victorians would have known and feared: scary stuff, a miserly bogeyman who puts himself beyond the pale by scoffing at the season’s sentiments and not sharing the wealth....
