In Edward Albee’s whimsical Pulitzer-winning drama, two diametric couples on a beach reflect on human nature. Nancy and Charlie, mired in midlife crises and the challenge of living in the present, are obsessed with doing things to prove they’re happy. They conjure up escapist fantasies of living beneath the sea, a fantasy realized by Leslie and Sarah, middle-aged talking lizards who crawl out of the water and learn what love is from the more emotionally savvy earth creatures....
Suzanne Hancock works the hell out of bridge metaphors in her first full-length collection of poems, Another Name for Bridge (Mansfield Press). There’s the bridge crossed growing up, the bridge as “swollen and vascular” love “holding two torsos immobile,” the bridge from one season to the next. There’s even the bridge as bridge, “a leap into the unknown, / but it is still beam and arch.” She’s a fan of individual structures–the Golden Gate, the Ponte Vecchio, Galloping Gertie, which collapsed over the Tacoma Narrows in 1940–and uses their particulars to chart the course of her own life....
The relentless deluge of hype that’s surrounded the Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant)–people calling it their Born to Run or comparing singer Craig Finn to Springsteen, Pitchfork handing out its highest rating of the year–is the sort of thing that would normally make me hate a record by association alone. But it’s hard to listen to Boys and Girls and not get swept up in the epic feelings that’ve led to all the breathless bloggery....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Coming from a fairly traditional Southern upbringing, I was not at all initially surprised when a voice came over the PA and asked everyone to rise for the invocation. I had been through this same ritual at many other high-school events and thought nothing of it, so to our feet my wife and I stood, bowed our heads, and prepared to partake of the prayer....
Friday 10 BOHMAN BROTHERS The Bohman Brothers seem hell-bent on taking the piss out of the experimental- and improvised-music scenes, blurring the line between high and low art and introducing deliberate absurdity. Not that the London duo can’t be serious: Adam Bohman cofounded the heavy electroacoustic improv group Morphogenesis and worked in the unruly London Improvisers Orchestra, and his brother, Jonathan, is director of the London Musicians’ Collective. But they’re hardly ever somber....
A Mano335 N. Dearborn | 312-629-3500 $$$Asian, Japanese | Dinner: seven days | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 2, other nights till 11:30 Cafe 1031909 W. 103rd | 773-238-5115 When Kurt Serpin says he’s cooking Ottoman cuisine he doesn’t mean the extravagant feasts of the sultans, but he is talking about the traditional national cuisine that developed in their expansive palace kitchens. The menu in his compact Lakeview restaurant is certainly expansive, covering the expected mezes—hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, falafel—kebabs, and grilled seafood dishes (Serpin is from the Turkish city of Mersin, on the Mediterranean), but also a nice selection of less common items, like the pre-Ottoman, tiny wontonlike meat dumplings known as manti, which arrive in a deep bowl of yogurt-tomato sauce....
The third annual African Diaspora Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, June 17 through 23, at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-4114 or consult www.facets.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The festival opens with How to Conquer America in One Night (2004, 96 min.), a Canadian comedy by Haitian emigre Dany Laferriere. An irrepressible young man leaves Port-au-Prince for snowy Montreal, convinced that the key to upward mobility is finding himself a blond pinup....
In the weeks leading up to Christmas it looked as though rival north-side factions within Mayor Daley’s political machine were getting ready for war. John Fritchey, a progressive state representative with family ties to powerful pols, was running against Alderman Ted Matlak, one of Daley’s City Council apparatchiks, for Democratic committeeman of the 32nd Ward. “This was going to be a tough fight,” says Kevin Lamm, a longtime north-side independent activist who once ran against Fritchey....
Dancer Belen Maya’s performances with singer Mayte Mart’n are sometimes billed as flamenco de camara or “chamber flamenco,” returning the form to its cabaret roots. The term seems apt given the smidgen I’ve seen of Maya’s dancing: a slim, narrow-hipped figure in a flowing dress sans flounces and polka dots, she moves with remarkable economy yet communicates great strength and passion. Maya is the daughter of Spanish dancers Carmen Mora and Mario Maya but was born in New York while her parents were on tour; she’s performed with many famous flamenco artists but has also studied classical, Hindu, and modern dance....
“I just changed my mind,” I told my boyfriend last Thursday night. “I want a baby.” We were standing in the balcony of Metro, and singer/rapper M.I.A. (nee Maya Arulpragasam) had just finished a whirlwind set with her boyfriend, Diplo, who provided the beats, and her friend Cherry, a hard-bodied beauty who sang backup and danced. M.I.A.’s a firecracker live, demanding that audiences be explicit about what they want–“Don’t just say ‘yay’!...
This festival of work by black artists from around the world continues through Wednesday, August 31, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for further information call 312-846-2800. Following are the programs scheduled for August 19 through 25; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nothing works in this would-be comedy of manners (2004)....
SAM QUINONES | ANTONIO’S GUN AND DELFINO’S DREAM: TRUE TALES OF MEXICAN MIGRATION (UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One day Muratalla shot a rancher, and the rancher’s son, Antonio Carrillo, begged his mother for his father’s pistol to avenge the killing. Fearing for his life, she refused. So Antonio left for the United States, found work, and bought a pistol there....
Who ever would have thought the heir to the Butthole Surfers would come from Scotland? The Buttholes at their peak achieved transcendence by taking the lowest possible road, producing profoundly rude, jarring, and difficult music that gave meaning to Oscar Wilde’s line “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” The Country Teasers are simpler and leaner than the Surfers, of course, with a rockabilly-based sound somewhere between the Cramps and the Fall....
When restaurateur Paul Boundas was asked by his mother’s women’s church group to submit a recipe, he thought he was contributing to a ring-bound community cookbook. Then a photographer showed up at his house. Boundas’s recipe for macaronada, a pasta dish with nutmeg-laced red sauce and baked shrimp, is just one of the offerings in the new coffee-table cookbook Greektown Chicago: Its History, Its Recipes by local author Alexa Ganakos. Ganakos says she was able to cull family recipes from a “good sampling of people”–old and young, women and men–just by putting out feelers in the Greek Orthodox diocese....
No one seems to know the origin of Georgia Pacific’s signature approach, the Bat, a long-form improvisational technique performed entirely in the dark and bookended by soundscapes the ensemble generates. “The basic exercise is not a mystery,” says troupe member Lisa Lewis. “In some ways, it’s like the best of old radio–it’s really about heightening the theater of the imagination.” Perhaps it’s best that the Bat retain an aura of inscrutability: it’s like a vision quest that shouldn’t work but somehow does, opening up the other senses while shutting down sight....
Re: Tori Marlan’s “How I Learned to Hate the War,” [September 30]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You cite safety concerns to change the names of Jake (main character in the tale) and his wife; you also didn’t provide their last names or ethnic backgrounds. Strange that the same safety concerns were not addressed for Nhu Tran, a Vietnamese from Carol Stream, and Mike Komorowski, a Polish linguist from Schaumburg; in fact their full names and ethnic backgrounds were mentioned at least twice in the tale....
How Safe Are We? Eleven nuclear power plants operate near Chicago. Can saboteurs get at them? Probably, according to a Time investigation two months ago. Long, slow freight trains rumble through the city, cargo ships dock in Calumet Harbor, semis course toward the Loop along our expressways. Should we worry? Absolutely, according to Stephen Flynn’s 2004 book America the Vulnerable. Would terrorists have any more difficulty blowing up subway trains in Chicago than they did in London?...
One of the most sophisticated singers in modern Brazilian music, Joyce has spent four decades blending jazz rhythms with lush samba and bossa nova. When she emerged as a solo artist in the late 60s she was pursuing an expansive, folk-tinged sound; she began expressing a strong female perspective in her lyrics, a rare thing in Brazilian popular music at the time. After stepping away from the spotlight to raise a family, she returned in 1975 to tour as a singer and guitarist with Vinicius de Moraes; she also started to take a growing interest in jazz and in 1977 moved to New York, where she began working with the likes of saxist Michael Brecker and arranger Claus Ogerman....
No Boundaries (Heads Up International), a collaboration between South Africa’s leading Zulu gospel choir and the string section of the English Chamber Orchestra, is in many ways a similar project to Youssou N’Dour’s 2004 album Egypt. Both integrate religious music from a foreign tradition: N’Dour uses the distinctive inflections of an Egyptian orchestra to celebrate Sufi Islam, while on its new record Ladysmith Black Mambazo performs European classical devotional music. N’Dour’s pan-African exoticism is more likely to surprise Western ears, so U....
The cheap, deceptive Howard is so jealous he plants a bug in his girlfriend’s apartment, and the girlfriend, Amy, feels incomplete because she’s still single and pretends to be pregnant so Howard will marry her. The ensuing high jinks in Norman Krasna’s tired 1967 script are completely unbelievable, relying on the worst stereotypes of male-female relationships, and neither Tony Fiorentino as Howard nor Jessica Granger as Amy is very likable. Yet this production manages to be somewhat charming under Donna Lubow’s brisk direction....
