Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drove past the old Nortown Theater last weekend, for what may be the last time ever. Not that there’s much left to look at, since hardly a shell of the homely old dowager south of the Devon-Western intersection remains—mostly auditorium bridges and a dingy brown entryway facade. Truth to tell, though, the Nortown was never one of my favorite venues....
Special All-Updates Edition Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Florida artist Maria Alquilar returned to Livermore, California, in August to make some requested changes to a 16-foot circular mosaic–containing the names and likenesses of various cultural and historical figures–she’d created for the city’s public library in 2004. Livermore paid Alquilar $40,000 for the work as originally installed, plus another $6,000 to come back and spell “Shakespere,” “Eistein,” “Van Gough,” and eight other names correctly....
Chicago filmmaker Usama Alshaibi grew up in Iraq and the U.S., and although he recently became an American citizen, his personal video documentary has plenty to say about the day-to-day existence of his Baghdad relatives, whom he visited in 2004. Distance tends to simplify our view of anything, and this video humanizes the situation on the ground mostly by complicating it: in a voice-over Alshaibi says he’s often asked what “the Iraqis” think, but by the end this question has become as meaningless as asking what “the Americans” think....
Tom Waits What resulted, among many other things, was a sort of ritualized literary scat singing, an idiom native to the sort of philosopher who wakes up drunk in boxcars and is just as likely to buttonhole you about James Joyce’s plagiarism as ask you for money. It’s like jawboning with Steinbeck’s dust-bowl down-and-outers, provided they’ve joined a circus instead of setting out for California–or like listening to one of your grandpa’s war stories, provided he went AWOL for a spell to live in the jungle with cannibals....
On Tranzition (Cuneiform), Richard Pinhas’s latest solo album, he and “laptop boy” Jerome Schmidt loop, delay, and distort his brief electric guitar phrases, piling them up into gorgeous oceanic swells. Prog-rock graybeards will of course be reminded of Frippertronics, the guitar-and-tape methodology that Robert Fripp and Brian Eno developed on the mid-70s albums No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, and Pinhas has already given credit where it’s due: one piece on his previous solo album is titled “RF (For)....
You hate-spewing, body-image-fascism-promoting asshole. I’m a large woman. I read your two incredibly offensive columns about “girl love handles” and the supposed “health risks” of obesity. How dare you oppress women, large and small, with your judgments! Maybe if you enjoyed putting something in your mouth every once in a while that wasn’t cock, Mr. Skin and Boners, you would see things differently. At least food is supposed to go in our mouths....
I live in Colorado Springs, home to the right-wing conservative evangelical movement. As the nation recently learned, the founder of New Life Church, Ted Haggard, was fired after a male prostitute alleged that Haggard bought sex and drugs from him. It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for him, even though I’ve always hated everything he stood for. How do you view all of this? Does Haggard deserve our sympathy?...
Read Harold Henderson’s blog, Daily Harold, at chicagoreader.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » [snip] “One of the most important victories of the Republican Party was to convince people in the suburbs to vote their fears and their wild fantasies rather than their interests,” writes Stirling Newberry at tpmcafe.com. “Reagan won everywhere because there were suburbanites everywhere. . . . The exfoleyation of the Republican Congress, the bubbling gambling scandal, and the crumbling of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strike at the heart of the argument ....
Marie Jones’s Tony-nominated comedy about filming a historical epic in a small town in County Kerry doesn’t provide mind-bending insights into the colonizing effects of Hollywood culture. But it does provide a fabulous showcase for the two actors who play all the roles, primarily two beleaguered extras. By casting the remarkably adept duo of Will Clinger and John Hoogenakker, director Steve Scott brings out the best of Jones’s acerbic wit and only occasionally edges toward the script’s sentimental traps....
Is Hushed Keith Bunin’s well-made play is also well-intentioned: it looks at the difficulty of religious belief and asserts that not all churchgoers are gay-hating conservatives, as an Episcopal priest-scholar acts as matchmaker for her son and her male ghost writer. Director Kimberly Senior makes a valiant attempt to bring the characters’ absurdly intellectual speeches to life, especially in an affectionate scene between the two young men. But ultimately you suffer your own crisis of belief trying to reconcile the script’s dry, tittery Episcopalian banter with its melodramatic exchanges (“You must pray to God!...
It takes Jonathan Gitelson less than a minute to blanket his car with the sort of square glossy flyers that are to cars parked near nightclubs what bird shit is to those beneath certain trees. Last summer, shortly after he moved across the street from the Funky Buddha Lounge, Gitelson began finding his Honda Civic bombed by as many as ten flyers daily, often the same ads over and over. (Green Dolphin Street and a strip club on 144th Street are repeat offenders, he says....
On Friday, March 3, some local movers and shakers gathered at Maxim’s, the city’s art nouveau special-events venue, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Stop Smiling. It’s a slick locally produced and internationally distributed lifestyle magazine whose declared mission is to recapture the freewheeling spirit of class acts like Esquire and Playboy in their glory days. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Glass is right: Stop Smiling has a lot to recommend it....
James Valcq and Fred Alley’s musical version of the 1996 movie, about a female ex-con who’s moved to rural Wisconsin, has interesting characters, nice tunes, and some fascinating plot twists. But these pieces are so predictably assembled that we can no longer believe in the story. In Tim Gregory’s staging for the Provision Theater Company, Tempe Thomas as the woman is too fresh and unscarred for someone who’s just spent five years in prison....
David Gedge is the only original member of the recently re-formed Wedding Present, and he’s still got plenty of his old bile on the new Take Fountain (Manifesto): last year Gedge broke up with Sally Murrell, his longtime girlfriend and collaborator in the post-WP project Cinerama, and that’s stoked the fire under his already simmering cauldron of bitter rhetorical questions and nasty double entendres. (In 1991’s “Rotterdam,” for instance, he succinctly describes lusting after someone whose intelligence he doesn’t respect: “I wanted you but not the way you think....
I’ve seen the future and it isn’t ready yet. Penned by grad students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the three short works presented by Halfway House Theater Society demonstrate lots of playfulness, the occasional whiff of talent, but no craft to speak of. No sense of how to tell a story to an audience–and too often, no evident desire to do so. All three go in for adolescent mystifications, as if a drama were a hip code to be kept uncracked rather than a secret to be shared....
On a winter night last year, a few months after losing the bulk of his personal library, journalist Danny Postel noticed a sign in a vacant Edgewater storefront a few miles from his home: LEFT OF CENTER BOOKSTORE–COMING SOON. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Postel was just as fortuitous a find for the store as the store was for him. For one, he’s bought more than 300 books there, replacing many of the volumes that had been auctioned off by a storage company in a complicated mix-up Postel describes as “one of the worst nightmares of my life....
Charlie Hunter fooled us with his debut disc in 1993: the album was billed to the Charlie Hunter Trio, but its songs had four distinctly discernible instrumental lines–guitar, sax, bass, and drums. How to explain three musicians playing four parts? Hunter is just a bona fide freak of nature. Using the lower three strings of his eight-string guitar, he plays completely independent bass lines behind his improvised solos; live, he sends each part to separate amps, and if you close your eyes you can’t believe only one musician is playing....
The members of the new-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird create a remarkable range of sounds with a riveting intensity. For this program they and soprano Lucy Shelton will perform Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, his last important work in the expressionist style and his first to use sprechstimme, an often eerie-sounding combination of spoken and sung text at designated pitches. Highly melodramatic and primarily atonal, the work sets 21 poems by Albert Giraud: the first act concerns love, sex, and religion, the second a more hallucinatory and nightmarish world, and the third Pierrot’s journey home, haunted by the past....
The 4600 to 4900 blocks of North Kedzie–one of most wonderful food stretches in the city–suffered a terrible loss late last year with the sudden death of Azzam Tbakhi and the closing of his superlative restaurant, the Shawerma King. Unlike the outrageously popular Noon-O-Kabab, many of the Middle Eastern restaurants, groceries, and bakeries on this strip do most of their business with Middle Eastern customers and lucky neighbors of other extractions....
Chantal Akerman’s greatest film–made in 1975 and running 198 minutes–is one of those lucid puzzlers that may drive you up the wall but will keep you thinking for days or weeks. Delphine Seyrig, in one of her greatest performances, plays Jeanne Dielman, a Belgian woman obsessed with performing daily rounds of housework and other routines (including occasional prostitution) in the flat she occupies with her teenage son. The film follows three days in Dielman’s regulated life, and Akerman’s intense concentration on her daily activities–monumentalized by Babette Mangolte’s superb cinematography and mainly frontal camera setups–eventually sensitizes us to the small ways in which her system is breaking down....
