“That weird dog boy” is how Milwaukee-area artist Fred Stonehouse refers to the figure in Perko, one of his 13 bizarre paintings and drawings at Gescheidle. And why are hot water bottles floating above the pine trees? “They’re vessels, like bladders and stomachs,” he says. “Earlier I was doing paintings of see-through mythical animals, showing the stomach and esophagus, and they sort of escaped from the bodies. They also echo the word bubbles in cartoons....
John Ciba used to have a pretty jaundiced view of Birmingham, Alabama. “Growing up in Chicago all I ever learned about was the racism and violence of the place from the civil rights era–blacks having fire hoses and dogs set loose on them,” he says. “That stuff really has stained the city in most people’s eyes. While all those negative things are part of the history of the place, there’s a real duality to the south and Birmingham in particular....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jazzkammer Metal Music Machine (Smalltown Superjazz) The Norwegian noise duo of Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre have markedly moved away from brutality in recent years, but here they jump face first into the gaping maw of black metal, working with members of Enslaved and Manngard to reduce the genre to its most elemental building blocks. Scott Walker The Drift (4AD) The most difficult album I heard all year, but one of the most rewarding, too....
Rock, Pop, Etc. BIG GUITARS FROM MEMPHIS Free concert. Tue 8/10, 7 PM, City Park, 275 Parkway, Lincolnshire. 847-444-9600. THE CURE, INTERPOL, THE RAPTURE, MOGWAI, MUSE, AUF DER MAUR, COOPER TEMPLE CLAUSE, HEAD AUTOMATICA Thu 8/12, 5 PM, Tweeter Center, I-80 & Harlem, Tinley Park. 708-614-1616 or 312-559-1212. GENTLEMEN OF LEISURE perform at Chicago SummerDance (preceded by dance lessons at 6 PM). Sat 8/7, 7:30 PM, Spirit of Music Garden, Grant Park, Michigan between Harrison & Balbo....
Like his model Art Blakey, 42-year-old drummer Winard Harper leads his band with a remarkable combination of flamboyant rhythms and an almost invisible pulse: he disappears behind his sidemen’s solo statements, except for the split second when a burst of percussion provides the punctuation. He’s followed Blakey’s legacy in other ways too. The Jazz Messengers provided an invaluable training ground for three generations of future bandleaders–from Horace Silver and Johnny Griffin in the 50s to Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard in the 60s to the Marsalis brothers and Terence Blanchard in the 80s–and from the formation of his first band in the mid-80s (with his brother Philip on trumpet), Harper has sought to create a similar launchpad for young mainstreamers....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cole: “This assertion is just a variation on the invalid domino theory. People [sic] in Ramadi only have one beef with the United States. Its troops are going through their wives’ underwear in the course of house searches every day. They don’t want the US troops in their town or their homes, dictating to them that they must live under a government of Shiite clerics and Kurdish warlords (as they think of them)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Posner’s core argument [in his new book Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency] is that the threat of terrorism is so ‘very great’ and ‘very novel’–‘sui generis’–that the Constitution must be intepreted differently than it ever was before in order to deal with the threat (there is no transcript available–all quotes are from my listening to the podcast)....
It’s not yet eight in the morning, but a demolition crew is already at work tearing down the frame house at 1304 W. Ardmore. Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, carrying an umbrella to keep off the December drizzle, watches a backhoe tear out a chunk; bits of debris flutter slowly to the ground amid a billowing cloud of dust. As the 95-year-old building is reduced to rubble, filmmaker Christoph Green directs a three-person camera crew recording the destruction....
Chicagoans tend get their summer ice cream fix by heading to old-fashioned ice cream parlors and new-wave gelaterias, but some of the best ice cream in the city is being made in upscale restaurants and hotels. The idea of going to a posh spot just for dessert may sound intimidating, but with a little attention to timing, it’s seldom a problem–and some restaurants are encouraging it. Here are a handful of possibilities, starting with a couple that are brand-new....
Edie Sedgwick–not the dead Warhol starlet but rather Supersystem/El Guapo bassist Justin Moyer in drag–is concerned about the future. He sees two paths for humanity: the vicious rigidity of the modern and the vacuous relativism of the postmodern. The way to escape this fool’s choice, as he explains in a sassy, pseudoacademic online manifesto, is to obliterate the illusory distinction between those paths by sincerely committing to the role of ultimate whitewashed fake–in other words, by learning to say substantial things about insubstantial subjects....
Sistuhs: Four African-American Self-taught Artists Wildly imaginative forms and colors and an utterly ingenuous sincerity characterize the 39 works by four African-American women at Intuit. In Sister Gertrude Morgan’s Spider Drake Driving Cows to the Butcher Pen, multicolored cows tread a pathway that seems an ascent to animal heaven; Morgan also wrote on her painting that Spider Drake–a commanding figure who appears to be pushing the cows along–is “singing one of his spirituals....
Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe is something of a Hollywood landmark. Located on Melrose just opposite the gates of Paramount Studios, the humble-looking Mexican restaurant has been an industry hangout for decades, and in the early 70s it was a haven for up-and-coming musicians. Among the regulars were Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and a Baptist minister’s son from Oklahoma, Jimmy Webb, who’d later memorialize the place as “the old cantina on the California coast” in his song “Adios....
“Where are our priorities?” asked Senn high school history teacher Jesse Sharkey in a Reader article last fall about the $360 million the city paid to rebuild Soldier Field so the Bears can play eight games a year there. “It’s just outrageous that our city would spend all those hundreds of millions of dollars on a new stadium but can only come up with $1 million for reduction of class size,” Sharkey said....
Fred Camper, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two weeks ago in the Reader you wrote an art review [Now Showing, June 23] that the Hermann Hall (student union at the Illinois Institute of Technology, IIT) was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. That is incorrect; Hermann Hall, like the library building directly to its south, was designed in 1962 by Walter Netsch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill when SOM was the master architect for the campus....
Walkabout Theater Company’s nearly wordless 70-minute piece, performed in a Laundromat, crosses Beckett with Sesame Street. Five characters including an aged, muttering attendant go way beyond eccentricity: a businesswoman wriggles out of her stained underpants while talking on her cell, a man who brings in his own votive candle and crucifix pulls out a knife and cuts a big hole in one of his shirts. Blessedly free of contrived romances and conflicts, Psycho-so-Matic’s “story” follows the laundry process: machine filling, wash cycle, spin cycle, drying....
Ketty Teanga learned to dance in a drag show in Puerto Rico in the 60s. Then a slim teen increasingly uncomfortable in a male body, she did salsa dancing dressed in skimpy women’s outfits, the closest she could come to looking the way she felt. “There was no silicone, no hormones, nothing,” she says. “Everything was illusion–fake wigs, fake titties.” When she arrived in Chicago she couldn’t find a drag revue in any of the Latino clubs she went to....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in midsummer, I rashly bet my Sox pal Kate a bottle of Blanton’s to her bottle of Rebel Yell that the Sox would finish ahead of the even-more-woebegone Kansas City Royals. That’s a ratio of a little more than 3-to-1, to judge from the prices listed at Sam’s. The Sox fell into a tie for last in the American League Central in late July, but then rallied with nine wins in thirteen games, so it looked as if they might actually catch the Minnesota Twins for third instead....
The sudden death of a 17-month-old boy in Hyde Park brought Dr. Robert Daum to the Cook County Jail. Out of town the April morning in 2004 when Simon Sparrow woke up screaming in his crib, Daum, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital, followed the case by telephone. Simon’s blood pressure dropped, his major organs began to fail, his skin turned purple and scabby, and his body bloated as if he were drowning....
In Jean Genet’s 1956 play, the brothel customers who pretend to be bishops, judges, and generals at Madame Irma’s “House of Illusions” end up replacing their real-world counterparts and the public is none the wiser–a shocking idea 50 years ago. Genet’s play takes longer than necessary to make its point, but the irony of this TinFish Theatre production is that directors Jon Frazier and Dan May render the playwright’s commentary on politics and commerce accessible by adding more words–specifically, by restoring scenes excised from the definitive Grove Press edition....
The year before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Dale Goulding was on a personal mission to reach Saddam Hussein–or at least his literary agent. The veteran Chicago director and cofounder of the European Repertory Company had made up his mind to adapt Saddam’s first novel, Zabiba and the King, for the stage, though he knew getting his hands on the book would be no easy task. It’s hardly surprising that Saddam would write an anti-American, anti-Jewish book, and the dozen or so reviews you can find in English dismiss Zabiba as an amateurish, megalomaniacal agitprop soap opera....
