A novelist having trouble imagining an artistic vagabond could crib a few ideas from the life of Mexican-American singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela. Born to hippie parents, she grew up in the Catskills in the 70s but often traveled back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border with her family in a converted school bus. After moving to Montreal when she was 19, she met guitarist Yves Desrosiers, and their lengthy collaboration resulted in her 1997 debut, La llorona....
The sensuous, densely layered paintings Bob Burdette is showing at Ann Nathan this month combine text and image in a way that recalls Rauschenberg and Warhol, both of whom he considers influences. But the actual text and actual images come from a place very particular to Burdette’s personal history, namely some 50 boxes of books, magazines, and comics that he started collecting as a child in rural West Virginia. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
“I’m a true Gypsy bluesman,” says James Pobiega, better known as Little Howlin’ Wolf. “My creativity is totally different though, ’cause I take Zen and yoga and martial arts and mix that into my music. I’ll play three or four saxophones at the same time and play flutes through my nose. I’m like a big freak, being freaky.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lately, however, he’s been discovered by a growing cult of freak-folk and outsider-art fans, including former Chicagoans Twig Harper and Carly Ptak of Nautical Almanac, who are now based in Baltimore....
My great-grandfather John Sebastian Sehnert was an odd man. From his earliest childhood, people shook their heads and said he was bound to come to no good. He was an idler, a woolgatherer, indifferent to authority, dreamily impervious to punishment, unintimidated by anybody else’s opinions. At school, he insisted on re-Germanizing his name, pronouncing it in the heaviest Teutonic accent he could muster: yo-hann say-BOSH-tyan. When the other kids made fun of him he just laughed and repeated their jokes himself....
Axis of Evol (Jagjaguwar), the latest album from the PINK MOUNTAINTOPS, leans hard into the question of redemption, going so far as to suggest that the answer lies in getting down with God’s son (and I don’t mean Nas). It’s a funny fixation–funny ha-ha and funny strange–because the previous PMs record was a nonstop freakathon where even the elements of fire and water got fucked. The band is technically the solo venture of Stephen McBean, front man and guitarist for Black Mountain, who became indie-popular last year and then toured with Coldplay–but there’s only a marginal difference between the two projects, as members of Black Mountain show up in much the same capacity on the PMs’ album....
Reeling: The 24th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, November 11 through 13, at Landmark’s Century Centre and the Columbia College Ludington Building, 1104 S. Wabash. Tickets are $10, $8 for members of Chicago Filmmakers. R Original Pride: The Satyrs Motorcycle Club Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » day he runs the family laundry business; by night he loves a handsome agent of the resistance (Bruno Todeschini)....
When I was young, I naively assumed that since male orgasm was accompanied by ejaculation, female orgasm must be too. When I finally asked a friend about “girl come,” I was corrected. So for years I ignored talk of female ejaculation, just as I ignore talk of bigfoot sightings. But now I’ve found myself wondering if this particular bigfoot really does exist. There are so many references to women who ejaculate that it seems like there must be some truth to it all....
At first Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, made over a span of 17 years, looks like a departure for him. It consists of 11 entertaining, mainly comic short films in black and white that show people mainly sitting around in coffeehouses mainly drinking coffee, mainly smoking cigarettes, and mainly talking. But four of Jarmusch’s seven previous fiction features were built out of similarly isolated episodes, and the remaining three—Permanent Vacation (1980), Dead Man (1995), and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)—are all episodic....
The victims in John Bishop’s spoof of 1930s mystery comedies are Broadway show people preparing for an audition in their benefactor’s cavernous home. With campy fervor they chase one another through secret passageways (of course), reveal secret identities (of course), and eventually explain the murderous spree’s convoluted whys and hows. Under Ray Frewen’s direction the acting is appropriately over-the-top, and Carol Blanchard’s costumes reflect the period and each character’s distinct personality....
American crime thrillers have grown so bloated with pop culture and testosterone that these three Danish noirs are arresting for their spareness and close attention to character. Nicolas Winding Refn made his feature debut with Pusher (1996, 105 min.), the tale of a wild-living Copenhagen dealer (Kim Bodnia) whose business debts spiral out of control after he dumps a bag of heroin into a fountain to avoid a bust. When Refn returned to the same terrain several years later he resisted the temptation to rehash the original, instead zeroing in on its secondary characters; each of his three movies stands alone, though watching them in sequence gives one the disquieting sense that every hood at the edge of the frame may have a vivid inner life....
Two actresses–one a Jew from Skokie, the other the daughter of Palestinian refugees–team up to write and perform a show about the Arab-Israeli blood feud. Talk about foolhardy. What do they think they’re going to do that dozens of other earnest artists haven’t done already? Make peace? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 80-minute result of nearly four years of struggle, . . ....
A show described as “Sex and the City meets Jerry Springer” set in a Las Vegas hotel suite after a bachelor party suggests lap dances, noogies, and lots of “fuckin’ A.” They’re here but serve mainly as a protective shell for the soft, expanding underbellies of a rich assortment of longtime male pals. Scott Woldman’s dialogue isn’t always natural, most of the stories raise at least one plausibility flag, and a couple actors turn gooey maudlin when talking about death and rejection....
Blue skies and unseasonably warm temperatures greeted the baseball season on both sides of town last week. But the blissful weather for the home openers only served to disguise what appears to be a dramatic change in the local sports climate. The White Sox were welcomed back April 4 by a sold-out crowd of 38,141; the fans were gleeful, joyous, and enthusiastic, quite a departure from the surly, win-or-else south-side stereotype....
Gagarin Way Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way debuted at the 2001 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and quickly spread to stages across the globe; it’s now been translated into 19 languages. The title comes from an actual street in western Fife in Scotland named for the first cosmonaut in space. Soviet heroes may seem unlikely honorees in the British Isles, but the once thriving west Fife, now a post-Thatcher industrial wasteland, has traditionally been a hotbed of communism, returning communist party members to Parliament until 1951....
Dismemberment figures prominently in Atalee Judy’s new evening-length dance-theater work, Deadtech. But it’s a doll or robot that gets dismantled, its arms, face, and/or gear stripped away until one wonders what’s beneath it all, if anything. In fact that seems Judy’s motive in this piece: to uncover what’s human in the high-tech–and low-tech–wonders that humans create. (Or, by extension, what’s human about humans.) The “mechanoid” main character, Deadtech, has survived apocalyptic destruction and can rediscover human life only by watching old movies, among them An American in Paris and Mary Poppins....
Cheap Trick has been treading water on record for years, but live they’re peerless, capable of turning on classic-rock radio punters and youthful music snobs alike. As with their last few studio efforts, the recent Rockford (Big 3) is being touted as the return to form fans have been waiting for since 1979’s Dream Police. It’s not quite that good, nor does it have the focus of their 1997 self-titled comeback album, but it’s no Busted either....
Movers and Shakers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SHAYNA SWANSON of Aloft Aerial Dance created a piece a year ago called Rolling Blackouts, lit only by battery-powered flashlights and lanterns, which gave the cast’s antics on rings, trapezes, silks, and bungee cords a moody sideshow quality. In October she teams up with Strange Tree Theatre Group in a piece that’ll transform the Aloft space into a haunted house....
Mozart, who was an exceptionally gifted violinist as well as a great pianist, wrote all five of his violin concerti before he was 20. In the first two the orchestra is primarily an accompanist, but in the third the orchestra and soloist become true partners. The first movement of the third is sprightly and playful, the second movement has a wonderfully languid adagio that Mozart made ethereal by replacing the oboes with flutes, and the third’s cheerful rondo includes a marvelous slow dance....
Since just after the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago has been a franchise player in global architecture. You can’t walk more than a few blocks around the Loop or North Michigan Avenue without stumbling on some remarkable structure that could happen to be one of the world’s most renowned buildings. But there’s a lesser-known treasure trove, more dispersed but no less rich, and that’s on college campuses, which seem to breed like rabbits here....
UK grime queen and self-described “white midget” Lady Sovereign was already a stateside cult phenom before her first domestic release, the cheekily titled Vertically Challenged EP (Chocolate Industries). Short white female rappers are a rarity even in the bizarro world of grime, where dancehall rhythms are married to 80s video-game sound effects and DJs contort beats every which way but boom-bap, but Miss Sov’s flow belies her stature. Her breathless debut performance on 2003’s “The Battle” (alongside male rappers Shystie, Frost P, and Zus Rock) grabbed the attention of UK DJs and music papers; she followed it up with her first solo joint, “Little Bit of Shhh!...
