Sheldon Patinkin’s deeply felt staging roots Tennessee Williams’s gorgeous coming-of-age drama in a raw, real family who hurt one another when they most want to help. Brendan Donaldson gives the frustrated son and resigned narrator an appropriate restraint. Dina Connolly is a sepia portrait come to life, all fragile yearning as Laura: her candlelit scene with sensitive Jayce Ryan as the gentleman caller is as good as this beautiful bittersweet duet gets....
Happy had a fever and was worried he might pass out onstage. He was the final act in Tomas Medina’s Son of the Superfantabulous Variety Show at the Lakeshore Theater, and he didn’t want to let the audience down. Happy (ne Dave Haskell) can handle pain–in fact, he thrives on it–but a human pincushion must be in the best of health to stay focused. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
From the outside, Wicker Park’s Empire Liquors, the brand-new bar in the old Reservation Blues space, doesn’t look like much. It’s an anonymous building, the windows seemingly half-assedly covered in black butcher paper. But inside, the window coverings are actually part of a flat wooden art piece with tiny jagged slits that make you feel like you’re peering out at the cold, cruel world from inside a magical woodland womb. White-painted tree stumps serve as stools and tables....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s obvious that the mayor’s 2008 budget plan is going to have to change. Daley has even said so, announcing that he’s willing to slash some of the nearly $300 million in proposed new taxes, including more than $100 million in property levies, and at least delay some spending, such as for additional cops and recycling services. The mayor is a skilled enough politician that he can present this as a thoughtful, generous compromise....
Born in Moscow in 1980, Alexander Kobrin won the prestigious Busoni International Piano Competition in 1999 and was the gold medalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2005–a prize that carries with it engagements with top orchestras and festivals, including tonight’s recital at Ravinia. His debut CD shows exceptional technique, musical finesse, and tremendous passion. In the opening bars of the first of Rachmaninoff’s Etudes Tableaux, op. 33, a powerful and buoyant bass line gives way to superbly shaped and well-balanced melodies; the stirring, nocturnal G minor etude is played with stunning sensitivity, the C-sharp minor with volcanic intensity....
I suspected Barry Bonds was using steroids as he hit his record 73 home runs in 2001; I felt sure of it by the start of the 2005 season. That’s when the BALCO scandal was breaking, a year before the release of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams’s book Game of Shadows. But Bonds’s leaked grand-jury testimony, the seed of the book, had little to do with my certainty. Rather, it was a table I saw comparing Bonds’s seasons from his mid-to-late 30s with those of other baseball greats....
Angry Youth Comix #10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And then there’s Johnny Ryan’s latest effort, Angry Youth Comix #10. Fifty pages of filthy one-panel gag cartoons in the worst possible taste, this is the graphic novel’s drooling, atavistic doppelganger. You can’t get it at Borders, you can’t talk about it on NPR without violating FCC regulations, and the whole thing takes about ten minutes to read....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Conlon quotes both sides, but they’re just pushing their beliefs or unbeliefs. No one’s looking for evidence wherever it leads — the only person I know of who does that is NYU’s Thomas Nagel. He cemented his status as my favorite philosopher with a sophisticated takedown of Dawkins in the New Republic (subscription only; text also available here)....
The Mayor’s Office of Special Events presents the city’s eighth annual Great Chicago Places and Spaces festival, a weekend celebration of local architecture and design, offering more than 150 free tours by foot, bus, el, trolley, or boat, all led by architects, docents, and other aficionados. Seats for Friday’s “Great Chicago Conversations” program are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Tours take place on Saturday and Sunday, May 20 and 21, rain or shine....
Chicago guitarist Henry Johnson’s Organ Express–a tight-as-Scrooge quartet that includes organist Chris Foreman, saxist Peter Roothaan, and drummer Greg Rockingham–is the perfect band for the first week of winter: nothing says heat (let alone sweat) like organ jazz, which took root in the chilly urban soil of Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. For Sunday’s New Year’s Eve show the Express will be joined by indestructible saxophonist and flutist David “Fathead” Newman....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What makes Biss different from other entry-level wannabes is that he made the rounds at Yearly Kos last week, and he’s been a presence on ActBlue.com, the PAC billing itself as the “online clearinghouse for Democratic action.” Since making an impression on the Kossacks, Biss has raised $31,287 from 422 donors on ActBlue.com, placing his campaign second only to John Edwards’ presidential campaign’s in fund-raising on that site last week [SEE CLARIFICATION IN COMMENTS] — and a couple orders of magnitude ahead of any Illinois state-level candidate on the site....
Kirby Gann’s novel Our Napoleon in Rags (Ig Publishing) is set around the Don Quixote, a bohemian bar in a run-down district of fictional Montreux, Tennessee. Haycraft Keebler, the central figure of a mismatched bunch of regulars at the tavern, is a bipolar 42-year-old who devotes his highly regimented life to inspired but ultimately unsuccessful efforts at community improvement. When Keebler finds himself attracted to an androgynous 15-year-old hustler and becomes a sort of Wildean mentor to the boy, his focus narrows from the social to the personal, despite the objections of his bar pals....
“Wilson’s case was pivotal, not simply because he won it in the end but because of what it led to—the exposure of a torture ring.” —John Conroy, November 29 Tony LaMantia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Haha, asshole! Your favorite cop killer is dead, what lame bullshit are you going to come up with now? You and your paper are a bunch of dirty, filthy communist fucks....
Back in May I wrote about a couple of back-to-the-landers in Wisconsin who’d purchased four American mulefoot hogs. That’s a hairy, black heritage breed known to produce good hams and lots of fat and possessed of an unusual mutation—dainty, uncloven hooves. For decades the mulefoots faced oblivion, and by the 70s an elderly Missouri farmer had the sole remaining purebred herd. But over the last seven years or so their cause has been taken up by a couple of breeders in Michigan and South Dakota and organizations such as the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and Slow Food USA....
This Bay Area avant-garde collective is a splendid and horrifying chimera, stitched together from pieces of animals that would probably eat each other in the wild. Violinist Carla Kihlstedt is best known for her work in the elegant Tin Hat Trio, and guitarist Nils Frykdahl plays with underground folkie Dawn McCarthy in Faun Fables, but Frykdahl and bassist Dan Rathbun were also part of the deranged prog troupe Idiot Flesh, and all three contributed to the Balkan klezmer-punk version of Charming Hostess....
Theatre Building Chicago’s 14th annual showcase of new musicals features eight new works plus a revival of the 1976 Broadway show Rex, in formats ranging from semistaged studio presentations to concert readings (with the actors at music stands), as shown below. The weekend-long festival, which also includes panels and social events, gives audiences and aspiring writers a chance to discuss the art, craft, and commerce of musical theater as they rub elbows between shows....
Lynn Hershman Leeson uses interviews, cable news footage, and dramatizations (with actors Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote) to tell the troubling story of New York professor Steve Kurtz, whose conceptual art got him busted by the FBI as a bioterrorist. In May 2004, medics called to Kurtz’s home after his wife died of heart failure spotted the harmless bacterial cultures Kurtz had bought over the Internet and called in the feds....
EXILED ssss Most moviegoers consider Johnnie To’s gangster films efficiently made shoot-’em-ups; some owe a significant debt to the spaghetti western. And they are made with consummate skill: the action’s conveyed in carefully composed scenes, not an instant wasted. Exiled (2006), in which two gangsters try to kill former colleague Wo (Nick Cheung) in retaliation for his botched assassination attempt against their leader, Boss Fay (Simon Yam), has its share of entertaining twists and gripping action....
Harold’s Chicken Shack, the ubiquitous south-side and south-suburban fast-food chain identified by a maniacal monarch chasing a chicken with a hatchet, is a confederacy of individual outlets. And many of them offer their own interpretations of the way Harold Pierce, the Fried Chicken King who died nearly two decades ago, meant his birds to be prepared. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pierce, who grew up in Midway, Alabama, never dreamed the joint would spawn an empire that reached as far as Atlanta, much less the north side–No....
Hungarian emigre Andre Kertesz’s 1971 book of photographs On Reading pays testimony to what Roland Barthes called “the pleasure of the text.” Taken between the early 1920s and the late 60s in disparate places–Paris, Manila, Buenos Aires, suburban Connecticut–these candid black-and-white photos capture people poring over print. The readers vary from scholars in libraries to sunbathers on rooftops, from monks in cloisters to Bowery bums standing over a trash can. Kertesz, always alert to the street’s revelations, also took shots of artworks depicting readers and, in an instance of his characteristic wit, a shot of a beetle crossing a page printed in Latin....
