Mark Noller may be the only person you’ll ever meet who likes his job so much he built a model of the office at home. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Noller, 58, is the organist at the Music Box, the guy you hear on weekends playing Gershwin tunes and standards like “Blue Moon” before a screening. He lives in a double-wide trailer in Manteno, just off I-57 a few miles south of Peotone....
I was delighted to see the Reader take on Logan Square in the August 10 issue. I grew up in Logan, attended Darwin School, and have lived, worked, and done research on the near northwest side most of my adult life. There are a million details I wish had been included, but journalists deserve their chance to offer their take on a neighborhood that no one should expect to be summarized in a few articles....
Chicago has always been a town of immigrants and mostly not of the WASP variety: when the 18th-century trader Jean Baptiste Point duSable, his Potawatomi wife Catherine, and their family became the first regular residents, you might say it was a BFIC (Black French Indian Catholic) town. Chicago’s first businessmen were fur traders who answered to the American Fur Company’s headquarters at Mackinaw on the far north end of Lake Michigan....
The third annual edition of this showcase of sketch comedy, presented by Lukaba Productions, features more than 70 local and out-of-town ensembles. Some well established, some new to the scene, they represent a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints. The festival runs January 8-18 at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, in the venue’s west, south, and north theaters. Performances are Thursdays at 8 and 9:30 PM; Fridays at 8, 9, 10, and 11 PM; Saturdays at 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 PM and midnight; and Sundays at 4, 5:30, and 7 PM....
I first heard violinist Nikolaj Znaider live in 2003, when he performed Schoenberg’s concerto with the CSO under the baton of Daniel Barenboim. He was incredible. He made this difficult work, with all its technical challenges, graspable, playing with great emotion, musicality, and an intensity and purity of tone that made for an exceptional balance with the orchestra. Born in 1975, the Danish-Israeli violinist won first prize at the Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition when he was only 18, then went on to study briefly at Juilliard with Dorothy DeLay before traveling to Vienna to study the Russian style with Boris Kuschnir, who became his mentor....
Szalas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Gorale, a sheepherding people of the southern Polish highlands, have a substantial community on the south side–which explains the presence of not just one but two fantasy European hunting lodges straight out of the Brothers Grimm on an otherwise mundane stretch of Archer northeast of Midway. (The other is the Polish Highlanders Association.) The wealth of rustic detail at Szalas includes a working waterwheel, stuffed animal heads, and staff in billowy peasant dress–you can even dine in a sleigh if you fit....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The increasingly regulated world we eat in keeps twisting in new and unusual ways, the headline-occupying trans fat ban by the New York City Board of Health–a move the Restaurant Association calls an example of “well-intentioned, misguided social engineering“–being only the most recent kink. New York’s trans fat debates mirror our city’s struggles over foie gras, in that overriding health concerns, whether for humans or ducks or–below–for children, have pushed the issue past the area of personal responsibility into (for lack of a better term) states’ rights....
“I’m very big in western Australia,” David Kodeski jokes. His rise to Aussie fringe prominence began last May in Chicago, when he learned that his application for a $30,000 grant had been rejected. “That’s a year’s salary for people like me,” he says. “I was pissed. But I thought, ‘At least I can go to a fucking fringe festival.’” Submission deadlines for the major events in New York and Edinburgh had already passed, but then he stumbled on Perth: “What I didn’t realize is, it’s the most remote capital I could have picked....
In 1978, when the Go-Betweens were a fledgling trio playing punk shows in Brisbane, Australia, they covered both the Monkees and the Velvet Underground. More than 25 years later the group–which expands and contracts around the core duo of singer-guitarists Grant McLennan and Robert Forster–is still trying to reconcile naked pop ambition with high-minded, eccentric songcraft. During the 80s they alternated between releasing stark, angular albums like Before Hollywood (1983) and making stabs at the big time like Tallulah (1987), whose gaudy production features the worst drum-machine sound of the 80s....
I’m a big fan of the first-person point of view, for both its emphasis on voice and the intimacy it can foster between reader and narrator. Collections of first-person stories, however, are risky. The narrators are often interchangeable, their cookie-cutter sensibilities obscuring each story’s distinguishing characteristics. But Holiday Reinhorn avoids this pitfall in her debut collection, Big Cats (Free Press). Her narrators–male and female, of varying ages–are all quite distinct. What they share is a tendency to be fresh out of a meltdown and stumbling through familiar terrain: service jobs, therapy groups, semifunctional relationships....
Michael Goode knows stage fright: the dry mouth, the sweaty palms, the shaky hands and shivering legs. He’s suffered from bouts of performance anxiety all his life, but it became unbearable about ten years ago, while he was playing trumpet in the Danville Symphony Orchestra downstate. “We were playing Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien,” he says. “I started to get nervous, started to get the shakes. It really terrified me. I told myself, ‘I’ve got to solve this or get out of the business....
In June, when local MC Mikkey took the stage at the Funky Buddha Lounge to perform his new cut “Liquor Store” for the first time, his career was moving along smoothly: he’d signed a deal with Virgin at the beginning of the year and he had a high-profile slot on Rhymefest’s hotly anticipated debut album, which would be out in a month. Mikkey, aka Mikkel Nance, says the song got a positive reaction at the show and on his MySpace page, where he posted it a week later; to date it’s been played more than 18,000 times....
By their very nature, jazz jam sessions are all about surprise, and the post-Jazz Fest show at the Velvet Lounge on September 4 was an especially good one. Sharing the front line with club owner and tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson was trumpeter Maurice Brown, a regular presence at the club in the late 90s but a rare sight in recent years. Brown normally would have been in New Orleans preparing for his weekly gig at Snug Harbor, the most prestigious jazz club in the city, but Hurricane Katrina changed his plans....
A Life in the Theatre Goodman Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Especially in director Robert Falls’s funny and moving revival, David Mamet’s gentle, compact A Life in the Theatre is just right for launching the Goodman’s Mamet festival, a series intended to both reevaluate the playwright who helped shape off-Loop theater in the 70s and introduce his work to audiences who may know it mainly through his new TV drama The Unit....
The Fall to Earth And indeed our first impression of Fay is of an annoying, somewhat flighty, but tough and lovable mama bear. Sure, she has boundary issues–most mothers probably wouldn’t go through their adult daughters’ suitcases and sniff their bras. And she’s incapable of doing anything without first informing Rachel what she’s going to do, telling her about it as she’s doing it, and then pointing out that she’s done it....
More than Dowd or Huffington or Palast, economist turned editorial firebrand Paul Krugman arouses ire at the red end of the blogosphere. You can practically see the Seinfeldian scorn curling their collective lip every time someone invokes the hated name: Krugman! Emerging as the New York Times’s voice of intelligent dissent in the wake of Bush 43’s accession to the presidency, Krugman brings a hard-numbers background to the table. Not only is he ready to contest the slipperiest postconservative bullshit–from rebates disguised as refunds to the doughnuttiness of the prescription-drug benefit to the attempted dismantling of social security–he’s got the math to back it up....
Columbia College proudly stood its ground last spring when the Secret Service came to investigate a campus art exhibit that included an image of George Bush with a gun to his head. “We’re an art school,” media relations director Micki Leventhal told the Sun-Times. “We support freedom of speech, freedom of artistic expression and academic freedom.” Nonetheless, when a cartoon version of the college president, Warrick Carter, started popping up on posters in Columbia buildings in October the school responded with Watergate-style tactics....
Lookingglass calls it a “Victorian fairy tale of joy and woe,” but Dickens’s 1841 serial novel is weak tea compared to Hard Times, whose 2001 staging was a triumph. Snapshots of London life–violent Punch and Judy shows, dens of iniquity–don’t suit a fairy tale, but the black-and-white characters do. Long-suffering Little Nell (an uncloying Lorri Hamm) is too good to be true while the gratuitously dwarfish, melodramatic villain (a spiderlike Thomas J....
The cutting-edge Collaboraction company makes a mystifying move with this high school nostalgia piece by Robert McEwen. The script, an ultraslight refugee from the Happy Days rejection pile, has a straight-arrow school principal on the trail of a football squad thug who’s brutalized a nerd in a homophobia-charged locker-room encounter. Justice, official and otherwise, prevails; in the process, three more excruciatingly familiar stereotypes get dusted off and trotted out. The talented cast work overtime to punch their way out of these limited roles, but to no avail....
friday29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » cssm, muldoons In some ways Detroit trio SSM sound like they’re trying to be a nouveau disco band; they have the beat and hi-hat heat, but otherwise they miss the target entirely. Not that you can say exactly what it is these guys are up to: Their full name, Szymanski Shettler Morris, is a straight 70s-prog nod, and the artwork for their self-titled debut on Alive rips off the nude-girls-on-rocks thing from Houses of the Holy–only these ladies are buxom, have cockatiel heads, and are posed next to a spaceship against a nuclear sky....
