Last fall, after speaking on a panel at Columbia College on how to manage a career in the arts, Kevin O’Donnell got on the elevator with House Theatre artistic director Nathan Allen, playwright Phillip Klapperich, and some other members of the young company. Making small talk, Klapperich asked the musician where he played around town. O’Donnell said he was the drummer for Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
I am a single guy . . . never good with women . . . not many girlfriends . . . . I didn’t have sex till I was 31 . . . but all my life I’ve had this strange fetish . . . . I love to be shampooed with lots of lather and suds, suds in my eyes, nose, and mouth. I have been trying to find a female partner to shampoo me ....
Bill Russell and Henry Krieger’s 1997 Broadway show isn’t so much a musical as a series of scenes in which the characters meditate in song about their feelings or fret about what they’re going to do next. That Side Show focuses on two conjoined twins (loosely based on the historical Hilton sisters) and their sometime business managers/maybe lovers doesn’t make the experience any livelier. What does help this morbidly introverted show is Stephen M....
William Wyler’s 1965 film version of the John Fowles novel, which confirmed the stardom of the incomparable Terence Stamp, should be held up alongside seminal serial-killer flicks like Psycho and Peeping Tom. Its butterfly motif prefigures imagery in The Silence of the Lambs, and its treacherous appeal to the audience’s inner stalker resonates profoundly in the surveillance age. In LiveWire Chicago Theatre’s production of Mark Healy’s contemporary update, the two performers are thoroughly commanding, right down to the different-class British accents....
In most people’s minds, ambient house overbrains the Orb might as well be a solo project of mastermind Alex Paterson, even though he’s always used a rotating cast of collaborators that’s included members of the KLF, Fortran 5, and Killing Joke. Berlin-based techno-head Thomas Fehlmann has been a constant since partnering with Paterson in FFWD–an early 90s “ambient supergroup” including Robert Fripp and then Orb member Kris Weston–and he’s just as central to the Orb’s ever mutating psychedelectronica....
Taryn Simon’s exhibit of large-format photographs has its roots in an assignment from the New York Times Magazine in 2000. The magazine asked her to photograph a handful of wrongfully convicted men who’d been on death row. Simon found that while some were angry and others were forgiving, all had been devastated. “They would tell me about the process by which they were convicted,” she says, “and it often involved a victim responding to a photograph presented by law enforcement, and then having to deal with her personal memory of the experience....
Last week Thrill Jockey released A Lazarus Taxon, a three-CD box set by Tortoise that collects a big chunk of remixes (both by and of the band), various Japan-only bonus tracks, compilation tracks, and rare singles. There’s also a DVD of music videos, an appearance on Chic-A-Go-Go, and some fascinating live footage, including performances at the Deutsches Jazz Festival in 1999 with the Chicago Underground Trio and Fred Anderson. The third disc of the set reissues the long-out-of print 1994 remix album, Rhythms, Resolutions, and Clusters, appended with a previously unissued remix by Mike Watt that was lost in the mail when it came time to release the original record....
In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s otherwise excellent capsule review of Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold, he claims the Iranian director “can’t even enter this country.” Yet in the long review of the same film, and in a previous piece on Panahi, Rosenbaum notes that the director actually refuses to enter the country as a form of protest, because he will not submit to (inkless) fingerprinting. A big difference, no? Rosenbaum should of course credit Panahi for his pointed (if pointless) sacrifice and complain all he wants about long lines at the airport (the longest I’ve ever waited through were in Rosenbaum’s beloved Paris, by the way, and coming back from Central America recently I saw people patiently zipping through the stateside digital fingerprinting stations with little hassle), but it’s really misleading to portray him as some sort of innocent victim of malicious U....
Argonautika | Lookingglass Theatre Company WHERE Lookingglass Theatre Company, 821 N. Michigan WHEN Through 11/26: Tue 7:30 PM, Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the world of Argonautika, writer-director Mary Zimmerman’s engrossing retelling of the saga of Jason and the Argonauts....
My Life in the CIA by Arnaldo Correa One new novel looks back to the bad old days of 1973 to highlight an underpinning of much classic intrigue fiction: that the alpha-male heroes of such books were not just privileged, but cynical and indolent. Harry Mathews’s My Life in CIA is being marketed as an “autobiographical novel,” an understandable approach given Mathews’s standing as the sole American member of the Oulipo, a French writers’ league that promotes the application of math and puzzles to the creation of fiction....
This festival of work by black artists from around the world continues Friday through Thursday, August 24 through 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RAugust the First In this self-assured debut feature, director Lanre Olabisi comes up with a novel twist on the typical broken home: instead of a black inner-city clan struggling to survive without a father, his comfortable family in suburban New Jersey is thrown for a loop when the patriarch who’s abandoned them (D....
The cast of this awe-inspiring production exhibits an eloquent, impassioned control over Sam Shepard’s language and imagery in his massively complex 1979 Pulitzer winner. First-time director Hans Fleischmann keeps the story, about a rural Illinois family sinking into spiritual ruin in the aftermath of a horrifying infanticide, in sharp focus but leaves its mystical interludes mysterious and thus resonant. The actors’ light touch with the weighty material allows the script’s humor to flow freely throughout this staging’s expertly paced two and a half hours....
Erstwhile folk-blues revivalist Chris Whitley has called his latest album, Soft Dangerous Shores (Messenger), a “Eurotrash folk-blues thing.” That’s not a surprising concept coming from Whitley–who once recorded a banjo-driven cover of Kraftwerk’s “The Model”–but many of his new songs do in fact sound like Robert Johnson hooking up with a gloomy synth-pop band at a crossroads in Dresden. His electric and acoustic guitar playing alternates between icy starkness and deep-muck ooze, and producer Malcolm Burn brings a claustrophobic, restive mood to the songs....
With the march down Michigan Avenue to protest the Iraq war just a week away, Andy Thayer was still arguing with the Chicago Police Department over logistics. The police had already agreed to let the march begin at 7 PM on Saturday, March 18, but now they were telling him to change the start time to 6:30. Thayer says they didn’t say why, but he told them all the participants–4,000 to 6,000 people from more than 100 organizations are expected to show up–had already been told it started at 7....
I used to imagine the VIP section was filled with all the glamorous people I never saw at a party. Now that I get invited to that exclusive, roped-off area, I know the truth: if the glamorous people aren’t on the dance floor, they’re not at the party. The VIP section hides only insecure people with a little wealth or a little fame who like to flash their money around, buying bottles of booze at inflated prices without having to interact with other human beings....
Dear Mr. Miner, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, maybe. My wife and son were banned for life from A Taste of Heaven in the sweetest possible language by Mr. McCauley himself before the sign was posted. (They undoubtedly have the distinction of being at least partially responsible for its appearance.) My son had been disruptive, and as my wife, a longtime customer, was taking him out of the store she stopped to tell Mr....
Presented by Facets Cinematheque, Lithuanian American TV, and the Lithuanian Consulate General in Chicago, this series of Lithuanian films runs Friday through Thursday, May 20 through 26, at Facets Cinematheque. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in Lithuanian with subtitles; for more information call 773-281-4114. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vytautas V. Landsbergis will be in attendance for An Evening About Jonas Mekas, which includes his video documentaries Anthology of Jonas Mekas (65 min....
From their inception in late 1995 the Minders were arguably the most doggedly nostalgic act of a backward-looking lot. While their fellow bands in the Elephant 6 collective, like Neutral Milk Hotel, Beulah, and Olivia Tremor Control, made the sacred mid-60s texts (Pet Sounds, Revolver, etc) a starting point for experimentation, Martyn Leaper and his rotating cast of helpers treated the songwriting techniques of the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Zombies not as guidelines but as immutable laws....
Luis Urrea’s aunt, known to the family as La Flaca–the skinny woman–had one bad ojo, wore glittery cat-eye frames, and could curse a blue streak. She told Urrea and his brothers many family folktales. One concerned a distant relative, a Yaqui Indian woman named Teresita, who was widely believed to be a saint. Urrea, who teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, adopts a scratchy growl to mimic La Flaca: “You sons of bitches,” she’d bark between puffs on her ever-present Pall Mall....
Lead Story Bright Ideas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Construction worker Kenneth Borger, 25, survived unharmed after crashing his truck into a tree in upstate New York in May, but his passenger was killed. According to investigators, Borger told them that rather than call the police he decided to wrap her body in tarps and drive it back to his home in Hamilton, New Jersey....
