Michigan is a magnet for cyclists, thanks to its gently rolling hills and thousands of miles of quiet secondary roads, many of which run through the state’s 19 million acres of forest. There are scores of weekend group rides throughout the state; maps and other resources are on the Web site of the League of Michigan Bicyclists, lmb.org. The annual Michigander mountain bike tour features three rides of varying distances, starting July 15; see michigantrails....
My 34-year-old sister–call her Carrie–came out to the family a week ago and is looking for us all to support the decisions she’s making surrounding her coming out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My question is this: how do I support my sister but still make sure that she doesn’t back herself into a legal and financial quagmire over a person she’s met only three times?...
Tap dancers have performed to classical music before, and they’ll do it again. But you can be sure that no one will do it like Savion Glover. Two years ago he unleashed “Classical Savion” on the world, performing to music by Vivaldi, Bach, Bartok, Mendelssohn, and Astor Piazzolla. Chicago never got to see that program, but this weekend Glover’s performing one day only with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to selections from Duke Ellington’s orchestral suite The River (which Alvin Ailey used for a dance of the same title in 1970)....
When Robert Quine died of an overdose earlier this month, pretty much every obituary mentioned that he revolutionized punk guitar in the 70s and 80s as a sideman for Lou Reed and Richard Hell. The enduring influence of that revolution is open to question–Quine’s avant-skronk wobbling is hardly lingua franca among the current crop of New York punks–but that hasn’t kept Chris Sanchez of the Fever from carrying its banner. As guitarist for that quintet of high-energy Brooklyn art-punks, he’s Quine’s ablest disciple, with the possible exception of Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs....
BackStage Theatre Company’s ingenious, exuberant revival of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 saga is a tonic and a triumph. Because the story spans a period from the dawn of time through World War II, the stage must be transformed into a New Jersey bungalow beset by a wall of ice, a 1929 Atlantic City beauty pageant that succumbs to Noah’s flood, and a painfully contemporary war scene. Over nearly three hours, director Brandon Bruce’s 16-member cast seldom strikes a false note or misses Wilder’s trenchant wisdom, treating period ballads, clever sight gags, and deft caricatures with inexhaustible high spirits....
Harold Pinter in his 1962 one-act The Collection suggested that so-called swinging London wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In the ambiguous story, a man who might be bisexual thinks his wife might have had a one-night stand with a guy who might be gay. Finally her alleged paramour’s probable boyfriend puts a stop to the fun and games. The youthful Upstart Theatre Group cast don’t communicate these intricate relationships right away, but under Erin Lichtenstein’s direction they soon evoke a palpable tension, which enhances the wry humor when the truth is revealed–if indeed it is the truth....
Freaky Friday was the first sign of trouble. Veteran actor Harold Gould portrayed the dotty old granddad–and managed to overdo it even in a movie where Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan switch bodies. Now here he is as Morrie Schwartz, the philosophical invalid, using an old-coot chuckle that makes the character sound like he’s losing his mind as well as his motor control. Schwartz was a retired professor who became famous in the 1990s when, dying of ALS, he began spouting aphorisms like “When you learn how to die, you learn how to live....
And They’re Off Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pair recorded an eponymous EP, self-released in 1999, and a 2000 full-length, Chicago Ruins Everything, that never quite came out on the local Swey label. Those early efforts, says Klein, were “essentially just Kevin and I playing, duking it out.” In late 2001, as the band was mixing a second full-length, The Perfect Gift (Flameshovel), Chicagoan Steve Art came aboard as a bassist; Parker had moved back to town, and when he joined in late 2002, Art switched to guitar and keyboard....
For 14 years Corina Turcinovic rarely left her home in Beverly. She worried that her bedridden, quadriplegic husband, Maro, would need her, or that the nurses who helped care for him wouldn’t show up. When she did venture out she was never gone for long, and she always thought about what she could bring back for him–a blues CD, some shower gel. “I was there like his shadow,” she says....
This year’s All-Star game commanded more than the usual interest in Chicago and more than the usual dread. The White Sox, who entered the break with the best record in baseball at 57-29, placed four players on the American League roster, including pitchers Jon Garland and Mark Buehrle. Buehrle got the start, but there was little to be gained from this honor and much that could be lost. Back in 1983, at the 50th anniversary All-Star game at the old Comiskey Park, Atlee Hammaker of the San Francisco Giants was shelled for seven runs in less than an inning....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That was last November. Little happened as a result of the hearing, and this spring, after new aldermen were sworn in and several incidents of police abuse were captured on video, the council’s black caucus called for another meeting on Burge. The stated purpose, according to their resolution, was “to invite Special State’s Attorneys Edward J. Egan and Robert D....
The best moments on the new Grandmasters (Angeles Records), a collaboration between GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan and Cypress Hill producer DJ Muggs, are like flashbacks to when I was a pimply teenager listening to Liquid Swords too loud and driving too fast. Muggs does his best impersonation of RZA circa 1995, looping single-word samples or hair-raising, wordless cries into his plodding beats and layering them with eerie piano and organ, urgent zigzagging violin, or murky electric guitar....
Hello, Best Buy; Good-bye, Best Friends Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We didn’t even know about [volume 6] until it came out,” says Miyk Camacho, operations manager of Tower Records’ Lincoln Park store. “Just about everyone has been looking for it. This store–given its location, we’ve traditionally been ‘XRT headquarters, you might say. Anything that’s on their airwaves we tend to sell the most of....
It’s hard to believe, but not 20 years ago there were as many gallons of ink being spilled about Ed Debevic’s as there were this past year about Alinea. Local and national press fell over themselves trying to explain what exactly the restaurant was, where precisely its “fakeness” lay, how to pronounce the name, and where the resurgence of meat loaf fit into new American cuisine. Times have changed: Ed’s creator, wizard restaurateur Rich Melman of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, is not the biggest restaurant story in Chicago anymore....
An uneven ensemble of ten improvises a group-therapy session in this dull late-night show by Chemically Imbalanced Comedy. Whenever the improv begins to fizzle, an ensemble member interrupts the scene to introduce a new idea, riffing on information gathered from an audience member before the show in the context of his or her own recollection, maybe about being a camp counselor or playing in a Christian rock band. The performers’ ramblings then inspire the next lackluster bit....
As a young creative-writing teacher 25 years ago, Jean Thompson gave her students only two restrictions: no stories about young love and no it-was-all-a-dream resolutions. But when you’re older you get to break at least one of the rules. Thompson’s new novel, City Boy (Simon & Schuster), tells the story of Jack and Chloe–newly married, recent graduates of Northwestern who take an apartment in a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood, their “vision of smart urban living....
Since the release of the mind-blowing masterpiece Subliminal Sandwich in 1996, techno-industrial-dub pioneer Jack Dangers has put up with plenty of guff about having fallen into a rut where he’s merely recycling himself. That seems an odd criticism to make within any of the cannibalistic subgenres of turntablia, let alone to direct at such a preeminent practitioner of Burroughs-style viral recombination. As the mutterings of “former genius” gathered momentum, Dangers refocused his energies on Tino Corp....
Krista Peel’s had half a dozen or so shows of her paintings and drawings over the years. Some of her work is quite large–one ongoing project involves creating site-specific paintings for people’s homes. But her latest project is very, very small. “I’ve been living mostly in apartments, so I haven’t had room to work on anything huge,” she says. “I started working with miniatures because of the size factor, but it’s also really fun to work in that scale–you can be really expansive....
Dear Readers: Last week we were treated to the childhood sexual misconceptions of my male readers–a shocking number of which involved piss. This week it’s the girls’ turn. When I was about seven, my older friend Annie told me that the way a man and a woman had sex was that the man put his middle finger inside the woman’s belly button and twisted from side to side. That’s why they called it screwing....
On a recent visit to Chicago, I noticed that Lake Michigan, close to shore, looks more like the waters of the Caribbean (crystal clear, light aqua color). When I grew up in the city years ago the lake was just a bucket of sludge. I’m told the change in clarity is due to zebra mussels ßushed out of the bilges of tankers visiting from Asia. These mussels, I understand, consume the sludge and act like filters, creating the crystal clear waters we see today....
