Calgary-born pop savant CHAD VANGAALEN recorded the material on his formal debut, Infiniheart, on a four-track at home, making liberal use of hand-built and modified instruments. At first he mostly handed out CD-R copies at shows, often in one-of-a-kind handmade sleeves, but in 2004 the tiny Calgary indie label Flemish Eye released a fine-tuned version that kicked off a scuffle among Sub Pop, Secretly Canadian, and Arts & Crafts, all of whom wanted to sign him....
Clouds of May, the second feature of Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, struck some viewers as belonging to the school of Kiarostami, a mistake they wouldn’t make with his masterful third feature. An industrial photographer in Istanbul (Muzaffer Ozdemir), who hasn’t recovered from his busted marriage, finds himself the reluctant host of a country cousin (Mehmet Emin Toprak) looking for work. Ceylan uses this slim premise to build a psychologically nuanced relationship between the men as an uncomfortable domestic arrangement leads to irrational spats....
The First Nations Film and Video Festival continues Friday through Sunday, November 18 through 20. Friday’s screening at the American Indian Center, 1630 W. Wilson, begins with a reception at 5:30 PM and continues with a marathon showing of the festival’s highlights; Ojibwa filmmaker Brion Whitford will attend the screening of his documentary The Gift of Diabetes (58 min.), about aboriginal peoples ravaged by the disease. Playing at Happiness (35 min....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A Polish mom asked if I could recommend a dentist for her son, David. I warned her that Ben’s dentists . . . like to be paid up front, letting the patient’s family do the waiting for insurance reimbursement. Not a problem, she said—they probably take Medicaid, and her son is covered through Illinois’s universal health insurance for children....
Some events require advance registration or reservations; call ahead to confirm. Fall Campfire Storytelling Harvest Festival a 10 AM-3 PM, North Park Village Nature Center, 5801 N. Pulaski, 312-742-7529, also Sunday. F Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » a 10 AM-1 PM, Skinner Park, 1331 W. Adams, $1; 10:30 AM-1:30 PM, Armour Square Park, 3309 S. Shields, $8; 11 AM-3 PM, Hale Park, 6258 W....
Most articles about Nashville singer-songwriter Kevin Gordon hasten to point out that he’s a published poet who graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His songs are free of literary pretense, though: starting with his full-length debut, 1998’s Cadillac Jack’s #1 Son, he’s been writing economical but finely etched narratives and setting them to an earthy mix of backwoods country, big-city blues, and febrile Cajun sounds. For the new O Come Look at the Burning (Crowville Collective), his first album in five years, he captures the power and unvarnished aesthetic of his band’s live shows; he and coproducer Joe McMahan decided to track the album live in a converted East Nashville house, even including scratch vocals and studio chatter in the finished songs....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upstairs, after dealing with the HOB’s baroque security gauntlet, we nabbed a couple of spots in the special seating section. We weren’t supposed to be there, but our press passes looked enough like the VIP ones. For a while, anyway: after waiting around for another hour, looking at the photo of Mary projected on the screen in front of us and comparing notes on how much plastic surgery each of us thought she had done, we got booted....
Retrospectives devoted to Alfred Hitchcock (at Block Cinema this fall) and Akira Kurosawa (at Doc Films) are always welcome no matter how often they occur. But Doc Films’ complete screening of the work of Ousmane Sembene is an exceptional gift, considering how difficult it’s been to see most of his nine features and four shorts. The father of African cinema, Sembene, who died in June at the age of 84, had a lengthy and distinguished career as a fiction writer before he made his first short around the age of 40....
Forced Entertainment Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The members of the English company Forced Entertainment would feel right at home at the special alternative service. Really, all of what used to be called the avant-garde would. Like me and my problem Jews, they insist on making the same critique over and over again. Consider First Night, which Forced Entertainment performed during its engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art....
Jay Torrence’s ambitious new play, which he directs with Kristie Koehler, examines an almost forgotten chapter in showbiz history: the 1918 collision of a military train outside Hammond, Indiana, with railway cars belonging to the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. Eighty-seven of the circus people were killed (no one on the military train was so much as hurt), and many of the dead were never identified. Torrence provides beguiling narratives for three of those lost to history, interweaving their stories with a broad meditation on the transience of the theatrical experience and the costs of war....
I’m a 21-year-old hetero two weeks from finishing my tour in Afghanistan, and I have a question about strip clubs. I live in Saint Louis and enjoy the pleasures of East Saint Louis as often as I can. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get home is get drunk and blow a bunch of money at one of the fine strip clubs there. I have no problem with a hot stripper sucking money from my wallet, but what do I do about strippers who aren’t my type?...
Ugly Betty | ABC WHEN Thursday, 7 PM WHERE Channel Seven Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Trib reviewer, Maureen Ryan, thinks Ugly Betty is subversive because the heroine is “a curvy Hispanic woman with thick eyebrows.” Ryan calls this “stunning.” If that’s all it takes to stun her, she must be walking around in a perpetual state of shell shock. The Salon reviewer, Rebecca Traister, thinks that Ugly Betty is subversive because of “its smart take on cultural and economic differences,” which makes it part of “the very narrow pantheon of television that has explored what it’s like not to be rich and/or white in America....
On the page, the foundering love affairs Tegan and Sara Quin chronicle are merely reminders of how wrought with anguish a person’s early 20s can be. Sung, however, their lyrics take on a tone of restless self-discovery so affecting you might wax nostalgic for the days when every doomed relationship seemed like a puzzle you could solve if you just kept talking it to death. Their latest disc, So Jealous (Vapor/Sanctuary), completes their evolution from earnest folk duo to power-pop whizzes, with a backing band (featuring members of the Rentals, the Smugglers, and the New Pornographers) capable of rejuvenating even that most tired of alt-rock cliches: the overpronounced dynamic shift....
Sublimely silly and unashamedly offensive, Mel Brooks’s musical skewers showbiz cliches while it celebrates Broadway’s glorious excess with an anthology of shtick. The songs sell the story and the story sells the songs. Marc Robin’s lean and hungry yet faithful staging reinvents Brooks’s irreverence at every turn. The lovable title shysters are played by Chicago clown princes Ross Lehman and Guy Adkins, the former scheming up a storm, the latter sweetly needy, with an adenoidal warble and a late-blooming lust for life....
Last Saturday morning was Dave Pecoraro’s first day of work as an animal handler for a petting zoo. An African wildcat swiped his face in front of a large group of 6-to-12-year-old girls and their mothers at a Catholic school in suburban Indiana. The little girls screamed. Luckily the animal was declawed, or “it definitely would have torn my eye out,” Pecoraro says. That might have ruined his plans for the evening, but by 10:30 PM, local fashion designer Stephany Colunga was cutting Pecoraro’s thick red hair and beard while he coaxed crackly, irritating noise out of radios run though effects pedals onstage at Buddy, where he lives....
Sarah Kane’s play is about power: the power to define, to control, to make others confront something terrifying–like this work, especially in the Hypocrites’ unremittingly intense production, which requires the audience to stand or follow the action around the space. Kane, who committed suicide before the play premiered, vividly dramatizes the struggle between a woman and her psychiatrist over who gets to define the woman’s despair and asks whether such pervasive misery is to be cured or simply accepted as the individual’s prerogative....
friday15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » VALIENT THORR At this point the notion of a band cooking up fake names and an elaborate sci-fi backstory is not in itself noteworthy. So what do Valient Thorr–Warped Tour vets and ostensible Venusian survivors of a 1957 spaceship crash–bring to the table? Well, their alien Viking whackjob patter is pretty solid, really. (Lead singer Valient Himself in a Chartattack....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Let’s imagine, though, a perfectly altruistic Wal-Mart, a Wal-Mart that took every bit of its net income and returned it directly to the employees. We shall forget, for the moment, that this would also drop Wal-Mart’s stock price to zero (no dividend and no possibility of growth means no reason to invest). We shall also forget that our new firm—call it Charity-Mart—will entirely lack the ability to meet unforseen contingencies....
Faced with a shortage of open space for parks on Chicago’s near northwest side, city planners looked around–and then up. Midway between North and Armitage there’s a dormant rail line that runs along a 13-foot-high embankment from Ridgeway to Ashland, a stretch of almost three miles. It’s overgrown, glass sprinkled, and littered with crumpled clothes, bottles, and other debris. The city has plans to turn it into a park in the sky....
Composer and playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes structures her play as a fugue for mostly solo voices. Though she has an ear for the melodies of language, she hasn’t fleshed out her characters–three generations of soldiers in the same Puerto Rican family–or their relationships to create an emotionally engaging piece. The bad food, comradeship under fire, bravado turned to fear, and other details of combat are familiar and insufficiently urgent. Though Meighan Gerachis is outstanding as the gardening-obsessed wife of one soldier and the mother of another, and Lisa Portes stages this coproduction by Rivendell Theatre Ensemble and Teatro Vista with appropriate spareness, the story’s richer notes remain frustratingly out of earshot....
