The Republican Party rose up with the Chicago Tribune in the 1850s, and a century and a half later they’re flat on their backs together–the GOP seeing stars on page one, the Trib in its own business section. In the 70s the paper covered itself with glory by publishing the first batch of the Watergate tapes. Today it’s righteously covering the collapse of the Tribune Company media empire. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
A pianist with several Chicago groups, Amy Dissanayake has carved out a niche as an exacting and dedicated performer of contemporary music. For this program in the MusicNOW series she steps out alone, playing a selection of etudes by David Rakowski and Gyorgy Ligeti. Rakowksi’s etudes, some of which Dissanayake has recorded, have a nerdy humor about them, most obvious in their punning titles (“Taking the Fifth,” “Strident”), but his deft use of jazz is charming and unforced....
Der Ring des Nibelungen Lyric Opera of Chicago, 4/11, 12, 14 & 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was in the lobby of the Civic Opera House for the first night of my first assault on the Everest of opera: Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Four operas, actually–Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung–in four nights, each longer than the last, portraying a cycle of connected stories based on German and Nordic myth....
Both movies are free and will be screened by video projection. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pixar Animation’s four previous releases have grossed more than $2.2 billion, which makes me feel like I’m reviewing not a movie but an aircraft carrier. This comic book adventure is fun for the first half hour, as the world’s superheroes are forced into retirement by personal-injury lawsuits and assigned new identities by the government....
On his new East to West (Bloodshot) Nashville singer-songwriter Paul Burch takes a moment to salute the underappreciated rhythm guitarist, singing, “That old band would’ve broke down if he stopped chugging.” Burch has played lead guitar, bass, and even drums on his records, but he’s a rhythm guitarist at heart, a role that speaks to the modesty in his music: he’s not flashy, but few alt-country types are as consistent or as consistently satisfying....
Considering the Pretenders have been around for nearly three decades and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, Pirate Radio, the career-spanning box set Rhino released back in March, might’ve seemed a tad overdue. But front woman Chrissie Hynde, the one constant in the band’s ever shifting lineup, has always been about modesty and understatement: in an interview with Billboard earlier this year she said her only ambitions in life were to have fun and not wind up waitressing in Akron....
Since she moved here in 1994 for graduate school at the University of Illinois, Helen Mirra has become one of the city’s best-known artists, with recent exhibits in New York and Germany and upcoming shows in Tokyo and Paris. But now, as happens all too often when a Chicago artist achieves recognition, she’s moving away, first for a year’s residency in Berlin and then to teach art at Harvard. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
In the wake of recent releases, both MC Aceyalone and producer Rjd2 have been accused of being stuck: they could keep the loyalists entertained, but the true headz were whispering that their outta-the-gate work was all they’d ever be known for. But then nobody’s likely to eclipse Innercity Griots, the 1993 album from Aceyalone’s old group, Freestyle Fellowship. On their new collaboration, Magnificent City (Decon Inc.), I think both Acey and Rjd2 sound freer and more elastic....
Every day Reverend James Demus sees people who can’t get the Internet connection they need or want. Kids come into his south-side church, Park Manor Christian Church, and ask to do their homework on its computers because their families don’t have access to the Internet at home or can’t afford a fast connection. Other people come in because they can’t get a fast connection where they live even though they can afford it....
A friend of mine is setting up a Web site with some of her friends for feminist (mostly queer) porn. I’m straight, but she asked me if I wanted to be in it, with or without my boyfriend of two years. After I stipulated that I didn’t want to make porn with people I didn’t want to do it with, and made it clear that I like it a lot rougher than would be traditionally considered feminist, she said that anything I wanted to do was fine....
Restaurants $$$ $15-20 CHERUBS This smart BYO spot started life as a casual deli and cafe and still does double duty as a catering kitchen, but owners Shin Thompson and Kurt Chenier hit their stride earlier this year when they introduced three-course prix fixe dinners. The contemporary American menu showcases clean, streamlined, seasonal flavors; the summer menu includes pan-roasted barramundi in a pink peppercorn sauce with a grilled asparagus risotto cake and plum chutney as well as a toothsome serving of braised pork shoulder in a burly bourbon sauce....
When John Edel first went to Bridgeport in 2001 to look at the old Lowe Brothers paint warehouse, it was surrounded by a few low brick buildings and lots of overgrown vacant lots filled with trash left by drive-by dumpers. A couple homeless guys were living in some steel containers out back, and a pack of dogs roamed the area. The warehouse’s owner, Tim Medema, told Edel that a year earlier one of the dogs had attacked a man and the man shot it....
The first thing you need to know about Mayor Daley’s budget, released on October 10, is that it’s nothing more than a projection. The mayor’s bean counters calculate how much money the city can expect to take in through fees, fines, and taxes over the next year and balance that against the amount they plan to spend. If, one year later, the city brings in more or spends less than anticipated, there’s a surplus and taxpayers would theoretically get a refund (ha ha ha)....
Kim Joon Ironic that identity theft should become such a big issue just when identity has become so obviously a thing of the past. But then we always cry loudest over the deadest doctrines–and anyway, what we call identity theft isn’t really about identity at all but about buying power, which remains a vital concept. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Korean artist Kim Joon clearly understands that identity–the real Western humanist thing, the sense of oneself as an individual with unique characteristics, an independent fate, and very possibly a soul–isn’t an option favored by consumer culture....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in US government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors…”...
How much of all Internet traffic is pornography? I’m talking Web pages, peer-to-peer transfers, and so on–the whole kit and caboodle. My friend claims that by far the majority of Internet traffic is porn. I’d say that while it makes up a large percentage, it’s probably less than half. Who’s right? –Allen Gainsford, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Livid critics went to town, pointing out so many flaws in Rimm’s work that Time printed a partial retraction....
Friday 17 EATS TAPES This San Francisco duo makes music the old-fashioned way: they jury-rig decrepit beatboxes, circuit-bent gadgets, and other banged-up junk, mount it all in a set of old suitcases, and tweak knobs until asses start wigglin’ and titties start jigglin’, or someone vomits. Recent signees to techno/weirdo label Tigerbeat6, they’re set to put out their debut album, Sticky Buttons, later this summer; their unreleased demos sound like Take Your Kids to Work Day at Throbbing Gristle’s studio, though they manage to hopscotch their way to a hot groove or two in the course of things....
Before December 9, Jackson Presley Diamond was a healthy kid. He’d learned to crawl, sit, walk, and run right on schedule. At 18 months he was starting to talk and was rapidly accumulating vocabulary words. He liked to stack blocks and knock them down, and when he heard music—his father, Lee, plays drums in the local punk duo the Douglass Kings—he’d pull his parents up from their chairs to dance with him....
Willie “Big Eyes” Smith is best known as Muddy Waters’s longtime drummer, but he began his career in the 50s as a harmonica player, appearing on classic singles like Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy.” In recent years he’s returned to his original instrument, and his latest disc, Way Back (Hightone), shows he’s lost none of his prowess. Smith’s raucous tone, dramatic swoops, and wide-ranging colorations recall Little Walter Jacobs, but he builds on Jacobs’s innovations instead of merely imitating them....
Chicago’s ZZZZ is an unusually difficult band to describe because its music is such a crazy hybrid: the quartet wraps polka-worthy beats and psychedelic keyboards around lurching math-rock time changes, fills in the foregrounds with swirling, klezmeresque sax, and bases its licks on dark minor and penta-whatever scales, which makes me wonder if they’ve been listening to Rom wedding music on top of everything else. The music evokes tragedy, terror, and a perverse sense of fun–ex-Sweep the Leg Johnny saxophonist Steve Sostak in particular has a bug-eyed, menacing stage presence....
