THE WILLIAM DARKE PSYCHO CIRCUS & FREAK SHOW SPECTACULAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to Jim Rose and Lollapalooza, sideshows are very hip right now. Which is bad news for sideshow lovers: for every troupe that’s got its act together there’s another, like the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, getting lots of press for a show that’s pretty lame but that photographs well and sounds good in print....
By Tori Marlan One might wonder what Robert Larson, the business manager, was doing at In These Times in the first place. Why would a lawyer, certified public accountant, and MBA with Republican leanings take a $21,000 job at a liberal political magazine? “Ironically, money is not important to me,” says Larson, who now admits to embezzling over $100,000 from the publication. Nor, he says, are politics. “I’m not a political ideologue....
WOLTER WIERBOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There isn’t much Dutch trombonist Wolter Wierbos can’t do. He’s played precise chamber jazz with Maarten Altena, garrulous open-ended freebop with Gerry Hemingway, and throbbing postpunk with the Ex. Yet you can pick his distinctive personality out of even the busiest melee–he’s the European answer to great, boundary-busting Americans like Ray Anderson and George Lewis. He speaks the classic trombone vocabulary as naturally as he does Dutch, mixing throaty growls, fat smears, elegant slinkiness, and impeccable wah-wahs like some long-lost Ellington sideman, but he’s just as adept when he gets abstract....
Just as she’s about to start a job with room service at a luxury hotel in Paris, a young woman (Virginie Ledoyen) tells her boyfriend that she’s pregnant and wants to keep their child. They quarrel but arrange to meet an hour later, and the film then follows her first hour at work in real time. This segment of Benoit Jacquot’s compelling 1995 feature, written with Jerome Beaujour, is a stunning demonstration of moral and existential suspense in relation to duration, much like Agnes Varda’s 1962 Cleo From 5 to 7....
At a demolition site on the southwest side, an end loader pulls up to a diminutive old man wielding a hammer. The man, who has a lazy eye and a mouth full of false teeth, looks up with dismay as a new load of bricks tumbles out of an enormous set of jaws and lands on the small mountain already amassed in front of him. He hates it when the wreckers pile up the bricks this way....
Camp Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andy Warhol’s 1965 response to Susan Sontag’s famous essay defining “camp” won my heart at the outset when its cast members (including Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga, and Jack Smith) start by discussing summer camps they’ve attended. Filmed at Warhol’s New York studio, the Factory, against walls covered with silver foil, each person presents a performance illustrating his or her idea of camp....
By Zak Mucha Sadlon had known since he was a student in Czechoslovakia that The Good Soldier Svejk was a classic, but he reread it in English and doubted his memory of it. He thought Parrott’s translation was a different book and wanted a second opinion. He knew Joyce was a voracious reader. “It took me three years until I gave Mike the book,” he says. “I was afraid to give it to him because–see, my wife is an insomniac, and when I started reading Svejk to her several different times, guaranteed, within 20 minutes she’d be dead to the world....
CESARIA EVORA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the past decade, singer Cesaria Evora has concentrated almost exclusively on the national song form of her native Cape Verde Islands, morna–thought to be a hybrid of Portuguese fado, Brazilian modhina, and a local rhythm called lundum–but on her new Cafe Atlantico (RCA Victor) she channels a wider variety of the currents flowing through her birthplace, the port town of Mindelo....
Friday 8/21 – Thursday 8/27 22 SATURDAY Paul Bossie estimates he handed out 7,000 antiwar leaflets at the Air and Water Show last year. Bossie, a peace activist who calls the annual pageant “a giant commercial for the military,” claims he could have handed out 20,000. “I was taking it easy,” he says. He and a handful of others will be leafleting and hanging banners again at this year’s noisy debacle....
KAREN MASON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a long way from Orphans–the funky, now-defunct Lincoln Avenue tavern where I first saw Karen Mason 20 years ago, singing for whatever cash listeners dropped into a hat–to Le Cabaret at Cite, the scenic and pricey penthouse supper club at Lake Point Tower where she’s performing through this weekend. The distance–aesthetically as well as vertically–is an apt measure of how far Mason herself has come: the eager, anxious kid with the Minnelli-size voice and a tendency toward all-stops-out bathos has grown into an elegant singing actress of real power and often exquisite subtlety....
LAKSHMINARAYAN GLOBAL MUSIC FESTIVAL WITH L. SUBRAMANIAM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Violinist and composer Lakshminarayana Subramaniam is no household name–and in fact, even in households used to such polysyllabic appellations, people are more likely to know his violinist brother, L. Shankar, who first caught Western ears as a cofounder of John McLaughlin’s East-West fusion, Shakti, in the mid-70s. But even then Subramaniam was entertaining larger crowds, touring Europe and the U....
LOUIS SMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite remarkable exceptions like Clark Terry, who’s 78, and Doc Cheatham, who sounded 40 in his 80s, trumpeters as a rule age faster than other jazzmen: the instrument’s demands on the lungs and lips shorten most players’ careers. Trumpeter Louis Smith is only 68, but he may merit a place alongside Terry and Cheatham–even though he no longer plays with the same bright swagger and intrepid articulation of his highly regarded debut, released 42 years ago on Blue Note....
Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s reassuring to see Harold Henderson outline the tactical confusion in the Buy Nothing Day strategy (especially in its tendency to inflate the role of retail consumption in environmental problems), as he does in his “Buy the Right Thing” review essay in the December 18 Reader. While Henderson’s account of the economic innocence in the “buy nothing” strategy seems generally incisive and on the mark, such a strategy may well be more muddled than he suggests....
RONNIE BAKER BROOKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ronnie Baker Brooks played his first gig in 1975, at the age of nine–when his father, guitarist Lonnie Brooks, invited him to sit in at a south-side club called Pepper’s Hideout. By 1986 he’d graduated to a full-time gig with dad’s band, and his 1998 solo debut, Golddigger (Watchdog), revealed a guitar style that spanned the modern blues spectrum....
Hey, Everybody: I’m beginning to get a complex. I wonder what I’m doing wrong. I wonder if they would be more satisfied if they had been with someone better endowed. During intercourse, I feel myself becoming discouraged: I think that she will never enjoy this as much as I do, and sometimes these thoughts have caused me to go soft in the middle of the act. Please tell me what to do....
SLOAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Halifax quartet has slogged through a lot of industry bullshit in the last few years–Geffen gave ’em the boot after two albums, causing a temporary breakup, and when the band reformed several months later and released a third album, its U.S. label, the Enclave, went under. These trials have taught Sloan that DIY can be good business, and the group’s fourth and latest album, Navy Blues, was released on its own Murderecords....
What’s the connection between the human menstrual cycle and the moon? Do our cycles last exactly one lunar month for a reason, or is it just a coincidence? I wonder how our cycles–not to mention our calendars–would work if we didn’t have a moon. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The smart money says it’s coincidence. In Science and the Paranormal (1983), astronomer George O....
WILHELM BRUCK & THEODOR ROSS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There isn’t exactly what you’d call a robust repertoire for guitar in contemporary classical music, and what literature does exist tends to be dry and academic, in the worst sense. In part that’s why German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s extraordinary 1977 guitar duet, Salut für Caudwell, was such a welcome addition to the canon. It features dazzlingly intense hockets–cascades of arpeggiated notes that ricochet between the players with split-second precision–and an almost bouncy staccato section with interdigitated guitar and vocal parts; Lachenmann also attended meticulously to various extended plectrum techniques and modes of scraping and glissing....
By Michael Miner Until last week the Press papers had a real one. There were guest columnists, and there were the regulars: Jack Zimmerman opining on Jerry Falwell and Teletubbies, Hal Dardick ripping the death penalty, Mike Sandrolini musing on Bill and Monica, Don Hammontree finding glimmers of peace in Northern Ireland. These were local guys, unknown outside Du Page but weighing in on the same hefty matters that occupy George Will, John Kass, and Robert Novak....
Archer Prewitt, Inc. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Prewitt, 36, moved to Chicago in 1991 with the Coctails, an eclectic, Martin Denny-crazy quartet he joined in art school in Kansas City. By the time the lounge revival hit, they’d moved on to less kitschy, more modern pop, and when the band split up in 1995, after issuing four albums, half a dozen singles, and boatloads of handmade merchandise, Prewitt was ensconced as a guitarist in the Sea and Cake....
