MARY LANE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » West-side vocalist Mary Lane came of age in the 50s, the heyday of Chicago blues, performing with the likes of Magic Sam, Otis Rush, and Elmore James as well as her late husband, vocalist-guitarist Morris Pejoe. Her style has changed little since then: she eschews frills, digging into the bone and sinew of the blues with knifelike emotional directness....
Media Assassin: Works by Art Jones Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The short videos on this program, concerned mostly with hip-hop and related cultural issues, are forceful and appealingly anarchic. Jones makes original and creative use of the medium: taping images off television or copying them so many times that they’re flickery and fuzzy, he expresses the alienation of his subjects–often hip-hop musicians or DJs–from mainstream culture....
Sisters of the Great Lakes: Art of American Indian Women By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several pieces replace the complete picture of Three Sisters with multiple, more open images. Shirley M. Brauker’s Sisters is a clay vessel solid in its lower half but broken in the upper by a friezelike openwork design that includes four women and various plants and animals....
RICKY SKAGGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ricky Skaggs made his mark as the first bluegrass artist to successfully cross over to the mainstream country market, blending the style seamlessly with gospel and hard 50s country under a shiny pop surface. Although he’s never entirely abandoned his roots–which include cutting his musical teeth in a duo with Keith Whitley, playing with Ralph Stanley and the Country Gentlemen, and sharpening his arranging and production skills with Emmylou Harris–the new Bluegrass Rules!...
SALAMANDER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Erik Wivinus and Sean Connaughty first joined their guitars and voices as Salamander in 1992, says Wivinus, “We sounded like Low–only we hadn’t heard Low yet.” Since then the Minneapolis duo has broken up and and reformed, with various additional members, half a dozen times, and its sound has morphed along with the lineup. In 1997, after one of the breakups, Wivinus took one of Salamander’s demos to Providence for the first Terrastock festival, a now-legendary benefit for the British psychedelia fanzine Ptolemaic Terrascope....
The Caravan Project: When Nights Were Dark Performers on occasion try to make critics irrelevant. At worst they’re trying to protect their work from attack. But at best they’re trying to change the relationship with their audience. Some performers are populists who want to bring art to the people, unmediated by concert halls, ticket purchases, and critics–all the mechanisms of elitism in the arts. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
The Chosen Ones Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one can accuse Robert Fitzpatrick of championing art for art’s sake. During his first six months as director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Fitzpatrick has appointed new administrators for membership, publications, and public relations; he’s also planned changes to the museum’s physical appearance and developed a penchant for throwing parties at the museum’s expense....
Amy Seeley and the Moline Madman Then along comes Amy Seeley to remind us just how powerful theatrical autobiography can be. Amy Seeley and the Moline Madman may look like its numerous predecessors: Seeley just stands onstage and tells us about her odd family, building to her father’s battle with cancer. But her efficient storytelling–her keen eye for detail, sophisticated humor, and refusal to sentimentalize even the biggest tear-jerking moments in her life–separates her from the crowd....
Dietrich and Lena Friedrichs married in 1905 and a year later moved into a new two-story, white frame house on the corner of what are now Busse and Maple streets in Mount Prospect. It was only the thirteenth house built in the town, but the community already had an interesting history, says Mount Prospect Historical Society director Gavin Kleespies. Standing in their lace-curtained parlor almost a century later, Kleespies explains that the Friedrichses were transitional figures in that history–one foot planted in the community’s insular, Germanic past, the other stepping into its future....
Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall, January 22 It’s a shame, really. Dumbarton Oaks deserved better. Stravinsky was one of the composers who most strongly resisted Beethoven’s dominance; he spent most of his career seeking out and exploiting musical idioms that hadn’t been swallowed up by the Beethoven tradition, from baroque and ancient music to ragtime and jazz. Bach was the model for Dumbarton Oaks, a kind of mutant Brandenburg Concerto in which Bach’s lovely contrapuntal architecture is invaded by a mysterious Stravinskian darkness....
TV Guidance “You got a little further than most people who watch television or who enjoy television,” says Daniel Tilles, a producer who’s documenting the group for a program that’s broadcast to France, Switzerland, and Belgium. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t think we took it further than anyone else,” says Amy Bugbee, Stocky’s sister. “We’re just willing to admit that television is God....
WENDO KOLOSOY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » African pop music didn’t seep into America’s mainstream until the 80s, when pop artists like Paul Simon and Talking Heads began borrowing from it and isolated stars like King Sunny Ade and Fela Kuti landed major-label contracts here. But in fact it has a history as deep as American R & B, and its relative obscurity makes the appearance of great Congolese singer Wendo Kolosoy, now in his mid-70s, even more important....
One World. Cheaper telecommunications means more exporting and importing of services, writes James Burnham in a recent study published by Washington University’s Center for the Study of American Business. Jobs that involve standardized skills–like software writing and routine document processing–may be done more cheaply in Ireland or India than in Ravenswood. And xenophobia may even speed up the process: “Competition between countries is likely to be even more intense if barriers to the physical movement of workers from lower income to higher income countries continues to increase, as has been the case in recent years....
Friday 2/14 – Thursday 2/20 Topless waitresses, exotic dancers, and a bondage rack with hot-wax torture are just a taste of the naughty menu available at tonight’s King VelVeeda’s Court of Porn. The smut fest kicks off a monthlong exhibit of the artist’s dark work (featured in such comics as Horny Biker Sluts and She-Male Trouble) and includes a special appearance by porn star Seka, music by Three Blue Teardrops, and free cheesecake....
GENETIC MATERIAL, at Live Bait Theater. Like DNA, our singular life stories make us unique. And that’s the thrust of Genetic Material, an evening of autobiographical monologues by Tekki Lomnicki and Lotti Pharriss in Live Bait Theater’s “Fillet of Solo Festival.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In “Paper Doll,” Lomnicki expresses smart-assed disgust with the people who’ve referred to her throughout her life as a “little doll” (she stands about three feet tall), then expands the doll image to talk about childhood fears and Barbie envy....
Jazz Scene Goes South Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Wicker Park’s loss is about to become the South Loop’s gain: A few weeks ago Marguerite Horberg, who struggled to keep HotHouse afloat for seven years, leased a new, 7,000-square-foot space at 700 S. Wabash; if all goes well the club will reopen in October. And last weekend, following a brief, unsuccessful relocation to Andersonville, the Bop Shop opened its doors at 1146 S....
By Jeremy Mullman Young is already wearing Northwest-ern’s colors, a baggy purple-and-black parka covering his six-one, 180-pound frame, an Adidas Big Ten gym bag at his feet. He’s the first black Chicago high schooler to accept a basketball scholarship to Northwestern since Art Aaron of Saint Ignatius in 1980. In two decades Northwestern has landed only five basketball players from Chicago, three white and two black. The black players were both second-generation Northwestern students, one of whom had attended a Virginia boarding school....
MALDITA VECINDAD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next to the recent invasion of savvy postmodern Latin rock bands like Bloque, Los Amigos Invisibles, and Aterciopelados, Mexico’s Maldita Vecindad sounds relatively scrappy. Even Mostros (BMG U.S. Latin), the band’s latest and most accomplished album, feels garagey by comparison. But Maldita Vecindad helped lay the tarmac those jet-setting synthesists landed on, forming in 1985 and touring the States and Europe in the early 90s....
One on One For it was on that court at Lunt and Damen one day last summer that Stuart Menaker and Ira Berkow, two worn and creaky 50-something basketball warriors, met to continue their ancient rivalry. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was a pivotal time in the city’s basketball history; the game, long dominated by Jews and Italians, was becoming more of a black kids sport....
Seven Letters and a Cloud of Dust Sherman’s having dinner at Edwardo’s with the current national Scrabble champion, Brian Capalletto, and my boyfriend and wannabe champion, Marty Gabriel. All three are competing in the top division, but after eight rounds Sherman is nowhere near the top. Capalletto is in second place, Gabriel in first, which is something of a coup. I’m tied for sixth in the third division, which is next to the bottom, and playing only tolerably well....
