Posts

MAGNETIC FIELDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “More than love, I think,” the Magnetic Fields’ songwriter Stephin Merritt said in an interview last year, “I care about popular music.” On the band’s extraordinary new 69 Love Songs (Merge)–a three-CD collection that in fact contains 69 love songs–he often directs his serenades to beloved music instead of beloved people: one acoustic tune is addressed to the acoustic guitar itself, and the subject of “My Only Friend” is Billie Holiday; there’s “Punk Love” on the first disc, “World Love” on the second, and “Experimental Music Love” on the third....

Moby Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As “electronica” fades happily into the annals of showbiz hype, what we’re left with–a whole lotta what we used to just call dance music–is at a crossroads. And by extension, so is Moby. Though he continues to be one of the most singular talents in music, his place in the postrave world is uncertain. Few artists in any genre have risen so far and fallen so hard....

I went to a fireworks display and a baseball game broke out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the night began, pity was the prevailing emotion, though I’d prefer to label it pathos. There’s a bit of superiority of subject to object in pity; pathos involves a stronger empathy, an identification with the object, and I felt that every time Frank Thomas came to the plate....

Dance COLEctive Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes self-imposed limits actually enhance creativity, as when a poet restricts herself to a certain rhyme scheme and meter. Margi Cole, artistic director of the Dance COLEctive, set herself a spatial goal in her new duet, Between Red Velvet Ropes: originally she hoped to present it in a hallway of the historic Glessner House, and when she found she couldn’t, she created a dance within the imagined boundaries of a long, narrow hall....

By Michael Miner The news was sort of interesting, so she took a journalism course at Western Michigan University. “This teacher was a dyed-in-the-wool journalism guy, and he lit a fire.” Life happened, and there she was at the age of 44, an editorial writer and columnist at the Sun-Times. A success. But not a perfectly happy one, which is why she went to see Frank Tobin, who’s over on Pershing Road....

Fred Goodman With the rarest of exceptions, the music industry is a festering slime pit populated by rabid weasels, a soulless corporate machine devoid of morals and compassion and dedicated to the pursuit of the almighty dollar, artistic integrity be damned. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The book opens with his rose-colored recollection of a summer at camp during the early 70s, when rock ‘n’ roll was a “secret language” teenagers could use to suss one another out....

Just about everyone I’ve spoken to regarding the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American movies—presented on a stultifyingly vacuous three-hour CBS special last week—has been depressed about it, in a hangdog sort of fashion. Part of this is the lackluster list itself and part is the absolute failure of the show to offer anything resembling an interesting justification of any of the titles that got picked. But it’s not at all the sort of deflation that comes when outsize hopes are dashed....

With one foot firmly planted on the prairie frontier and the other in the drawing rooms of her mind, Juliette Magill Kinzie wrote the first known account of life in early Chicago. Published in 1856, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the North-West is a hodgepodge of autobiography, social history, and travelogue chronicling the years between the Fort Dearborn massacre of 1812 and the Sauk war of 1832. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Stories In a September hearing before an employee appeals panel in Drogheda, Ireland, Paula Levins, 36, claimed the accounting firm M.A. Whately dismissed her because she was unwilling to share an office with an excessively flatulent coworker. Levins said that she was pregnant at the time and that the man’s gas exacerbated her nausea, especially in winter when the windows were closed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Texas judicial discipline panel issued a public reprimand in April to former judge Robert Hollman, who resigned early in 2000 following a female employee’s sexual harassment complaint....

It turns out there are limits to love after all. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was according to form. The Hawks have played on the road with the vim and vigor of a randy traveling salesman, producing a .500 record, only to return home with all the enthusiasm of a long-bored spouse. (Not 24 hours after this loss, they would travel to Nashville and beat the very same Predators 2-1....

Will the Amusement Tax Get the Ax? The short list of people interested in nurturing any local music scene rarely includes politicians–in fact, in Chicago the pols seem too busy fielding complaints about the noise and booze that go hand in hand with live music. Yet last month at a City Council meeting, 43rd Ward alderman Charles Bernardini and 44th Ward alderman Bernie Hansen introduced legislation designed specifically to help smaller clubs around the city....

Brother, can you spare a hut? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After settling into our new bamboo-thatched house on stilts, built for us by the village council, we sat one day with our neighbors for storytelling. When my turn came, I showed our new friends a collection of photographs of Chicago. I was planning to wow them with the enormous buildings of an American city....

Chicago Moving Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watching Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Representatives, we watched the power of Christian fundamentalism at work. Fundamentalist movements around the world–Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish as well as Christian–revere the law and believe in following it to the letter; the alternative, in their eyes, is punishment by a wrathful god or legislature. But Nana Shineflug in her evening-length piece Coming Forth by Day provides an antidote to fundamentalism from a surprising source–ancient Egyptian religion....

This 1998 Caspar Stracke feature is one of the rare experimental films in 35-millimeter, and though I could preview it only on video, it kept me fascinated even in that format. Stracke describes it as moving in a circle with neither a beginning nor an end; in the version I saw, the credits come in the middle. A lecture on the philosophical and psychoanalytic implications of the invention of the telephone by theorist Avital Ronell eventually turns into a story in black and white about a woman who has a lotus blossom growing in her left lung; at different times this film comes across as documentary, essay, performance art, and silent throwback (complete with intertitles and irises), and the capabilities and rhetoric associated with both computers and VCRs play a part in the continuously shifting and evolving discourse....

Friday 2/26 – Thursday 3/4 27 SATURDAY The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization started back in 1994, when residents learned that the Board of Education planned to build a school on a polluted site at 31st and Millard. They won that battle, but the group didn’t have the time or resources to investigate the construction of two other schools, which, it turns out, were built on land the state EPA never approved....

M With Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Grundgens, Ellen Widman, Inge Landgut, Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur, Franz Stein, and Theodor Loos. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lang himself correctly maintained to the end of his life that M was his best film–not so much for its formal beauty as for the social analysis that its form articulates. (In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Contempt–another restoration that will open at the Music Box a month from now, in which Fritz Lang plays himself–this point is underlined when he first meets Brigitte Bardot’s character, who expresses enthusiasm for his western Rancho Notorious; Lang graciously replies, “I prefer M....

Hot Licks for the Lord Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This obscure tradition began with a guitarist named Willie Eason, a member of the House of God, Keith Dominion, in Philadelphia. (The Keith Dominion is part of a Holiness movement started by an African-American woman, Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate, in 1903. Three years after her death in 1930, the church split into three denominations: the Keith Dominion, the McLeod Dominion, now called the Jewel, and the Lewis Dominion....

Wednesday, July 15, 12:00 AM 1458: Squad, we’re here with the owner of that red Maxima now, we’re at about 12– on Noble. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dispatcher: OK, 12– on Noble with the owner of the Maxima, ten-four. OK, 61-Boy has it stopped over by Halsted and Division. 61-Boy, am I correct, you have that red Maxima stopped over at Halsted and Division?...

I read with interest the story about John Berton disconnecting from the grid (“Circuit Breaker,” 11/19/99, Vol. 29, No. 8). Congratulations to him, and congratulations to Chicago for not having zoning restrictions against this type of small-scale solar and wind-energy installation. I’d like to point out that while there is a certain poetry in disconnecting from the grid, the true power of these types of installations is in reducing, not removing, our need for traditional electricity generators....

UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had an acquaintance who had trouble managing her dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. As I remember it, she was trying to use her dual citizenship status to avoid serving time in the Israeli army. Unfortunately the U.S. wouldn’t back her up since we don’t recognize dual citizenship. She had to either serve in the Israeli army (which meant, I’m pretty sure, renouncing her U....