Posts

Ian Belknap lives on the border between two performing worlds. His act has a stand-up structure: he gets behind a microphone and spews funny shit. But his material is meaner, smarter, and more subversive than what your average Seinfeld-Leno wannabe spouts. And his ironic hipster (or is it faux hipster?) demeanor is closer to the realm of performance art. Fortunately the two sides of Belknap’s personality feed each other: his inner performance artist keeps his material and point of view fresh–I’ve never heard him joke about airline food, TV, or socks getting lost in the laundry–and his inner stand-up keeps his material funny....

By Ben Joravsky According to Morote, soccer was the means by which he overcame shyness and insecurity as a youngster growing up in Peru. He played day and night, and rose through the ranks of organized soccer until at age 20 he was a highly regarded goalie on Alianza Lima, a professional team. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But in the 1970s, he says, he gradually lost interest in the game....

MIRI BEN-ARI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe it comes from growing up in the middle of a simmering civil war, but Israelis, at least the ones I know, seem to have a preternatural awareness of their surroundings. So when violinist Miri Ben-Ari walks onstage at the Green Mill, I’m guessing she’ll take one look at the prewar decor, glance at the down-to-earth crowd, and decide to skip the smooth, synth-augmented tunes at the beginning and end of her debut disc, Sahara (Half Note)....

The 10th annual National Poetry Slam runs August 11 through 14. Preliminary and semifinal bouts take place Wednesday-Friday evenings (three per night) at the following Wicker Park venues: the Guild Complex at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 773-296-1268, ext. 26; the Subterranean Cafe & Cabaret, 2011 W. North, 773-278-6600; the Note, 1565 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-0011; Phyllis’ Musical Inn, 1800 W. Division, 773-486-9862; and Roby’s, 1944 W. Division, 773-252-9250. The championship final takes place Saturday at the Chicago Theatre, 175 N....

Plastic People of the Universe Nothing warms the cockles of an American heart like a good story about scruffy but noble rebels duking it out for their freedom against an evil empire. In fact, the story of the Plastic People of the Universe and their circle of ultimately successful dissident artist friends would make a great movie. There are so many great climactic scenes to choose from: the moment in 1977 when the imprisonment of manager Ivan Jirous and saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec for “disturbing the peace” inspired the drafting of Charter 77, a human-rights manifesto by the opposition that would peacefully take over in 1989; the inauguration of Havel as president; the band’s first show in 16 years, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Charter 77; the 1998 concert in New York, attended by longtime Plastic heroes Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs; perhaps even bassist and de facto bandleader Milan Hlavsa’s 1998 gig at the White House, where at Havel’s request he cheerfully accepted the onus of backing Lou Reed....

For many years Euripides’ The Bacchae has tantalized Xsight! artistic director Brian Jeffery. It must seem a natural for the man who helped create the 1989 sexual thriller/murder mystery What Are We Going to Do About Mary? and Xsight!’s 1990 religious satire, The Pope’s Toe, to explore the collision of religious faith, sexual passion, and social convention at the heart of this ancient Greek drama. But though Jeffery seems attracted to the play partly because of its excess–he says that nothing in contemporary drama is so “graphically out of proportion as the Greeks”–he’s also hoping to “live up to the challenge of a classic....

Brad Goode Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When trumpeter Brad Goode first hit town in the mid-80s, just out of college, he looked about 14; now in his mid-30s, he still looks young enough to get carded at the clubs he plays. But onstage his musical maturity was always self-evident, as he drew out lithe but complex lines with his light, skipping technique. And over the last dozen years, his travels through a wide range of jazz styles have given Goode plenty of opportunity to showcase his bright-toned virtuosity....

Justin Hayford’s review of Ghetto (November 12) reveals both his ignorance of Israeli culture and of the Holocaust. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He seemed to have culled from an entire play about the Vilna ghetto just one point: that Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol should be commended for his “disquieting honesty” in pointing out the “human contradiction” in all of us. Because the character of the Nazi Kittel, who is both a murderer and an art aficionado, is moved to tears by a beautiful song, Hayford writes, “Kittel may have done monstrous things, but he was human–after all, intolerance, brutality, and genocide are the rules, not the exceptions, in history....

JOE HENRY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joe Henry’s sensual, seductive, warmly melodic music is deceptive: the people who inhabit his songs are filled with deceit, self-hatred, insecurity, distrust, and debilitating desire. As with his last few efforts, on Henry’s new album, Fuse (Mammoth), his fractured images overlap and collapse into vague, often beautiful meanings. You have to love lines like, “My love is like a mountain, her mouth is like a mine / Incubating diamonds as we rise and shine,” but the interpretation is a little slippery–and that couplet, from “Angels,” is about as straightforward as they come on this record....

LOUIE BELLSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Louie Bellson first came into his own–as the first white drummer ever to play in Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and the first drummer of any color to contribute compositions to the maestro’s repertoire–he almost hid the electrifying energy that has distinguished his playing ever since. He made it sound so easy, and he played with such elegance and musicality, that listeners might have overlooked the flamboyant novelty he had already exhibited in the bands of Count Basie and Benny Goodman; one might even have mistakenly ranked him in a different echelon than his slightly older contemporary, the attention-grasping Buddy Rich....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Practicing for Yugoslavia: In April an air force pilot training at the Warren Grove Bombing Range in New Jersey missed his target by a mile and a half; the missile landed in a state forest preserve and started a fire that burned more than 18 square miles. Leading Economic Indicators Two professors reported in March that they had conducted identical polls on ethical questions, one of graduate business students and the other of inmates at three midwestern prisons, with remarkably similar results....

Paul Robeson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The U.S. government’s persecution of Paul Robeson during the cold war “illustrates the extent to which guardians of the culture are willing, when frightened, to attempt to blot from history a man’s meaning, his very existence,” wrote Professor Sterling Stuckey in a 1973 New York Times essay. One of our nation’s finest actors and singers, Robeson was hounded and smeared by authorities for his open embrace of communism and angry reaction against American racism....

We Americans are fond of thinking of Canadians, if we think of them at all, as politer, drabber, cleaner versions of ourselves–Wisconsinites squared. We don’t think of them as particularly funny. But some Canadians at least have a very sharp if somewhat cerebral and literary wit–and even more important, a major chip on their shoulders concerning their neighbors to the south. Moreover, Canadians have been a major presence in America’s comedy scene since at least the early 70s....

The Yeomen of the Guard, Light Opera Works, at Northwestern University, Cahn Auditorium. Strangely dark and emotionally ambivalent, this 1888 operetta by William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan veers far from the comic formulas of the same team’s H.M.S. Pinafore and The Mikado. Set in the time of Henry VIII, it concerns a condemned prisoner who escapes from the Tower of London by wooing two women: the daughter of a tower guard (or yeoman), whom he finally dumps, and the betrothed of a traveling jester....

Rock, Pop, etc. MUSIC OF ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER Sun 10/22, 3 PM, Star Plaza Theatre, I-65 and U.S. 30, Merrillville, Indiana. 773-734-7266 or 312-559-1212. MIGUEL BOSÉ & ANA TORROJA Wed 10/18, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence. 312-421-5121 or 312-559-1212. RALPH COVERT & ROB NEWHOUSE Free concert and discussion entitled “A History of Rock and Roll, Part 1: The Classics.” Thu 10/19, 6:30 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E....

By Ben Joravsky The community’s a curious place for a Lincoln Park-like land-use war. It is, residents joke, “nowhere land,” or the “pope’s nose of the city”–an anonymous slice of turf without a trendy name (officially, it’s part of Avondale) and no strong political identity. Even zoning officials don’t seem to know which ward it’s in. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet gentrification is slowly making its way west along Addison, the tell-tale sign being the number of suited professionals who hike home each afternoon from the Addison stop on the O’Hare line....

There’s no getting around it: George of the Jungle is an amiable, highly ingratiating piece of lowbrow entertainment, and the audience of mainly young children and parents I saw it with on Saturday night clearly had a ball. So did I, for that matter. If consumer advice on where to take your kids is what’s needed, change “worth seeing” into “a must-see.” On the other hand, if I–a nonparent–had to choose between seeing it a second time and seeing the black-and-white Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942) for the third or fourth time on video, I wouldn’t blink before selecting the latter....

D’ARCANGELO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their terrific recent album, Shipwreck, brothers Fabrizio and Marco D’Arcangelo add a new dimension to the notion of a vanity label: the way they mix overloaded-circuit beat science with ethereal, sometimes quasi-classical electronic melodies is a page right out of the book of Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, who put out the record on his Rephlex imprint....

By Grant Pick It’s not a big story, but it demonstrates Walters’s skill at storytelling. “Phil could take a simple notion and peel it down like an onion so you’d see its facets, its dimensions,” says Channel Two’s Carol Marin, who worked with Walters for years. “And I don’t care if you’re talking about a 7-Eleven robbery or the irony in how you market Father’s Day. On TV you can’t fake it....

Jan Erkert & Dancers at the Athenaeum Theatre, through March 22 Los Mu–equitos de Matanzas at the Museum of Contemporary Art, March 13 and 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jan Erkert is a serious artist. As she puts it in her mission statement, “We live in a world in need of awareness and wisdom of the body, in need of connections to the human spirit, in need of communication....