Angel in the Lookingglass Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Schwimmer was unavailable for comment at press time, and John Morris, president of the company’s board of directors, would not confirm the story. But Morris admits that $2 million is “the magical figure” needed to fund a space, and Schwimmer, he says, “has a history of helping the company,” which celebrates its tenth anniversary this fall....
Keeping track of public opinion, if any. Joseph Schwieterman and Brian Maddox of DePaul University on the results of their national survey on railroad policy (“Railgram,” February): “Don’t expect citizens to have even a rudimentary knowledge of historical events shaping today’s industry. When asked when Amtrak established service, more than a third responded with dates before the end of World War II. One in 12 responded that Amtrak was created during the 1800s (Amtrak ran its first train in 1971)....
It’s hard to think of a musical style that’s been discussed, celebrated, and borrowed by so many yet heard by so few as drum ‘n’ bass. The music formerly known as jungle has left traces on pop albums like Everything but the Girl’s Walking Wounded and smothered the new David Bowie…but who’s actually got the latest Peshay record? It’s precisely this cart-before-the-horse dilemma that will in all likelihood prevent electronica–the blanket term favored by the music biz for drum ‘n’ bass, along with its older siblings techno, instrumental hip-hop, ambient dub, and trip-hop–from becoming the industry’s new cash cow, despite concerted efforts to milk it....
By Ben Joravsky In many ways Schmidt’s showdown with central-office chieftains was no surprise, since he’s been a major pain in their necks for a long time. In addition to teaching English and journalism, Schmidt is the editor of Substance, a muckraking monthly teachers’ newspaper that hammers hard at schools CEO Paul Vallas, Mayor Daley, and Chicago Teachers Union president Thomas Reece, whom the paper all but accuses of rigging a ratification vote in the rank- and-file election on the teachers’ contract....
Robbie Fulks When I interviewed Robbie Fulks last year, the Chicago-based singer-songwriter claimed that though his music was based on honky-tonk, he couldn’t “sound the full diapason” as long as he was with Bloodshot Records. And so, after two acclaimed albums on the local “insurgent country” indie–Country Love Songs in 1996 and South Mouth in ’97–Fulks was off to Geffen, where he felt he could broaden his sound as well as his audience....
LE QUAN NINH & GUILLERMO GREGORIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » French-Vietnamese percussionist Le Quan Ninh is a professed anarchist, and his highly intuitive collaborative improvising certainly hints at a desire to reconcile freedom with collectivism. On the new La Voyelle Liquide (Erstwhile), a superb collection of electroacoustic duets with fellow percussionist Günter Müller, the two are constantly on the move in search of common ground....
Narita: Heta Village Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From 1967 to 1974 Japanese documentarian Shinsuke Ogawa lived with the farmers of Sanrizuka, whose village was targeted for demolition to make room for Tokyo’s Narita airport. Supported by radical students, the farmers protested their eviction, and Ogawa joined in, recording both the long-term struggle and the everyday life of the village. His intense involvement eventually yielded five films with a combined running time of about 15 hours; the 146-minute Narita: Heta Village (1973) is the second and final segment included in Doc Films’ retrospective of virtuoso cinematographer Masaki Tamura....
Lead Stories Bottom of the Gene Pool Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Police in Bonita Springs, Florida, charged Randall James Baker, 45, with aggravated battery in August for shooting his friend Robert Callahan in the head. A sheriff’s spokesman said Baker and Callahan had a playful tradition of trying to shoot the little buttons off the top of each other’s baseball caps. Alcohol reportedly played a role in the game....
Sleater-Kinney All Hands on the Bad One (Kill Rock Stars) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With their debut EP, Sleater-Kinney, and their first LP, Call the Doctor, Sleater-Kinney had already established themselves as major players in the northwestern punk scene when Dig Me Out was released. But Dig Me Out blew them up bigger than that world. It fleshed out ideas only hinted at on Call the Doctor....
Same Business, New Family Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think there’s a little bit of passing the torch,” says co-owner Bill FitzGerald, who until now has been the club’s only booking agent. As briefly noted in this column last month, he’s in the midst of developing a new restaurant adjacent to the club with Sheila McCoy, owner of Wicker Park’s Leo’s Lunchroom. “I thought to myself, How can I possibly put the effort required into this if I have all this other stuff on my mind?...
Today my obsession is old country-and-western music. Already this morning I’ve crawled butt-up in a skirt across the filthy floor to retrieve some records that had fallen beneath the bins. But the first two thrift stores bottomed out, and I can feel my early-morning ardor fading. And this Unique, so busy by noon, has such a tiny record section. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a circuitous, halfhearted route to the records, I slow down to admire an old leather suitcase and a man walks smack into me....
The Sound Board Was His Springboard Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the adventure didn’t end there: The great Algerian rai singer Khaled heard the album and was so impressed that he enlisted Funk Essentials leader Lati Kronlund and Zerang to produce half the songs on his latest album, Kenza, out now on Ark 21. There are also plans for the band to back Khaled on a major European tour this fall....
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Last season he was at his most erratic. At least twice he reached the top of his game, with an all-Bartok program and a concert performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron. These are on my short list of all-time great concerts; Boulez’s adventurous taste, his brilliantly analytical clarity, his imaginative sympathy, and his forceful dramatic intelligence all came together to illuminate some of the darkest and most difficult music ever composed....
It’s after midnight and the streets are nothing but empty cabs. We’re driving in circles, jockeying for worthless positions, waiting for the smallest crumbs to fall. “I’ll let you know when we get there.” A trace of an accent, a bit of a drawl, way too much attitude. “Why not?” Straight out of The Wild Bunch. William Holden: Fifty thousand dollars cuts an awful lot of family ties. “Probably all dead,” he says....
Excerpted from Each time I smoke a cigarette, my mind wanders back to ancient Greece. You know, those slave-owning misogynist homosexuals on whom the United States based their philosophical and political ideas. The ancient Greeks would pour wine onto the ground as an offering to the gods. These libations were a celebration of the raw, primal forces that fuel the mysteries of life and are responsible for the simple pleasures, such as the growing of grapes....
These two dance programs are the first to take the stage of the new Storefront Theater downtown. Showcasing the range of modern dance, they run the gamut from deep and dark to light and sparkling, from the formalism of Sheldon B. Smith’s Zharmon to the narrative of Peter Sciscioli’s Cc:. Appearing on the first program, “Balanced on the Ledge,” Zharmon sets five dancers in motion within a grid of 15 small squares placed in three rows of five....
Kathie Bergquist had a dream: to publish a book by the time she turned 30. Just a couple weeks before her big three-oh, Bergquist’s first volume hits the shelves, right on schedule–Ricky Martin: An Unauthorized Biography. “This might not be what I had in mind,” she says, “but here it is!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bergquist has been writing, and writing about music, for a long time....
Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival This video documentary was made for Canadian TV, but it offers so many insights into gay and lesbian stand-up comedians that its mainstream style is easily forgiven. David Adkin cuts between comedy bits and interviews with the performers backstage at the first queer comedy festival in Toronto. Lea DeLaria, Kate Clinton, and Scott Capurro are the brilliant headliners, and Christopher Peterson’s female impersonation is good shtick and great improvisation....
To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From that vantage point, I can say that if the Trib’s travel editor thinks he has lost only one writer, he is wrong. I’ve heard from other travel writers who have pointedly declined to sign even the proclaimed “better” Trib contract, and from a gaggle of freelancers who haven’t spoken to a Trib editor but have simply crossed the paper off their submissions list and gone on to other ways to make a living....
If you’re accustomed to shelling out big bucks for organic food, remember you can still find it in the ground, in the wild, and free of charge. Once a month Wes Wagar convenes the Foraging Friends, a group of natural foodies and other interested parties, at the Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park. From there they carpool to various forest preserves, vacant lots, and sometimes private properties (with the owners’ permission), where they hunt for mustard, garlic, black currants, grapes, mushrooms, nuts, and seeds....
