Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t care much about gutters. “It is not the deluge of water in a storm that hurts any building,” he wrote in 1938. “It is ooze and drip of dirty water in thawing and freezing, increased by slight showers.” But in the case of Taliesin, Wright’s iconic home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, 200 miles northwest of Chicago, he might have been wrong. Taliesin (“shining brow” in Welsh) rose in stages to crown a lovely hill....
Filmmaker Mweze Ngangura was born in Congo and educated in Belgium, and since codirecting Life Is Rosy (1987) he’s made a number of documentary shorts about the African diaspora. In this 1998 dramatic feature a Congolese tribal king (Gerard Essomba) travels to Brussels in search of his long-lost favorite daughter, and customs officials, the police, and a greedy antiques dealer all try to strip him of his headdress and other regalia held sacred by his people....
Rainer Gross: Fingertip-Tingling By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gross’s warm, glowing Lasso might seem welcoming at first. But one soon becomes aware of several different elements in this large painting almost struggling with one another. Gross in fact painted it in layers, beginning with a yellowish one underneath, then bluish drips in a grid, then an “amorphous flesh tone” in puddles left in the center to dry, and finally small blue gray dots in rows over the whole surface....
LUSCIOUS JACKSON/CIBO MATTO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With their new albums both these New York combos have wedged their hip-hop-derived bricolage squarely into the pop hole, sanding off with sugar most of the rough edges that made their previous work so beguiling. Luscious Jackson have been heading this way since the beginning, hiding modest hooks under jacked-up street beats, but on the new Electric Honey (Grand Royal) the fly components are actually subordinate to the soft melodies, wrapped in thick layers of keyboards and snatches of heavily treated guitar....
Michael Solot reveals his true agenda in the final sentences of his review of John Colapinto’s book [June 2], when Solot asks whether Reimer has “any special insight into the feminine mind.” Since when is there such a thing as “a” feminine mind, some set of beliefs or feelings or attitudes or behaviors that all women–or all “true” women, Solot might say–share? There isn’t such a thing, any more than there’s a “masculine” mind....
General Idea By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In an interview General Idea pointed out that, because Indiana never copyrighted his image, it “spread…rapidly through the commercial media”; their use of a similar design thereby suggests the virus’s rapid spread. They also hoped that Indiana’s “Love” design would create for theirs “an aura of familiarity that would allow a more alarming content....
I am a 24-year-old woman dating a 39-year-old former porn actor. At first I was willing to believe he did porn to “support his art,” but now it seems that if he’s an artist at all it’s the pick-up variety. He constantly tells me he’s a sexual athlete who needs to have group sex. I am bisexual, but my last relationship broke up after a menage, so I’m reluctant to go that route again....
Baal All these deaths had a profound impact on Brecht’s worldview. In 1914 he’d written a column full of patriotic fervor and romanticized jingoism for a local newspaper. In “Augsburg Letters on the War,” composed as the first wounded and dead were arriving back in Augsburg, he described “the ruins of young men as they were carried past us on that gray day” yet concluded that “the great single thing that we Germans want is: To guard our honor....
FLYING LUTTENBACHERS 11/28, LOUNGE AX Too persistent to be a joke, too arrogant to be serious, Weasel Walter’s excessively excessive sonic-sabotage project just keeps picking up steam. At their best–which their new Gods of Chaos (Skin Graft) arguably is–the Luttenbachers sound like a high-speed tour-van wreck between Naked City and Fushitsusha while both bands just happen to be listening to a crappy live tape of Fear playing “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones....
Stilluppsteypa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title of the terrific new compilation (Microscopic Sound), on Caipirinha, is an apt description of the MO of an increasing number of electronic-music artists. In work being done everywhere from Japan (Ryoji Ikeda) to Finland (Pan Sonic), morsels of music, single tones or clicks, are stretched, chopped, distorted, blurred, and looped into a full meal. The trio Stilluppsteypa, from Iceland by way of the Netherlands, has evolved (devolved?...
By Jack Clark Across the way there’s a gas station. It’s an old-fashioned-looking place. And like the old days, there are no self-service pumps. There’s an apartment above the garage, which is rare in Chicago gas stations and makes the place look like a gangster hideout in a Bogart movie. Sometimes they’ll have some old car with a For Sale sign in the window sitting on the grass where Wolcott and Lincoln come to a point....
With every record it produces, the British folk family known as Waterson:Carthy proves over again that traditional music doesn’t have to sound like it belongs in a museum. For the clan’s latest collective offering, Broken Ground (Topic), singer and guitarist Martin Carthy–a veteran of Steeleye Span, the Albion Country Band, and the harmony vocal group the Watersons–and his singer-fiddler daughter Eliza paged through yellowed British songbooks to find forgotten gems. Martin’s liner notes are full of the lore unearthed with each discovery: of “The Ditchling Carol,” about a church choir that likes to take its music on the road despite the disapproval of church reformers, he writes, “Other places included going as far as Dorking twenty five miles or so away, which is nothing these days but these were people who walked to their gigs....
BRADLEY WILLIAMS & HIS ORIGINAL 21ST CENTURY REVIEW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the reference to the next century, this is not a thematic “revue” but an actual review, and it has nothing to do with music of the future. Rather, it uses the millennium’s imminent arrival as an excuse to look back at the past century’s musical styles–in particular those in which popular music merged or collided with the jazz so close to pianist Bradley Williams’s heart....
Stereolab, Mouse on Mars Of course, having the means to sample doesn’t guarantee that one has the vision to use the technology toward a greater end. But performing last week at Metro, both the British pop sextet Stereolab and German electronic style splicers Mouse on Mars demonstrated that they did, blending bits and pieces–the “dots and loops” of the title of Stereolab’s new album–into seamless new music. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Psycho With Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, Robert Forster, Philip Baker Hall, Ann Haney, and Chad Everett. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But let me be just. The first 53 minutes of Psycho–very nearly the first half, everything from when we enter a seedy Phoenix hotel room to when we see the sinking of a car in a marsh, capped by Norman Bates’s triumphant grin–constitute one of the supreme achievements of Hitchcock’s career....
Helen Zia was one of five children of immigrants from Shanghai who had met and married in New York. Her father had a degree from Saint John’s University, but he couldn’t find a job after the family settled in New Jersey in the 1950s. “He earned money as a taxi driver,” Zia recalls. “Later we kids helped him out in our home making baby toys and trinkets for flower shops.” He regularly wrote letters to newspapers and politicians, complaining about their views on China....
Jerico the Fool and Darshan With Custer, Curious Theatre Branch, at the Lunar Cabaret. It’s always a joy to watch Curious Theatre member Beau O’Reilly in action, and his appearance in Bryn Magnus’s elliptical monologue Jerico the Fool is no exception. Seated in a darkened corner of the Lunar Cabaret stage, O’Reilly delivers Magnus’s extended monologue, about a terminally unlucky working stiff, with so much charm and conviction it’s hard to believe he’s not improvising....
JESSE FORTUNE & LITTLE SMOKEY SMOTHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Abe “Little Smokey” Smothers and vocalist Jesse Fortune haven’t always gotten their due in this town, but these Chicago blues veterans have earned international reputations with their generation-spanning command of styles and influences. Smothers’s career stretches back to the mid-50s–and includes a stint backing Howlin’ Wolf–but he didn’t record Bossman (Black Magic), his first release under his own name, until 1993....
JUNE TABOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With her most recent album, Aleyn (Green Linnet), British folksinger June Tabor has come a long way from her early-70s beginnings. Back then she rendered traditional material with elaborate embellishment, usually unaccompanied. Her first real notoriety came when she paired up with Steeleye Span vocalist Maddy Prior to form Silly Sisters; through that outfit she met many of the collaborators she’d work with in subsequent years....
One of the best contemporary war films I know is this singular 1988 feature, the first by Guinea-Bissau filmmaker Flora Gomes (Po di sangui). The first half, as elemental and as unadorned as Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, concentrates on women fighting alongside guerrillas at the end of Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence in 1973, attacked by Portuguese helicopters as they travel on foot close to the border. The second half, more diffuse and at times more rhetorical, deals with the ambiguous conditions of the war’s aftermath....
