By Harold Henderson “No one takes you seriously unless you raise money,” she says. “Political insiders all wrote me off until I raised $350,000. Then, all of a sudden, people who had never talked to me before started saying, ‘That’s a lot of money.’” By the end of the race, she says, she’d pulled in close to $900,000–more than Blagojevich. (Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, there’s no limit on campaign spending in federal elections....
GERRY HEMINGWAY QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In work as a composer and bandleader and as a drummer for figures as diverse as Anthony Braxton, Ray Anderson, and German pianist Georg GrŠwe, Gerry Hemingway has accumulated a body of work strong enough to knock down walls–the walls between composition and improvisation, pure sound and carefully articulated melody, foreground and background. Hemingway’s primary vehicle is his quintet with bassist Mark Dresser (his rhythm partner in Braxton’s quartet), cellist Ernst Reijseger (who worked with him in GrŠwe’s trio), trombonist Wolter Wierbos, and reedist Michael Moore (who was preceded by rising star Don Byron)....
Laurie Anderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Laurie Anderson was digital before Wired coined the term digerati, a cybernaut before William Gibson discovered cyberspace, a composer of electronic music before electronica became the newest niche in the musical marketplace. But with the electronic revolution in art, we can see Anderson for what she always was: a gender-bending visionary. Years before boys started playing girls on-line and vice versa, Anderson was gleefully creating transgendered versions of herself–in sound and on video–through the miracle of computerized technology....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January KZZC-FM radio in Tipton, California, ended 18 consecutive months of being an all-“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” station, during which it played various versions of the song all day, seven days a week (except when it played the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” for one weekend). The station had been up for sale, and the owners only needed to keep the frequency occupied, but negotiations dragged on much longer than expected....
Lead Stories In November parishioners at Saint Andrew’s Church in London, England, overpowered a naked man wielding a sword after he attacked nine people during a children’s service. Also in November two former Rutgers men’s basketball team players filed a lawsuit against the school and its coach for making them run laps naked during a practice two years ago. In October a naked University of California at Santa Cruz student was hit by a car; he then commandeered it, drove off, and promptly crashed into a tree....
Luna’s Gaze Courage is often misidentified in the performing arts. Critics make a habit of praising big, loud pieces for their daring, which is a bit like gauging the boldness of a Hollywood film by the number of exploding objects. Sure, the faster-louder school of art provides its share of thrills, but they’re usually cheap and easy; how much brainpower does it take for the otherwise ingenious Blue Man Group to conclude their show by blaring techno music and dumping a few thousand feet of toilet paper on the audience?...
To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Neal Pollack did an excellent job in describing the ridiculous situation involving the blind street musician Gary Jones and the CTA president Frank Kruesi [May 14]. It’s good to know that a political mercenary who clearly never missed a meal in his life has the time to pursue peanut salespersons, small vendors, and musicians while the real problems on the CTA, like maintenance, the resultant scheduling problems, and general comfort on the system, go unaddressed....
In the days after the bloody confrontation between labor and police at Haymarket Square in 1886, John V. Farwell and his brother Charles B. were reminded of their return home from a hunting trip out west during a railroad strike nine years earlier. They were traveling on a troop train bringing federal soldiers from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to Chicago to quell any further disturbance. It took several days for the train to reach the city, long enough for the brothers to decide that Chicago needed its own federal military post....
SEELY 10/24, Lounge Ax In the cosmology of the fair folk, the Seelie Court are the noble romantic fairies, and the Unseelie Court are the things that go bump in the night. On its second Too Pure release, Seconds, this smart, ethereal pop quartet out of Atlanta lives up to its appellation. But be warned that even good fairies have an unnerving habit of spiriting mortals away for a wild night that turns out to have really lasted 20 years–and after that much of this sweetness and light, you might come back hankering for a little more bump....
Friday, October 16 A French comedy about half a dozen musicians and the crises they encounter after being booked to perform a New Year’s Eve concert in a castle in Normandy, directed by professional musician Denis Dercourt. (600 N. Michigan, 4:45) Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl Among the most provocative works about the intersection of British and Muslim culture in contemporary England is “My Son the Fanatic,” a short story by Hanif Kureishi that describes generational, religious, and ethical conflicts in a depressed northern town....
People who can’t see are blind, and people who can’t hear are deaf. What is the term for people who lack the sense of smell or taste? Smell-less? Taste-less? You: “Goodness, you must be an anosmic ageusiatic.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A related term is dysgeusia, the condition of having an abnormal, presumably bad, taste in your mouth. This word offers a range of uses....
Pavement I Have Been to Heaven and Back: Hen’s Teeth and Other Lost Fragments of Unpopular Culture Vol. 1 This has already been a great year for guitar thinkers–Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock, the Latin Playboys’ Dose, and Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret all mix smarts and riffs in revolutionary ways. Sleater-Kinney are hedgehogs: they’ve got a story (girl can’t stop the noise in her head, girl meets guitar, girl rocks) and they’re sticking to it....
Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet Gross Indecency’s Wilde and Death of a Salesman’s Willy have a commonality of soul. Both are men of words whose rhetoric–no matter how outlandish in Wilde’s case or cliched in Willy’s–expresses a deeply felt belief in who they are. Both are dreamers, creators of personal truths derived equally from experience and fantasy....
Attributed to: Anomalous By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rather unpleasant meaning is obvious, though gallery director Jason Zadak assured me the smears are only paint. (“I was worried about taking it in my car,” he said.) This extreme example of the “look at me” trend, like most of the best work in this mode, soon suggests its opposite. The heavy diet carefully recorded almost shouts its defiance of the prevailing dietary puritanism; the smears exaggerate that defiance to the point of absurdity....
By Robert Recklaus Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the trustees who opposed the registry, Fred Pospisil, said he couldn’t support it because it didn’t extend the benefits to unmarried straight couples. “I’m not at all disappointed the registry passed,” he told Oak Leaves, “but for a community that promotes equality and inclusion, here was a chance to put different-sexed, unmarried couples on the registry....
A Man Escaped Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on a French lieutenant’s account of his 1942 escape from a gestapo fortress in Lyons, this stately yet uncommonly gripping 1956 feature is my choice as the greatest achievement of our greatest living filmmaker, Robert Bresson (rivaled only by his more corrosive and metaphysical Au hasard Balthazar a decade later). The best of all prison-escape movies, it reconstructs the very notion of freedom through offscreen sounds and defines salvation in terms of painstakingly patient and meticulous effort....
CALEXICO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the time drummer John Convertino and bassist Joey Burns work as a self-effacing and flexible rhythm section for hire, equally at home playing spare indie pop with Barbara Manning, loose boogie rock with Giant Sand, eccentric old-timey music with Michael Hurley, or off-kilter country with Victoria Williams, with whom they’re currently touring. But as Calexico, they step into the spotlight....
Chicago Underground Film Festival “I have always known who Rimbaud was,” Jim (Al Shannon) insists when his disillusioned girlfriend claims she introduced him to the 19th-century poet and contemporary icon of pretentiousness. Jim’s a poet who hangs out at the Electric Urn nightclub and uses his poems like drugs or cash–depending on whether he’s trying to exploit someone or just pay for a drink. He’s an irksome, pathetic poseur who gets the girl at the end, confirming the self-indulgence of this flat, insidery hang-out movie written and directed by Dean Bivins (1996)....
“Being on probation has been very stressful,” complains Colleen Dykas, a teacher at Jungman Elementary on the near southwest side, in Catalyst (May). “Our [assessment] team never returned, so we couldn’t ask what they meant by certain statements. For instance, one item said that the school had a sterile environment. Well, that could be good. It could mean that the school was clean, or it could be bad. We don’t know....
If nothing else, Chicago’s improv community has proved that improvisation is a limitless form that can be molded and warped to suit the performers and audience. On the other hand, the weight of improv history and tradition is an awful cross to bear. There’s an urge to add flourishes to the palatial mansion of improv built over the last half century–and a concomitant risk that improv will become too academic. That’s why ComedySportz, with its emphasis on improv for entertainment’s sake, will always be among the hardiest of troupes....
