weiner Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have to ask, Where did you get Ed Gold? First he comes up with his “let’s make fun of Bob Greene” column, which was (the two times I read it) more insipid than any dreck Bob Greene could muster. And then you print his “let’s make fun of stupid books” column. Yes, there are lots of stupid books around, but Ed Gold can’t seem to find them, especially in the 2/13/98 Reader (True Books)....
One hundred years ago last week, members of the just-constituted Chicago Arts and Crafts Society gathered at Hull-House to listen to “Mr. Frank B. Wright,” who was presenting a paper on “The Use of Machinery.” The Hull-House Bulletin can be forgiven for misidentifying Frank Lloyd–he was not so well-known at the time–but it accurately captured a debate that would define the future of the Arts and Crafts movement. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
J.D. CROWE & THE NEW SOUTH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years the bands headed by bluegrass banjoist J.D. Crowe have doubled as a training ground for some of country music’s finest instrumentalists and vocalists–among the beneficiaries of his disciplined leadership are Doyle Lawson, Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, and Keith Whitley. Crowe, himself a disciple of Earl Scruggs, came up through Jimmy Martin’s band in the late 50s and early 60s, and while fronting his own Kentucky Mountain Boys in the early 70s he broke all the bluegrass rules by bringing in popular country songs from the likes of Gram Parsons and, perhaps less visionary, Gordon Lightfoot....
Lead Stories The New York Daily News reported in November that 71-year-old twin sisters Ynette Sapp and Olvette Mahan had just had plastic surgery to remove moles and wrinkles from their faces so that they would continue to look exactly alike. The doctor said such a situation is not unusual; another set of twins was scheduled the next day. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where’s Barry Scheck when you need him?...
OLD 97’S Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you listened closely enough, you could find fuzzy, familiar pop hooks on this Dallas quartet’s first three albums, but more often than not it wasn’t worth the effort to sift through the bland country-rock guitars and shuffling two-beat rhythms. But Fight Songs (Elektra), the group’s fourth and best LP, is a great leap: a solid pop record largely free of cosmetic cowboyisms....
Envisioning the Contemporary I couldn’t obtain a syllabus for the workshop, but I can make some assumptions based on its title and some of the ideas about art floating around our culture. Haman sees a visit to a museum as a creativity vitamin, a boost to the creative juices of people developing new products, laying marketing plans, and forging business partnerships. This crowd equates creative inspiration with the lightbulb that goes off over an executive’s head: “We don’t have to just sell fries, we can sell plastic toys, too!...
BRAVE COMBO 8/22, FITZGERALD’S This long-lived Texas band of roots defilers is finally poised to catch a wave–and what do they come up with but Group Dance Epidemic (Rounder), a collection of deliciously, straightforwardly annoying presentations of “The Hokey Pokey,” “The Mexican Hat Dance,” “The Hustle,” and other communal boogie-woogie. The whole thing sounds like the perfect record for your local hipster watering hole to play at last call to drive the drunks out....
FROGS 12/18, EMPTY BOTTLE “There’s a fine line between clever and stupid,” spake one of the wise gentlemen of Spinal Tap, and no one illustrates this better than Jimmy and Dennis Flemion, who have been staggering drunkenly back and forth over that line for 18 years. Their Frogs are still a cult band despite Smashing Pumpkins’ best efforts–big bald Bill’s fans weren’t much more receptive to the tepidly offensive 1997 collection Starjob than they were to 1989’s outrageous It’s Only Right and Natural, which presented the heterosexual brothers posing as incestuous gay lovers and featured song titles like “Hot Cock Annie,” “Richard Dick Richards,” and “Homos....
There’s a new arrival in Chicago’s Nutcrackerland, the holiday theme park that opened officially last week at various venues. Donald Byrd’s The Harlem Nutcracker hails from New York, where the full version was first performed in 1996; composer David Berger’s score incorporates and adds to the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite (an arrangement also used by Joel Hall in his longtime holiday confection Nuts & Bolts, a high-spirited, more abstract takeoff on the classic)....
The Rhinoceros Theater Festival has always been one of the high points of Chicago’s theater scene, but in recent years the event has begun to drift. The festival began as a showcase for new plays back when big, ambitious scripts were pouring out of Wicker Park in a torrent. As that neighborhood began to drown in tony restaurants and luxury automobiles, the Curious Theatre Branch, by then the fest’s host, fled north and the festival started to go a bit soft, heavy on unfinished, easy-to-produce one-person shows and light on fully scripted plays....
A World of Difference Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ozomatli, named for the Aztec god of dance, features ten members of diverse ethnicities playing an amalgam of son, merengue, ranchera, cumbia, flamenco, raga, dub, hip-hop, and funk. It would appear to be just the sort of pointedly eclectic worldbeat mush that usually turns my stomach. But in fact the group’s eponymously titled debut, on Almo Sounds, which brings the achievements of cross-cultural Latino music like Santana, War, and Los Lobos (whose David Hidalgo contributes accordion on a couple of cuts) firmly into the sampling era, is a real groundbreaker....
ABRAMS/BARRY/DEWAR TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The legendary set of 1957 recordings of Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard remains one of the genuine high-water marks in jazz history. Backed by Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware, Rollins ripped bop conventions wide open, and the recordings inspired countless pianoless, freedom-seeking trios for decades to come. The Abrams/Barry/Dewar Trio is one of those, though it doesn’t swing nearly as hard and makes more deliberate use of wide open spaces....
DJ Q-BERT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Q-Bert is the most celebrated member of the celebrated Bay Area DJ crew Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and his streamlined but lightning-quick performance in the recent DJ documentary Battle Sounds shows why. He might not have thought to do what he does without pioneers like Grandmaster Flash or D.St, but he makes their work seem quaint by comparison....
FANTCHA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to the “barefoot diva” Cesaria Evora, music fans almost universally equate the island nation of Cape Verde with morna, the melancholy balladic style sometimes characterized as an East African version of the blues. But Cape Verde’s music has other moods as well, including the lighter, usually faster, and always more upbeat style called coladeira, which sashays through the work of Fantcha....
LES BATTERIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their long-delayed third album, Bell System (Rift)–most of which was recorded at Chicago’s Idful Music with John McEntire more than three years ago–the bicontinental percussion duo Les Batteries continues to flout expectations. Together New Yorker Rick Brown (Run On, Timber, Fish & Roses) and Frenchman Guigou Chenevier (Volapuk, Etron Fou) take concise but eventful journeys without resorting to brainless funk, drum-circle trippiness, or sterile academicism for narrative help....
Time to Burn East-coast playwright Charles L. Mee has made a specialty of using classic texts as the basis for commentary on contemporary life. His Orestes, presented last year by Roadworks Productions, jumbled together Euripides’ tragicomedy with material appropriated from such sources as William S. Burroughs, Brett Easton Ellis, and women’s magazines to create a nihilistic satire on the media-saturated, morally drifting modern world. But here, inspired by Gorky’s 1902 portrait of derelicts and drifters in a Russian flophouse, Mee wants to exalt the human capacity for compassion and joy in the face of poverty and despair....
MARYANNE AMACHER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some musicians are heard of more than heard–some deliberately cultivate a mystique, but for others it’s the nature of the beast. Composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher has been in constant disciplined pursuit of the relationships between space and sound since the mid-60s. In the 70s she collaborated with John Cage on his homages to Thoreau and provided sound for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and throughout the 80s and 90s she created sound installations in Europe, Japan, and the U....
Hey, Faggot: Hey, RH: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Janet loves having intercourse during her period. “My sex drive goes up when I’m bleeding, and I want sex more. In my experience, it’s usually the guy who has a problem with it–bloody condoms freak ’em out, I guess.” No one has ever gone down on her during “the event,” and while it doesn’t turn her crank, she might let a guy do it “if he really wanted to....
My ex-boyfriend was the first man to give me a real orgasm, and he did it with his tongue. He was extremely unselfish and would stay down there for as long as it took me to get off. We broke up three years ago, and in that time I have had four lovers, all of whom have refused to put in the needed effort. I actually mustered up the courage to tell the last guy I was with that I hadn’t come, and he said, “Well, I’ll fuck ya again in a minute....
Two top Western Conference contenders for the National Basketball Association championship came to Chicago last week, and the Bulls–even without injured center Luc Longley–simply brushed them aside. They avenged an early season loss to the Utah Jazz in typical fashion on Monday with a punishing 102-89 victory that wasn’t even that close. Then they crushed the Houston Rockets, the team with the second-best record in the league, 110-86 Saturday night, winning in the same way they had the night before in Milwaukee against the Bucks: by turning it on in the final 15 minutes....
