Posts

Chicago Symphony Orchestra The second-to-last concert of his season was an all-reef evening. Three items were on the bill: Stravinsky’s Song of the Nightingale, Debussy’s Sacred and Profane Dances, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. For any other conductor, this would have been an adventurous program–all three works are beautiful, exotic, and odd. But Boulez is truly at home only with the freakiest excesses of modernism, such as the gorgeous cataclysms of Elliott Carter or the eerie interstellar transmissions of Anton Webern....

LINDA TATE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago singer Linda Tate has a voice like buckwheat honey: sweet but with substance, and just a little dark. It lends a distinct flavor to everything on her newly released second disc, Time, Seasons and the Moon (Southport), from the the knowing nostalgia of “September in the Rain” to the innocent satisfaction of Steve Swallow’s “Falling Grace” to the quiet passion of “I Concentrate on You” to the voluptuous dreaminess of “Moonlight in Vermont....

Lead Stories In the British elections in April the usual fringe parties were in evidence, such as the Black-Haired, Medium-Build Caucasian Party, but the longest-standing alternative, the Monster Raving Loony Party, ran the most candidates. Its main platform plank this year was a proposal to tow Britain 500 miles into the Mediterranean Sea in order to improve the country’s climate. MRLP candidates also suggested such innovations as requiring dogs to eat phosphorescent food so that pedestrians could more easily avoid stepping in their poop....

By Elana Seifert Susie’s brother Steve Lilovich–who runs the retail component of DeKalb County Marketing, George’s Market, two doors down on South Commercial–met me early on a Saturday morning when 400 chickens were to be slaughtered “Buddhist kill” fashion, which means with head and feet intact. Coops of chickens raised on several Amish farms in Indiana–“drug and pesticide free”–arrive by truck at 5 AM every day but Sunday. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Rabbit in the Moon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This documentary about the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II is less revisionist history than poetic memoir. Bay Area filmmaker Emiko Omori was 18 months old in 1942, when she and her family were shipped off to a detention camp; her film reconstructs the experience through interviews with survivors and rarely seen archival photos and newsreel footage....

SCOTT HAMILTON & HARRY ALLEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When tenor saxist Scott Hamilton emerged in the mid-70s, Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra were still riding the first wave of fusion, the Art Ensemble of Chicago was recording for the mainstream Atlantic label, and bell-bottoms hadn’t yet gone out of fashion. But the twentysomething Hamilton, who worshiped at the altar of Lester Young, played music indebted to the 30s–untouched by bebop or Coltrane or soul jazz....

Gordon Matta-Clark James Drake While these works have been seen in Chicago recently, three rarely shown Photoglyphs from 1973 have not been shown in 20 years; they too reveal Matta-Clark’s paradoxical approach to an enveloping “reality.” These startling 30-foot scrolls of photographic paper have between 9 and 11 separate black-and-white images of subway cars printed side by side; Matta-Clark has hand painted many of the graffiti on the cars in their original colors....

THURSTON MOORE & MATS GUSTAFSSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he’s not playing dissonant rock with his main gig of the past two decades, Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore is usually playing mad scientist with one of a wide array of coconspirators–from pseudophilosophical windbag DJ Spooky to radical free-jazz drummer Milford Graves to the chameleonic Jim O’Rourke. His experiments have improved over the years, yet he never pretends to be something he isn’t: instead of striving to imitate jazz technicians, he plays up his strengths as a colorist, using sound like Jackson Pollock used paint....

Rock, Pop, etc. CHICAGO MUSIC AWARDS with Public Announcement, Youth Edition, Twista, Frank Paul, Patricia Barber, Funkadesi, Devon Brown, Doggie, Kelly Rankin, Malik Yusef, Belizean Vibes, Tony Roger, Mingo Valentino, Dansika, Mercenaries, Vashawn Mitchell & New Image Choral, Lindsey Sharer & Blackjack, Aswah Greggorri & the Enforcers & others. Next Sunday, February 7, 5 PM, Congress Theater, 2135 N. Milwaukee. 773-252-5400, 312-427-0266, or 312-559-1212. ENRIQUE IGLESIAS Next Friday, February 5, 8 PM, Horizon, 6920 Mannheim, Rosemont....

In 1981 Sean Sexton, a British photo collector, stumbled on an old trunk in a London antique market and made a lucky discovery. The trunk contained hundreds of photographs made from glass-plate negatives at the turn of the century. Two-thirds of them were of vegetables, the rest were of fruits and flowers. The images were arresting: the vegetables had been posed in isolation against solid backgrounds for highly detailed close-ups that looked strikingly modern....

“Posthumous fame is a ridiculous concept,” says poet Lisa Hemminger. “You can almost pick out people who will be famous after they’re dead, so why not appreciate their work now while they’re here?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The seance kicks off Hemminger’s new Dead Poet Channeling Series, which will attempt to contact Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, Charles Bukowski, Dorothy Parker, and Sylvia Plath....

Brain Drain Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ohen writers and editors start leaving the Sun-Times en masse something’s up, and it’s not employee morale. The exodus technically began in 1994, when the paper was bought by Hollinger International, but the bloodletting really picked up last December, when five staffers packed their bags. Since then 22 more editorial employees, or approximately 10 percent of the staff, have been fired or given good reason to quit....

Modest Mouse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Presently there’s a lot of god-awful music coming from the sensitive indie kids’ corner of rock (some people call it “emo”), so I don’t blame anyone whose first instinct is to dismiss Modest Mouse. Hell, I consider myself a fan, and front man Isaac Brock’s pained earnestness still gets on my nerves from time to time. A lyric like “I got this thing that I consider my only art / Of fucking people over”–from “3rd Planet,” the opening track of the band’s forthcoming major-label debut, The Moon and Antarctica (Epic)–just makes him sound like a self-defeating asshole stuck in the tenth grade....

RICH CORPOLONGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The stocky figure Rich Corpolongo cuts on a bandstand doesn’t hint at his sleek and flighty reed work. Corpolongo’s an equal opportunity virtuoso: on alto and especially soprano saxophone, he combines dead-on intonation and a rare malleability of timbre; on clarinet, he distinguishes his sound with a breathy subtone that adds a buzzy complication to the music; on flute, he can leap easily into a screech, building on the examples of Eric Dolphy and Rahsaan Roland Kirk to construct a style that emphasizes strength over delicacy....

Hey, Faggot: –Frustrated in the East Bay Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Have you heard of supply and demand? In a capitalist system, when demand for a particular good or service exists, someone somewhere will try to make themselves a pile of money by satisfying that demand. Extremely horny men, gay and straight, will buy sex if they can’t find it for free, which creates a demand for men and women willing to supply their bodies to horny men at reasonable hourly rates....

At a recent evening of “girl talk” with some of my friends, the subject of makeup tips came up. One of the women said her mother swore by Preparation H to reduce the dreaded under-eye puffiness we all get sometimes. We all laughed, but afterward I wondered: Does it really work? What’s in it that shrinks hemorrhoids and under-eye bags? Is it safe to put it on your face? Why don’t you hear Heloise or Tammy Faye or Dr....

Aaron Moore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist Aaron Moore, a dexterous stylist who bridges generations and genres, may be the last well-kept secret of Chicago blues. Moore worked with the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter in his younger days, and he remembers that Muddy Waters tried to recruit him in the early 70s. But by then he’d mostly abandoned music for a steady job with the Department of Streets and Sanitation, and only since retiring in 1988 has he turned back to it....

Andrew Weatherall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall’s early contributions to England’s rave scene were extremely influential, but that doesn’t mean you should waste your time listening to them. Weatherall’s production ideas helped initiate Primal Scream’s short-lived dalliance with dance culture in the early 90s and inspired the exploding Manchester scene; he remixed their hit “Loaded” and contributed heavily to their breakthrough album, Screamadelica....

Friday 9/17 – Thursday 9/23 Pinup girl Bettie Page’s life and times provide the fodder for the new play from Psychotronic Film Society boss Michael Flores, Bettie Page Uncensored. It opens tonight (and runs weekends through November 20) at 10:30 at the Playground, 3341 N. Lincoln. Tickets are $16. Call 773-338-2206. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 18 SATURDAY Performances of traditional African dance and Latin American music punctuate the annual Peace Day celebration....

DIRTY THREE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their first three albums the Dirty Three trafficked almost exclusively in wild dynamic leaps: the subdued, lyrical melodies of violinist Warren Ellis would start things off, only to be broadsided time and again by Jim White’s battered drums and Mick Turner’s violently droning guitar. Those records offered a scaled-down version of what happened when the Australian trio played live, where the crescendo-happy high-intensity acrobatics often got too bombastic and predictable....