As the 34th Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second week, my favorite new movie among the selections this year, Manoel de Oliveira’s Anxiety, has come and gone, but a lot of other worthy fare is playing. An especially welcome last-minute addition, though I haven’t seen it, is Theo Angelopoulos’s Eternity and a Day, winner of the top prize at Cannes this year. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
At least one Chicago basketball dynasty continues on intact. In fact, it might be stronger now than ever before. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like any great team, they were conscious of the impression they made. From the moment they jogged onto the court at Loyola’s Joseph J. Gentile Center for the Public League championship game, the Marshall players seemed cool, collected, and confident....
Stalag 17, American Blues Theatre. In the pantheon of POW dramas, Stalag 17 ranks somewhere between Jean Renoir’s brilliant Grand Illusion and a 1940s Danny Kaye vehicle. Taut and highly entertaining, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski’s Tony-winning play is nevertheless a bit formulaic and lightweight. Until its gripping conclusion, this drama of American soldiers in a German prison camp rooting out a Nazi spy in their midst is somewhat quotidian, failing to explore the larger implications of the World War II experience....
UNION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Count the eponymously titled album by this group, which arrived this summer on the British label Naim Audio, among the year’s great surprises: it documents an impeccable trio that few people even knew existed. Not that any jazz head in Chicago would at this point question the impact pianist Laurence Hobgood’s leviathan chords and intensely focused improvisations can have on an audience....
By Jordan Marsh While researching The Great Fire, he came across Chicago: City on the Make, Algren’s bittersweet ode to his hometown originally published in 1951 as an article in Holiday magazine. City on the Make detailed the writer’s profoundly ambivalent relationship with the city that “grew up too arrogant, too gullible, too swift to mockery and too slow to love.” He acknowledged his emotional investment in the place, writing that Chicago divided his heart, “Leaving you loving the joint for keeps / Yet knowing it can never love you....
From the pages of Hermenaut ¥ Number 14 (P.O. Box 141, Allston, MA 02134; $6) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One day, in the fall of 1995, I decided it was time to do something about Urban Outfitters. I was sick of hearing my friends complain about getting paid slave wages in exchange for discounts on crappy clothes and the privilege of listening to indie rock at top volume all day....
Across the Fence My mother is uneasy about living across from the prison. For the most part, she can ignore it. It’s a minimum-security work camp, and breakouts are rare. When she drives past in her minivan she doesn’t wave or stare at anyone. But on Mondays, she complains, she can’t mow, because she doesn’t feel comfortable. A decade ago some prisoners yelled “compliments” at her and whistled. My mother turns red when she tells me this and sets her jaw....
Antonio Gaudi Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1984 documentary about the architect essentially lets Gaudi’s work speak for itself, and it couldn’t be more eloquent. The cinematography by Junichi Segawa, Yoshikazu Yanagida, and Ryu Segawa provides perspectives you couldn’t get on-site in Barcelona, guiding you at a perfect pace through intimate interiors or whisking you to aerial vantage points, alternating between minute details and comprehensive views....
Careful What You Ask For Unaware of the vote, about 30 people showed up for the meeting that had been scheduled for April 5. “When we arrived where the meeting was scheduled to take place, we found an empty room,” says Chris Dunn, a resident at the Catholic Worker, 4652 N. Kenmore. “The chairs were all folded. We set them up and waited. Four TSNA members appeared and told us the group had ended, then held a brief question-and-answer session and left....
GUNDECHA BROTHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dhrupad is the purest, most austere style of northern Indian classical singing. Rooted in Vedic chants, it dates back to the 15th century, and its ancient grace is its strength: subsequent styles like khayal, ghazal, and even qawwali are flashier and less somber, frequently incorporating wild flights of vocal fancy. In a typical dhrupad performance the alaap–the beatless introduction–is the longest section....
I hear that LA is not the most hospitable town for theater. The cost of living is high. The audiences are sparse. And it’s hard to keep a good ensemble together for a full run–you never know when someone will be offered a plum role in a movie or sitcom. Still, when you have that many actors milling around, some are bound to band together. The Actors’ Gang–founded a decade ago by Tim Robbins and a group of LA colleagues–has often been compared to John Cusack’s old Chicago-based company, the New Criminals: both had reputations for gutsy, intense, not always polished performances....
LARRY NOVAK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe every big city boasts a pianist like Larry Novak, a near perfect accompanist for a gamut of singers and horn men who can intimidate most musicians with his own solos–but I’d have to hear them to believe it. Novak had unbeatable training: between 1963 and 1975 he led the house trio at two internationally renowned Chicago supper clubs–first the London House, then Mr....
LOS FABULOSOS CADILLACS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A band that mixes and matches disparate musical genres is about as surprising as a Bulls win these days–from Naked City to Fatboy Slim to any of the dozens of lame ska-pop outfits on the club circuit as we speak, everybody’s doin’ it. What distinguishes the Latin and South American bands connected by the fairly new rock-en-espa–ol rubric (besides the shared language) is the uninhibited glee with which they do it....
LUCINDA WILLIAMS/JIM LAUDERDALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lucinda Williams infamously spent years making her new album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Mercury), sound just right–so what happens when she has to perform those songs live, with no opportunity to fix the passages that displease her? Not to worry. She’s lived with these “new” songs for ages now–it’s been six years since her last album and since she last played Chicago–and based on the few shows I’ve seen by her, the restrictions of live performance do Williams wonders....
Dr. DeWalt flips through his patient’s chart. “We started you off with the Percosan,” he explains. “But one of the common side effects of Percosan is hysterical delirium. So we were forced to take that down with the Silozan, which unfortunately made you too relaxed. So we had to crank you up a notch with the Demerolstyrate, which raised your heart rate to an almost lethal level and your body temperature to…135 degrees!...
Restless Record Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That restlessness has informed Callahan’s work at least since 1990’s “Puritan Work Ethic,” from Smog’s Drag City debut, Sewn to the Sky. And the sinister “I Was a Stranger,” from the 1997 album Red Apple Falls, explicitly addresses some of the reasons a body might keep moving: “In the last town / You should have seen what I was / If I was a stranger / I was worse than a stranger / I was well known....
The Winter Guest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two older women make their way to an out-of-town funeral, a teenage girl engineers a meeting with a boy she’s attracted to, his mother and grandmother (real-life daughter and mother Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law) go for a walk, and two young boys play hooky in this deeply atmospheric poem set in a seaside town in Scotland on a single day....
By Michael Miner McCourt went on, “I operate in an atmosphere of trust. I don’t operate in an atmosphere of paranoia. If I did, perhaps I’d have been more suspicious.” He continued cryptically, “In retrospect I’ve uncovered a great deal of information, but that’s for my counsel to deal with.” “No, she did not,” said McCourt. “But she left in a way that was not as–let’s just use the words ‘potentially destructive....
DKV TRIO WITH JOHANNES BAUER, AXEL DšRNER & THOMAS LEHN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the introduction to his fine book on jazz in the Netherlands, New Dutch Swing, Kevin Whitehead writes: “Some folks dismiss jazz abroad–in Europe especially–as one more ripoff of black culture. Wrong. Not ripoff but great triumph of; the world adopts the diasporan esthetic.” Particularly in the last three decades, jazz has scattered like a supernova, mixing and mingling with the cultures it encounters and arriving transformed by them....
Stuart McCarrell’s sitting in his office, shuffling through a sheaf of poems he’s written about his old pal Nelson Algren, when he produces an extraordinary document. It’s a letter from Algren, dated February 13, 1992, more than a decade after the writer supposedly died. McCarrell reads it out loud. The prose is gritty yet lyrical. Such hoaxes no longer seem necessary: since cofounding the Nelson Algren Committee nine years ago, McCarrell has done more than anyone to keep the writer’s legacy alive, especially in Wicker Park, where the Detroit-born “poet of the Chicago slums,” as critic Malcolm Cowley dubbed Algren, lived for 35 years....
