Best foot forward. Vinton Thompson, a world authority on spittlebugs, has been named associate provost at Roosevelt University. In the September issue of the “Renaissance,” the school’s newsletter, he jokes, “There are lots of parallels between academia and spittlebugs. Spittlebugs are economic pests, and one is always looking for strategies to deal with the pests.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reasons not to assimilate....
“When you add it all up, what you get is a picture of [a future] Chicago with no poor people between 67th St. and Evanston, and between Interstate 90 and 94 on the west and the lakefront on the east,” says Adolph Reed, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in Chicago Ink (August). “You know the statue down on South State St. in Bronzeville, of the black migrant with his suitcase in his hand and the big, wide-brimmed hat?...
EDDIE C. CAMPBELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1977 Eddie C. Campbell, already a veteran bluesman of two decades, took a break from his regular gig as a guitarist in Willie Dixon’s band to record his debut LP, King of the Jungle (currently available on Rooster Blues). That disc showcases his blend of rootsiness and eccentricity in its full, roaring glory: his trademark deep-pocket shuffle and Carey Bell’s alley-tough harmonica squalls keep the slapstick holiday anthem “Santa’s Messin’ With the Kid” more or less down-to-earth, but Campbell’s voice is nightmarishly double tracked on the title tune, where he sings of facing down Mister Lion and halting an elephant stampede and punctuates his boasts with whammy-bar-enhanced leads....
America, the Beautiful I remember a sign–“XXX, all nude girls, all the time!”–that flashed continuously near one of my cheaper apartments; figuratively, that same glowing sign remains the lurid subtext for avant-garde experiments with the nude female body. Naked performance is an awkward footnote in American culture. It doesn’t seem to matter which political or visual tricks artists use to reframe their nudity–a hypersexualized energy always surrounds such events. The best artists are able to subvert voyeuristic audience expectations, but nudity is still a risky performance strategy....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A confidential report prepared for the Australian Foreign Ministry containing uninhibited appraisals of many South Pacific leaders was accidentally left on a table at a regional economic ministers meeting in Cairns, Australia, in July, and picked up by the press. The report described many of the leaders as inept or corrupt. And two weeks earlier, Austria’s foreign minister came under fire for name-calling at a breakfast meeting in the Netherlands....
The Matrix Christ is one prototype for comic book superheroes: he transcends earthly laws and fights evil powers. His first episode may have ended badly, with that bloody business on the cross, but the Second Coming promises a blockbuster sequel. And in The Matrix Andy and Larry Wachowski–a Chicago duo who graduated from writing Marvel comic books to making movies inflected with comic graphics–cast Keanu Reeves as a Christlike hero whose Net moniker is Neo....
Waging Waugh Eclipse Theatre Company The autobiographical texts were particularly valuable to Roccasalvo, a Catholic priest (and teacher of comparative religion at Loyola) who’s written several novels but is making his playwriting debut with this work. While Waugh’s fiction isn’t easily boiled down to stinging epigrams the way that Oscar Wilde’s plays and stories are, his nonfiction scribblings are peppered with beautifully phrased bitcheries; Roccasalvo, aided by director James Finnipot and dramaturge Nicholas Patricca, has stitched these musings into an impressively seamless conversational tapestry....
As a child in Lockport, Jennifer Aranas found her mother’s Filipino home cooking far more palatable than American grub. “My mom was a nurse who worked the graveyard shift, so she had a lot of time to cook for her kids. She chopped, diced, shredded, did all that labor-intensive work Filipino food demands,” she says. “It helped that she was a terrific cook.” At her side Aranas gradually became versed in recipes from her parents’ native Cebu, one of the major islands of the Philippines....
ROYAL TRUX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t really believe that just signing to a major label can make a good band go bad, but Royal Trux’s two-album stint with Virgin was almost enough to convince me. Although the beefy boogie rock of the David Briggs-produced Thank You holds up surprisingly well, the band’s attempt to re-create that big sound live was a disaster....
RUFUS WAINWRIGHT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike the undistinguished stuff his fellow famous babies–Emma Townshend, Chris Stills, and yes, Sean Lennon–have been spitting up recently, Rufus Wainwright’s Rufus Wainwright (Dreamworks) would be worth hearing no matter who his parents were. As it happens, they’re singer-songwriters Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, but his music has little in common with theirs, except perhaps a blissful disinterest in the mainstream....
Huey “Piano” Smith & the Clowns Christmas With Babyface Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the arrival of doo-wop and rock ‘n’ roll, a new generation of variously talented–and not necessarily reverent or even sane–performers put its mark on the classics (the Drifters’ nutty “White Christmas” may be driving one last poor Pottery Barn shopper over the edge even as you read this) and baked up an impressive batch of its own sweet potatoes, including the Penguins’ “Jingle Jangle,” Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run,” and the Youngsters’ “Christmas in Jail....
Jin-Wen Yu Dance In dance, the path to technical mastery has frequently been used as a metaphor for an individual’s experience–for the hero’s journey. In classical ballet, technical skill is also used to justify social hierarchies: different levels of skill are manifested very concretely in the division of dancers into principals, soloists, featured dancers, and corps. In ballet it’s self-evident that hierarchy is a natural structure for human society: princes and nobles are usually played by principal dancers, and the corps de ballet are often peasants....
SMOG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The music of Smog, a “band” composed basically of singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, has always been introspective and dark; the flickerings of contentment and vulnerability on last year’s superb Knock Knock (Drag City) were something of a breakthrough. On Smog’s new Dongs of Sevotion (Drag City), though, that vulnerability is gone; it seems Callahan’s happiness, if he ever really felt it in the first place, was short-lived–or that he just doesn’t trust it anymore....
Bonga Pretaluz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Portugal first occupied the southern African nation more than five centuries ago, and ultimately incorporated it into an empire that included Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe. The 1974 coup in Lisbon that toppled its dictatorship eventually caused Portugal to relinquish its African colonies, but Angola has been wracked by internal strife ever since....
By Michael Miner What music did your dad like? I ask. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Royko, 39, is a psychologist. He directs the Marriage and Family Counseling Service of the Cook County courts. He sees families as they’re shattering, and he gets only the hard cases, the families that can’t work things out alone. “Our role is to try to help parents negotiate a custody and visitation agreement,” he says....
I read somewhere years ago that when you flush the toilet with the lid open, a plume of contaminated water droplets is ejected into the air and lands on everything in the bathroom, including (yuck) your toothbrush. Women I mention this to nod knowingly, but among men it is met with scorn, the common view being that this is another female scare story intended to “get us to put the top down....
Ballet Theater of Chicago Ballet is hard. In every sense. As I sat down to watch Ballet Theater of Chicago at the Athenaeum–in a solid performance peppered with brilliance–I was desperately trying to suspend the disbeliever in me, the part that has trouble reconciling the pretense, the artificiality, and the majesty and fantasy of ballet with the fact that most of us need more than a proscenium stage, dramatic lighting, and shimmering costumes to “escape....
1 GASTR DEL SOL Camoufleur (Drag City). David Grubbs’s final collaboration with Jim O’Rourke is a fitting swan song, an absorbing collection of art-pop tunes expertly fitted with experimental flourishes. From Rob Mazurek’s sputtering cornet on the breezy “The Seasons Reverse” to Markus Popp’s fractal electronics on the melancholy “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder” to Edith Frost’s gentle cooing on the Beach Boys-flavored “Each Dream Is an Example,” the many components are masterfully arranged, without a single wasted gesture....
By Ben Joravsky If there are a few doubters (“Luddites,” the project’s backers call them), they’re old-timers who remember what the stretch of Howard between Clark and Sheridan was like in the good old days. The dividing line between Chicago and Evanston, it was the quintessential neighborhood business strip in the 60s and early 70s, one of many that flourished in the days before highways, cars, and suburban malls strangled the city....
By Michael Miner The site is an elaborate piece of work. The home page sets the stage: “Arab Americans and non Arab Americans are protesting the firing of Mike Monseur by CLTV management on Saturday, Sept. 2. We urge you to join in protesting this firing and in combating what we believe is bigotry and discrimination at CLTV.” There’s a “Law Suit Update Page”–though at this point there’s a lawyer but no suit–a list of CLTV advertisers to remind that “there are more than 150,000 Arab American families in the Chicagoland region,” and boilerplate text for angry letters to station manager Denise Palmer....
