Wanda Jackson’s rockabilly hits from the 50s and 60s are classics of the genre, and her comeback recordings in 2002 and ’03 were nearly as potent. So why did she release a tribute CD last year called I Remember Elvis, as though her most interesting feature were a capacity for nostalgia? I can think of a couple good reasons. First, she dated Elvis for a while in the mid-50s and credits him with encouraging her to cross over from country into rockabilly....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Inside, guests and gallerists varnished one another on an individual basis. A taut-skinned faction, obviously devoted to the cosmetological arts, even looked varnished. Deals were broached (“What’s your best price?”) and some apparently fell through (“This sucks!” one fireplug of a man opined, “and I’m gonna make sure everybody knows it!”). A clutch of large, rough-looking men with expensive suits and shiny hair looked like mafiosi at a money-laundering seminar....
Consider two candidates for the state legislature. One, an incumbent whose father happens to be one of Chicago’s most powerful aldermen, appears to have violated election law. The other, a political rookie taking on an incumbent, has sworn affidavits from voters attesting that he played by the rules. Guess which candidate will be on the ballot for the February 2 Democratic primary—and which won’t? Her opponent, Joe Laiacona, a computer science teacher at Columbia College and the proprietor of LeatherViews....
William Parker is one of the greatest bassists ever to play free jazz, but a lifetime in the avant-garde hasn’t dimmed his opinion of the giants of the mainstream. As a child he pretended his toy pistol was a horn so he could jam along with Paul Gonsalves’s legendary 27-chorus solo on Ellington at Newport, and 2006’s For Percy Heath (Victo), the latest effort by his big band, the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, is dedicated to the Modern Jazz Quartet’s longtime bass player....
Bill Douglas’s My Childhood screened at Doc Films in February. I had far less difficulty picking ten favorite new releases of 2012 than I did selecting just one older movie as my favorite revival of the year. Chicago remains an incredible city in which to learn about film history; every week offers numerous big-screen presentations of classics and rediscoveries and in a variety of venues. My 20 favorite revival screenings of the past year, listed below the jump, took place at art-house theaters, universities, living rooms, and one bar....
Radio communication has come a long way since World War I, when the tactic of sending infantry forward shielded by an artillery barrage was confounded by the inability of the advancing infantry to tell the distant cannoneers exactly where they were. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But apps keep coming and bragging rights are never long settled. HearHere Radio, a Chicago-based start-up, will grant Radio....
The South Loop has historically been a neighborhood without a political identity. In other parts of the city, neighborhoods are closely identified with their political geography. Rogers Park has long been part of the independent-minded 49th Ward on the far north side. On the far south side, Beverly is known as the heart of the 19th, the base of the South Side Irish. And Bridgeport, the home of mayors and the center of Chicago clout, is always, always, always in the 11th....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night I had one of the more bizarre experiences I’ve had at a local theater. My wife and I met a friend for dinner in Logan Square and afterward we walked over to the Logan to see a film—it was The Way, Way Back and it sucked, but suffering through it wasn’t the worst part of the evening....
Ink Well has been a great addition to the Reader, and I always have a good chuckle when I finally figure out the solution to the puzzle. But there are weeks when I’ve got every square filled in correctly, but I still don’t get it. I see that all the Bs and Ws have been substituted for each other in the clues [Ink Well, May 11], but what does that have to do with “Developing Negatives”?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today would have been the 80th birthday of Martin Luther King, and J.R. Jones has the rundown on a screening of King in Chicago tonight at Northwestern. That reminded me of one of the more interesting posts I’ve done, a roundup of virulently anti-King Tribune editorials from 1966 during his sojourn here. “The night Obama won was surreally mellow in Grant Park....
Clint Eastwood’s powerful companion film to Flags of Our Fathers looks at the fighting on Iwo Jima in World War II from the viewpoint of the Japanese soldiers. I prefer it to Flags because the story is less familiar, even if it’s told more conventionally, and because an American war film in which Americans become the enemy, emotionally if not intellectually, is a nervy undertaking. Inspired by letters written to his family by the pro-American general Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who was sent to Iwo Jima as punishment for his views, Iris Yamashita’s screenplay sketches out as many impossible moral dilemmas as Flags did....
Even within playwright Jose Rivera’s slightly surreal logic, Massacre (Sing to Your Children) is nearly incoherent. Seven Latino conspirators murder Joe, the tyrant of a rural New England town, then leave his corpse on their doorstep while they bicker, make love, and wax poetic about the “revolution” (despite much talk of Joe’s brutal, omnipresent police force, they don’t bother to show up). When suspicions arise that Joe might be just fine–despite multiple stab wounds from seven crazed people–the well-armed crew merely cower while their IQs plummet and the implausibilities mount....
Last month president-elect Barack Obama vowed to end the old system of awarding federal goodies to friends. Furthermore, Daley has done a masterful job—and you really have to give him credit for this one—of shielding the public from any specific details of his Olympics plans: almost no one knows enough about them to decide whether the games would be a boon or a boondoggle. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Last Thursday, just a few hours before the Chicago Architectural Club was to announce the winners of its global contest to design a reuse for Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic but doomed Prentice Hospital building, things took a dramatic turn. The plaintiffs in the case are Landmarks Illinois and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They’re suing both the city and the Chicago Commission on Public Landmarks, which on November 1 granted landmark protection to the building, only to rescind it the same afternoon....
As leader of one of the most improbable, satisfying, and Methuselan operations in all of jazz, Pierre Dorge has spent nearly three decades piling on apparent contradictions. A native of Copenhagen (where, of course, there is no jungle), Dorge studied music in Ghana, where he absorbed the rolling rhythms of West and South Africa and learned to imitate the pearly tone and percussive phrasing of the kora with his guitar. With those techniques as a base, Dorge creates a madcap mosaic from odd shards of several musical legacies: the mercurial inventions of Thelonious Monk, the Afrocentric psychedelia of Sun Ra, and the spirited music of the Jungle Band that Duke Ellington led at the Cotton Club in the 1920s....
I’m suspicious of the rash of supergroup-style noise collaborations, but there are a couple promising candidates on this solid bill. At past performances the guys in MILTON–Milwaukee noise duo Mildew plus Mat Rademan, aka Newton, of Pennsylvania’s Breathmint Records–have dressed in thermal undies and rubbed blood all over one another or put on suits and pretended to do office work, and this one will allegedly have something to do with Abraham Lincoln....
It’s weirdly mesmerizing to watch Gene Kato at work behind the grill at Sumi Robata Bar, where the lanky, deceptively youthful-looking former Japonais chef methodically seasons bits of skewered flesh and vegetable and carefully tends to them on a pair of charcoal grills until they’re sizzling, fat-slicked, and ready to be gnawed off the sticks. If you sit at the bar, he’s separated from you by a wall of protective glass like the boy in the bubble, and he’s so concentrated on his work you could be watching him on television....
South of the Border La Cocina Criolla2420 W. Fullerton | 773-235-7377 For a long time I didn’t have the heart to file a report on this odd, dark, and claustrophobic little Ecuadoran-Japanese hybrid. It had the stink of death about it in its first perpetually empty couple of months, and I saw no reason to piss in the karmic waters about a place I was sure wouldn’t be around much longer....
See our previews and photo/video recaps of bands playing on: Friday · Sunday ·Afterparties Lollapalooza main » Planet Hemp1:00-2:00Bud Light Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reignwolf2:00-2:45Petrillo Stage The Dixie Chicks derby has heated up this year, but I think Mother (Columbia), the hotly anticipated solo debut from Natalie Maines—which aims for roots-rock crunch with the help of Ben Harper’s band—clearly loses out to Amelita (Columbia), the second album from Court Yard Hounds, aka Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, the two current Dixie Chicks who aren’t Maines....
Q I was hanging out with a guy who’s in a relationship. I told him nothing could happen, and we decided to keep things friendly. A while ago, I made the drunken mistake of climbing into the backseat of a car with him, and things got racy pretty quickly. He asked if I was on birth control; I told him yes, because I was, and he penetrated me and came inside me after one thrust....
