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TRUE NORWEGIAN BLACK METAL PETER BESTE (VICE) Ironically, though, the same traits that work as popularity repellents also make black metal very attractive to certain people. Musical avant-gardists find it fascinating, especially the juxtaposition of brutal ugliness and Wagnerian ambition in the subgenre called symphonic black metal. Visual artists go for the illegibly ornate logos that are de rigueur for black-metal bands and the grainy photos of forbidding Norwegian landscapes that frequently show up on album covers....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Normally by mid-December the live music scene is already hibernating. Maybe it’s global warming, but this weekend there are still plenty of touring musicians risking inclement Midwest weather to bring their music to Chicago, although the action does seem to drop precipitously after this coming weekend. But why worry about that now? Aside from the four Soundboard recommendations after the jump, there are plenty of other events vying for your attention....
In 1971 and again in 1999, progressive changes were made in America. In the best tradition of unintended consequences, these changes hastened the decline of the American male. If reproduction were an industry, Mitt Romney would write off American men as a necessary casualty of creative destruction. Dry your tears, he’d say; they’re an obsolete product so it’s best they go away. The ones we need, we’ll import. Men are obsolete because, for one thing, they do jobs that no longer need doing....
Tracey Emin In 1999, Tracey Emin rocked the art world when she was short-listed for the prestigious Turner Prize. The work that got her there was My Bed. Transported directly from her bedroom, it was Emin’s real-life bed—the one to which she’d confined herself for days following a rough breakup. Strewn with empty liquor bottles, soiled underwear, and ominously stained sheets, My Bed was perfectly emblematic of Emin’s particular synthesis of confrontation and vulnerability....
Two eminent cartoonists, together on one stage to discuss their craft. The work of 54-year-old Philadelphia-based Charles Burns (who guest edited the 2009 edition of Houghton-Mifflin’s The Best American Comics)appeared in the pages of Art Spiegelman’s celebrated Raw magazine in the 80s, and his illustrations have graced magazine covers (Time, the New Yorker, the Believer) and record sleeves (e.g., Iggy Pop’s Brick by Brick). His new graphic novel, the hallucinatory X’ed Out (Pantheon), follows a young man who’s apparently sustained some sort of head injury as he ventures through surreal passages filled with typical Burnsian creepy, alienlike characters....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The day after right fielder Kosuke Fukudome made his Major League debut against the Brewers at Wrigley Field, he blogged about it on his Japanese Web site. “I don’t quite feel like a real Major Leaguer yet,” he wrote, “but my first at bat was greeted by such amazing cheers and the Chicago fans, said to be especially tough, gave me such a warm welcome that I felt like I was truly a member of the team....
Major news from Chicago’s favorite reverb-friendly garage jammers, Disappears—the band has parted ways with Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley due to scheduling conflicts. Singer-guitarist Brian Case tells Gossip Wolf that the split was amicable, and the evidence bears him out—this winter Shelley’s label, Vampire Blues, will release a collaboration that Disappears recorded with local droners White/Light in 2008 2009. Drummer about town Noah Leger (Electric Hawk, Anatomy of Habit) will replace Shelley behind the kit—he makes his debut with the band on Sat 9/8 at the Dust Up, a one-day mini festival hosted by Big Star (1531 N....
Hyde Park Art Center See also Art & Museums. The center offers classes for all ages in four core areas: painting and drawing, ceramics, printmaking and textiles, and photography. Ten-week adult courses, with a weekly two-and-a-half-hour class, range from $250-$290; ten-week kids courses (90-minute classes) range from $160-$290. Summer arts camps for ages 4-15 begin June 14. Discounts available for members and early registrees. 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org. —Sam Adams...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anderson’s blond locks set him apart even before he cut them short, and for three seasons now I’ve been pointing out how he’s made the Sox better just by playing center field like the fair-haired son of Jesus. So it’s been gratifying this year to hear everyone else ask, in the daily newspapers and on sports-talk radio, how come Anderson doesn’t play more....
The timing was coincidental but totally appropriate: at two separate meetings on a single day last week, announcements were made revealing the very different fates of the Three Arts Club building, at 1300 N. Dearborn, and the organization that owned it for nearly a century. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At an open meeting hosted by 42nd Ward alderman Brendan Reilly on March 11 at City Hall, a couple dozen people, mostly from the building’s Gold Coast neighborhood, learned that M Development will be signing a long-term lease with a British firm that will turn the four-story structure into Soho House Chicago, a boutique hotel promoted as a private club....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since it came out a few weeks ago, I’ve listened to Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch several times, almost always with friends and at top volume. I tend to be a headphone enthusiast (when the listening experience is that private, I feel like I’m disappearing into music the way I do with works of literature), but Walker’s records feel most impactful when they’re able to fill an entire room....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t actually say anything bad about Mike Huckabee other than that I disagree with virtually all his actual political stances. He’s the only good speaker in the Republican party–he sounds exactly like John Edwards, actually, but the difference between Edwards and Huckabee is the difference between good and great. His only competition right now in political oratory is Obama....
There’s a neat little feature in the program for this year’s First Look Repertory of New Work, at Steppenwolf Theatre. It’s called “The Pyramid Challenge,” and the way it operates is that each of the three playwrights getting developmental stagings of their scripts is asked ten questions. The first response must be given in one word, the second in two, and so on, yielding an interview that’s graphically wide on the bottom and narrow at the top—i....
I wasn’t as impressed as some of my colleagues by Oren Moverman’s directing debut, The Messenger (2009), though Woody Harrelson was terrific as a steely marine who must drive around notifying military families that their loved ones are dead. Harrelson returns in Moverman’s second feature playing a similar character, a bullheaded LAPD officer whose long career with the force is unraveling amid a succession of brutality complaints, and although the role offers the same macho quotient as the earlier one, it’s counterbalanced in this case by funny, observant scenes of his gyno-centric home life....
[Editor’s note: Matt Eversman is slated to open his own restaurant in 2012.] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m wasn’t crazy about the banh mi at the market—I’ve been spoiled by Nhu Lan Bakery. So I yawned when I heard about this place, where Eversman’s intentions are announced on a low cabinet displaying Andrea Nguyen’s fundamentalist Into the Vietnamese Kitchen next to David Chang’s heretical Momofuku....
A radio ad for the Goodman Theatre’s Measure for Measure calls it “rare”—not because theater companies tend to avoid staging this dark, unruly Shakespeare play, but because director Robert Falls has set it in late-1970s New York City. Yet anyone who’s spent much time in the theater over the last few decades knows there’s nothing unusual about that. It’s become de rigeur to set A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Daytona Beach or Hamlet on the moon....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Q: Is there any standard for the usage of emoticons? In particular, is there an accepted practice for the use of emoticons that includes an opening or closing parenthesis as the final token within a set of parenthesis? Should I incorporate the emoticon into the closing of the parenthesis (giving a dual purpose to the closing parenthesis, such as in this case :-); simply leave the emoticon up against the closing parenthesis, ignoring the bizarre visual effect of the doubled closing parenthesis (as I am doing here, producing a double-chin effect :-)); or avoid the situation by using a different emoticon (some emoticons are similar :-D), placing the emoticon elsewhere, or doing without it (i....
Growing up under military dictatorship in Chile—which, you might be surprised to learn, is home to some half a million Palestinians—Marcelo Piña always felt he understood the Palestinian plight. So when the Palestinian soccer team began courting Chilean players to improve its chances of competing in the 2006 World Cup, he saw it as an opportunity to humanize their cause. “People have become numb to the conflict,” Piña says. “They hear about it all the time, but they don’t know the chronology or what it’s about....
Once upon a time there was a princess who longed to participate in a literary event. She wanted to attend readings, discussions, panels, book signings, films, and conversations with famous authors. The Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference was in town, but it was sold out and rather expensive to begin with. (She wasn’t the richest princess.) So she fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of something free—free and entirely open to the public ....
