Whether you like to bike long and hard or drunk and bare-assed, there’s an organized ride here with your name on it, from a trip across the state to a tour of suburban eateries. —Sam Adams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago Nomads’ Southwest Suburban Bike and Wine and Dine This laid-back tour stops at Parmesan’s Wood Stone Pizza for appetizers, Jenny’s Steakhouse for the main course, and the Frankfort Creamery for dessert....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month I got to hear Broo play in Bergen, Norway, with IPA, a quartet with three killing Norwegian players–bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, drummer Håkon Mjåset Johansen, and tenor saxophonist Atle Nymo (the latter two play together in a quintet called Motif with pianist Haavard Wiik). Last year, before Broo hooked up with the band, the other three musicians recorded a wonderful take on Don Cherry’s Complete Communion album....
This week the Music Box presents all five installments of Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle of avant-garde features, plus the Chicago premiere of his latest, De Lama Lamina. Tickets are $10, and a pass good for all three programs is $24; for more information see musicboxtheatre.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cremaster 1 Sculptor, writer-director, and former football player Matthew Barney returns to Bronco Stadium in his hometown of Boise, Idaho, to stage a Busby Berkeley-style dance routine while two Goodyear blimps float overhead....
Who knew that 50 pounds of recycled Readers (with a few New York Times pages thrown in) could be so attractive? Erica Mott opens her piece, InPrint, with her back to us, wearing what appears to be a bridal gown with a gigantic skirt. In fact all the costumes and set pieces in InPrint, a trio, are made of newspapers, which here reveal an unexpected luminescence and startling aural capabilities, from gentle rustling to a snapping racket....
[Read Jeff Huebner’s 2000 story “Has Anyone Seen Clyde Angel?”] In November 2008, online research led Marcus to a Connecticut gallery that specializes in outsider artists—people whose idiosyncratic work betrays little or no influence from the mainstream art world. He liked what he saw and called the dealer, Beverly Kaye. They got to talking, Marcus says, about “this fascination with the freedom of the artist, with the artist as a free spirit,” and Kaye asked him if he’d heard about Clyde Angel....
“Art Works,” the slogan National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was spouting during his quick visit to Chicago two weeks ago, is shorthand for the theory he was touting—that art is good for the economy, and especially for urban redevelopment. The stuff is supposed to work like Botox on failing neighborhoods: inject a few artists and, presto, the ugly disappears. People flock, and commerce flourishes. The Outlet was created this spring, after the CAC—which has been programming pop-ups for the CLA—invited Links Hall to curate a performance-art venue....
Beth Rooney, photographer, turns on the red light for: Chicago Poetry Bordello Poetry readings with visual interest are a rare but wonderful thing. The Chicago Poetry Bordello, whose next show is Tuesday, October 30, at the Chopin Theatre, combines stunning spectacle with powerful and sometimes hilarious poetry. For $10 ($5 if you wear Victorian dress) you enter the era of the Everleigh Club, complete with burlesque dancers, fortune-tellers, musicians, tarot readers and, of course, poetry whores....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Basically I’m so physically exhausted from 4.5 years of a grueling schedule that I’m starting to make errors at work I couldn’t have imagined 6 months ago.” he told me via e-mail. “Kris [Vire, TOC theater writer] has very quietly and patiently been aiding me, but the reality is that I can’t function in the job the way I used to....
When I describe the Tribune‘s top-secret project, everybody makes the same snarky comment. The Tribune is designing a weekly edition that it will offer subscribers for a surcharge. The premium content will consist of long, thoughtful reporting and commentary—local in its focus—on the news and cultural affairs. The inevitable comment is this: That’s what the Tribune is already supposed to be doing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve obtained a partial copy of a dummy....
Before this week, you couldn’t listen to the self-titled first record from local heavy-prog outfit Ga’an unless you had a boom box or a Walkman or an ’89 Celica at your disposal. The band released it in summer 2009 on cassette, and then Records on Ribs reissued it in the UK—also on cassette. But on Tuesday it finally came out on vinyl, thanks to Captcha Records. It’ll be available locally at Reckless and Permanent....
QI’m a 27-year-old bisexual chick who just moved in with my girlfriend of ten months. I love her very much, and this is a great relationship—hot sex, laughs, good conversation. Here’s the thing: I like to smoke pot, and pot makes her very uncomfortable. We’ve talked about it a lot—you know how dykes are—and I’ve been up front with her from the beginning. I’m responsible and successful, and I don’t smoke that often....
Four days after discovering the unexpected prevalence of Sex Pistols fans in the mafia, I was still feeling pretty euphoric over it when I was confronted with something almost equally mind-blowing: former teen heartthrob and “That’s How I Beat Shaq” singer Aaron Carter taking to Instagram to announce to the world that he was attacked on the streets of Boston by a quartet of very devoted New Kids on the Block Fans....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday afternoon at the River East, an undivulged projection issue delayed the start of Cloud Atlas by almost 20 minutes. It was likely a minor snag; but as Music Box projectionist Doug McLaren told me in August, whenever a DCP projector needs to reestablish its Internet connection, the system takes about a quarter hour to reboot. All this time the projector bulb stayed on, and the screen was filled with an unnecessary wash of digital black, making the canvas—once idolized as the “silver screen”—look like a giant sleeping laptop....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On April 1, Baby Loves Music will release the first ever album of prehistoric hip-hop with ‘Baby Loves Hip Hop’. Following the adventures of five paleolithic pals as they gear up for the big school talent show, ‘Baby Loves Hip Hop’ is an thrilling blend of music, rhymes, poetry, storytelling, and beatboxing. I’m not bummed out that Prince Paul, under the name DJ Stegosaurus, produced this kiddie record by the so-called Dino-5–even when he makes beats for babies, I’m sure they’re still really good....
thepeoplephotographer.com/fleshhungrydogshow He doesn’t produce them regularly anymore—in fact, the monthly rock ‘n’ roll shows at Jackhammer in Rogers Park ended their seven-year reign in May of 2012—but Gary Ward and the Flesh Hungry Dog Show (a bizarre but memorable band name that eventually morphed into a rogue LGBT promotion company of sorts) will still book the bill if it’s worthwhile. Last month, in collaboration with the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks, Michigan, Ward hosted playwright and drag performer Charles Busch....
ART & ARCHITECTURE Readers’ Choice: Intuit and Las Manos (tie) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At 32, Mejia is just starting to build a substantive body of work—now that he’s gone half-time in his day job, teaching art at Jones College Prep in the South Loop. His raw portraits and disturbing street scenes document specific moments in his life. He paints estranged friends, agitated crowds, ex-lovers, or his wife, giving his works telling names; a portrait of his wife wearing an accusatory expression is titled I Draw Just Enough to Not Get Yelled at by My Wife, while a drawing of a downtrodden throng is called I’ve Been Really Hard on People Lately....
QI’m seeing an amazing guy who I met doing sex work—as in, he was paying me for straight-up sex. It’s not a Pretty Woman situation. He’s my age and not wealthy, and I’m too old for that anyway. We share a lot of geeky interests and have a great connection, and the sex is awesome. When I was seeing him for pay, I would think, “I would totally date this guy....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night the Music Box presented the Chicago premiere of The Master, the latest drama from the enormously talented Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood). As Ben Kenigsberg wrote recently at Time Out Chicago, Weinstein Company is releasing the film September 21 in 70-millimeter, a beloved format for cinephiles but one that can be shown in fewer than a hundred venues nationally (more on this in Drew Hunt’s forthcoming post)....
The six members of Eighth Blackbird have been called athlete-poets, and their energy and precision are amazing–rhythm is to the group what wind is to a kite. One of the pleasures of a live concert is seeing how they produce the sounds that stretch the capabilities of their instruments (piano, percussion, violin/viola, cello, flute, and clarinet). Much of their repertoire was written for them, and they’re so in harmony with the music, often playing from memory, that it’s hard to imagine anyone else performing it....
The trial of former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, slated to begin later this month, has been postponed until January. We’ll have to wait till then to see if Burge is found guilty of lying under oath about the interrogations-by-torture he allegedly conducted at Area Two headquarters in the 1980s. But on October 12, we can get a look at the latest work on the subject of police torture by John Conroy, whose reporting in the Reader exposed a situation that for many years no one else wanted to talk or write about....
