penguin.com Is there anybody else who gets excited when they hear Meg Wolitzer’s got a new book coming out? There are very few authors who write as well as she does about the lives of girls and women, particularly about the conflict between your responsibility to your family and doing what you want to do. Wolitzer’s characters don’t get to go out in a grand, 19th-century, throwing-themselves-on-the-train-tracks blaze of glory....
RANGDA FALSE FLAG (DRAG CITY) Chasny’s description of the process is succinct: “going for it.” Though Rangda does write the occasional pure tune, the trio works mostly with the improviser’s toolbox. Parameters are set, and for any piece that consists predominantly of improvisation, desired ends are roughly mapped out in advance—but once the musicians start to play, “going for it” is how they coordinate the action. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Hundreds of the city’s restaurants and bars set up outdoor dining catering to customers starved for summer. We’ve selected 25 notable spots, including some newcomers; for complete alfresco listings search under “features” at chicagoreader.com/chicago/RestaurantFinder/Page. Owner Marty Fosse’s neighborhood Italian place has many virtues, among them a frequently changing menu tailored to the season and a charming back patio—though good luck getting a seat, which is first come, first served. 5316 N....
If you attended any of the dozens of recent school-closing hearings, you know all about Ginsberg-Jaeckle. He’s the fellow at the front doing the heavy-duty English-Spanish translation. “I was at one school-closing hearing every night for a full month at one stretch.” A graduate of the University of Chicago, Ginsberg-Jaeckle, 30, learned to speak Spanish during the years he lived in Honduras. In addition to the school-closing hearings, he interprets for local hospitals....
The November 10 cover of the New Yorker features a drawing by renowned cartoonist and Oak Park resident Chris Ware. It’s an illustration of a health clinic at a Walmart-style big-box store: a clinician walks out of a door into the waiting area looking down at a clipboard he’s holding; seated are mothers with children on their laps. Aside from superb color choice and hyperprecise lines, what stands out are the gestures: the children all reach out for one another while their mothers, looking askance, pull them away....
Carrie Spitler, Neighborhood Writing Alliance executive director, is reading: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m about a third of the way through. The story is about this woman, Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are being used by people who are studying cancer. The thing I love about it is that it tells this story of an individual who’s hidden behind this huge corporate business. All of us want cancer research to move ahead, but it’s being done without any recognition of who’s being studied, down to the cellular level....
There’s not much about Osvaldo Golijov’s song cycle Ayre that sounds like “classical music.” Taking as his subject 15th-century Spain, where Sephardic Jews, Arabs, and Christians coexisted peaceably, the Argentine composer borrowed liberally from each culture’s sound, throwing in elements like electronic textures, contemporary klezmer clarinet by David Krakauer, and guitar by pop producer and Oscar-winning film composer Gustavo Santaolalla. It’s a thrilling collage that succeeds by virtue of its scale, emphasized by arrangements that juxtapose the extremes of rhythm, intensity, and density at play....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which exactly describes my own experience with Sarris’s classic volume—”I once was blind but now I see,” or at least see a damn sight better than I had before. It’s 40 years on since the The American Cinema: Directors and Direction, 1929-1968 was published by Dutton (in late ’68), and my gratitude for it remains undiminished, even if our still sometimes capricious author-critic loses me more often now than he ever did then (e....
In 2007 Mary Bryson, a genderqueer artist and academic based in British Columbia, was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a double mastectomy, she found herself pressured by her doctor to undergo breast reconstruction, a procedure that would return her to a supposedly more desirable shape, which is to say a more womanly one. She wasn’t interested, but her doctor signed her up anyway, telling her, “You’re just crazy right now.”...
LA PMA punk duo No Age played with an extra member at SXSW last weekend: Cundo Bermudez (Wrangler Brutes, Nazti Skinz), who worked as the recording engineer on some of the duo’s early 12-inches. Contrary to a report on the Los Angeles Times music blog, drummer Dean Spunt told Gossip Wolf that Bermudez is only a temporary touring member, but they are “hoping to find a permanent third.” May we suggest Craigslist’s “Casual Encounters” section?...
Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor, is obsessed with … Kurt Vile, Wakin on a Pretty Daze The album everyone in Logan Square will be playing outside in the sun all summer long. Vile somehow outdoes 2011’s great Smoke Ring for My Halo, which is no easy feat. He has a particular talent for knowing which chord sequence he can play for ten minutes without boring you to death. Listen to “KV Crimes” while strutting; listen to “Too Hard” while ruminating; listen to “Goldtone” forever....
On her fourth album, last year’s Limón y Sal (Norte), Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas proved her shift from stormy, brooding Spanish-language alt-rock (a la Polly Jean Harvey and Fiona Apple) was more than just a passing phase. Although she shed some of the treacly new wave touches that hampered her otherwise superb previous record, the paradigm-shifting Sí, she continued to deliver ultra-catchy melodies with the sunny demeanor of a California beach bum, even when singing about failed love....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given the underground dance music scene’s constantly plugged-in nature (where you can export a song from the software you used to build it straight to your SoundCloud), its insatiable hunger for novelty, and the fact that so many of the producers and consumers within it are tastemakers (or at least consider themselves such) susceptible to on-to-the-next-one-ism, pretty much every calendar year some sonic trend is born that within months is completely exhausted by mediocre coolhunting producers and DJs (and embarrassingly passe by the time we start shopping for next year’s kitten calendar)....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A February ruling halted California’s program to relieve prison overcrowding by transferring inmates to privately run facilities out of state, but pending appeal the California prison TV channel continues to air a video advertising the West Tennessee Detention Facility, hoping to encourage future volunteers. The 20-minute infomercial, shown once a day, lists amenities including larger and cleaner cells, better views, and weekly all-night movie-and-pizza parties; in taped testimonials one transferee praises the 79-channel cable menu (“ESPN....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monday kicked off with a speech from Republican presidential nominee John McCain (perhaps he mistook the event for a different kind of NRA show?) and marked the debut of the first annual International Wine, Spirits & Beer event. The IWSB expo was sequestered from the rest of the show, held in a black-swathed VIP lounge restricted to those “involved in the decision-making process to purchase beverage alcohol in a food service operation,” and required a special badge that cost twice as much as a regular NRA Show pass....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, I’m not sure why the mayor was so upset. For the most part, Hoffman was rather measured in his comments. He made no sweeping accusations of fraud or negligence — even though reporters gave him plenty of opportunity with their questions. He refused to speculate as to why the mayor rammed the deal through the City Council so quickly....
The real phantoms of the opera—the 76 usually unseen but indispensable members of the Lyric Opera orchestra—were in great form for last week’s opening of Gounod’s Faust. “We played our hearts out,” one of them said the next day, and the audience responded with an ovation so warm it felt to the musicians like empathy for their predicament. They’re a union crew, represented by the Chicago Federation of Musicians, and their contract expired in April....
Water Tower, 835 N. Michigan: The wave of the future: the city’s newest theater features four tiny auditoriums, arranged smorgasbord style with a common lobby. “Multiplexes,” as these things are known in the neologism-crazed trade, allow the owner the luxury of running four different attractions without increasing his overhead. But small theaters aren’t the same–it’s like watching an oversized TV set in a slightly formal living room with a few surly friends....
This may be the best of times and the worst of times for nonfiction filmmaking. For every breakthrough like The Act of Killing, at least a dozen documentaries pass through town that are formless, dry, or so narrowly focused that they alienate all but the sorts of people they depict. Docs at the Box, the Music Box’s first-ever documentary festival, collects 11 new nonfiction films; one hopes they’ll have more in common with Killing than with such recent nonmovies as Somm, which plays like a feature-length reality-TV pilot, and Money for Nothing, which reminded me of a PowerPoint presentation....
Who wouldn’t want to be married to a movie star? The fame, the wealth, the parties; the lies, the infidelities, the recriminations. Happily, it’s the latter attributes Christine Sneed focuses on in her new novel, Little Known Facts (Bloomsbury). Renn Ivins is an Oscar-winning actor and director in his early 50s. He’s the central figure in the novel but not its central voice: the “lesser planets” in the Ivins orbit—ex-wives, son, and daughter—get their say, too....
