One day in the 1970s, when Pamela Bannos was a teenager, she was riding in the back of her father’s car as he turned off Lake Shore Drive onto LaSalle Street. Looking out the window, she noticed an old stone structure standing in Lincoln Park. Surrounded by a chain-link fence and a wall of weeds, it looked like it might be a tomb. The word couch was just visible on its crest....
Colleagues: Rumor has it this will be a difficult week at the Tribune, with staff cuts that could reach 20 percent. The rumor has been circulating for several days inside the Tower, and editor Gerould Kern seems to have addressed it in this recent staff memo. What Kern meant by “inaccurate information” isn’t clear, but his description of the new Tribune he’s fashioning is. Aside from its digital dimension, it reminds me a lot of the old Sun-Times....
“Everything is collected but nothing is saved,” writes conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg in the catalog that accompanies “No Time Left to Start Again/The B and D of R ‘n’ R,” his history of postwar pop music. The adjective, his, is vital: Ruppersberg stresses that this cacophonous installation is “one possible history of Rock and Roll”—his history, which leaves all questions open, answering none. “No Time” is composed of five parts: an introduction, set up to face the atrium of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, and then, inside the exhibit proper, “lyrics,” “home,” “church,” and “fun....
The Hunchback of Notre Dame Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best musicals are the result of creative partnerships. It took Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and director Rouben Mamoulian and choreographer Agnes De Mille to transform Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs into Oklahoma! My Fair Lady was the brainchild of Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Moss Hart, and George Bernard Shaw (not to mention Ovid)....
Are you looking for something to do on a laid-back Sunday? The Hideout is hosting a hell of a mini-festival on the 24th, “A Day in the Country,” pimped to me relentlessly by organizer Lawrence Peters. (The last time I saw Lawrence, he was getting all Hendrix on an electric washboard as a member of Steve Krakow’s Celestial Vision Guitarkestra. Yes, “guitar” is interpreted very loosely with that unit.) Headlining are Freakwater and Kelly Hogan, but some lesser-known treats lurk further down the bill, like Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue, Tangleweed, the Blue Line Riders, and, of course, the Lawrence Peters Outfit....
I made the mistake of inviting a dieter to Au Cheval. In this line of work that’s a bush league move under any circumstance, but at prolific chefpreneur Brendan Sodikoff’s ostensible diner, primely located at the northern gateway to the Randolph restaurant row, it’s cruel and unusual punishment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t let that keep you away. I should have known better....
COMMERCIAL SERVICES Best Real Estate Agent a chase.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Granted, most of us don’t have too many couture gowns in need of special handling, which is just one of Davis Imperial’s areas of expertise. But when you spill red wine on your white slipcover or that dress you just blew your monthly grocery budget on, it’s time to take advantage of the family-owned company’s 52 years of experience....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the tracks, including “Chega de Saudade,” featured Gilberto on guitar, but the arrangements downplayed the bossa nova rhythm. Later that same year Gilberto recorded the song himself, in a radically stripped-down arrangement. His sophisticated guitar playing–he articulated gorgeous chords with a deft rhythmic touch–was front and center, as was his restrained, whispery singing. Of course, within a year bossa nova was becoming a sensation, and as the genre celebrates its 50th anniversary it remains the sound most people identify most closely with Brazil....
Since his earliest pieces 15 years ago, which roughly followed a path carved out by the great sound artist Christian Marclay, this French turntablist has continually expanded his sonic vocabulary. Most of his recorded output has been collaborative: teaming up with an international list of electroacoustic improvisers, including Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Jerome Noetinger, Voice Crack, and Gunter Muller, he’s tended to deploy his electronic noises as part of a single massed sound rather than as one side of a give-and-take conversation....
Curi Valentine, 26, is a student in DePaul’s Japanese studies program. She sings and plays keyboards in the “gothic Lolita industrial jazz” duo Curiosity Valentine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m wearing my favorite dress by Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, which is a Japanese label, which I got at their store in Tokyo. My headpiece is by Angelic Pretty; I got it in Japan, too....
Even after a nine-year Chicago run and a disappointing film adaptation, Will Kern’s enduring look at a day in the life of a Chicago cabbie (based on Kern’s own experiences) proves that a good backseat orgasm will get ’em every time. In this revival, Jonas Grey embodies the vulnerability that comes with driving a taxi. Transporting random citizens at all hours to all sections of town, he’s subject to crime, unwanted physical contact, rudeness, condescension, and, most striking, the emotional impact of passengers’ revelations....
Mash Tun “WTF Is This” trophy Maybe trying 49 beers in less than three hours sounds like great fun to you. Me, I got a little panicky at the prospect. As a judge at the third Mash Tun Fest, held at the Bridgeport Art Center on Saturday, I was tasked with employing my allegedly sophisticated palate to form considered opinions of two score and nine lovingly crafted adult beverages (out of 77 total pouring that afternoon), but I half expected to get so drunk I’d end up sitting on the curb, pale and sweating, head in my hands and dead to the world, my temple pressed to a blessedly cold but otherwise entirely forgotten bottle of water while I waited what felt like an eternity for the universe to stop spinning....
What’s a Sellout? But I do not mean to hold Raymer accountable for the lack of institutional memory or fact-checking skills that led to these overlooked points. This would be exactly as pointless as accusing bands of “selling out,” when “selling out,” as he rightly points out, means continued viability in the commercial market. (He does not describe the great number of bands that are dropping out of, or failing to enter, the commercial market in order to make interesting music....
Vinyl fetishists and gizmo geeks will probably feel a little light-headed when they encounter the impressively named ELP 1XRC Laser Turntable, a device that combines the retro-style sexiness of analog LPs with the futuristic thrill of shooting laser beams at things. (You can read a review over at Wired.) The ELP uses lasers to do a stylus’s job, getting deep down into the record’s groove, replicating the audio information more precisely, and causing no wear and tear....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I said the other day that a Sun-Times strength is its packaging. Certainly the paper has others. One’s its willingness to let its stars have at each other–always exciting to see, in the way it’s cool whenever superheroes from different comic books bump heads for supremacy over Metropolis, or Gotham, or the Free World. Back in 1991 I wrote that as it was passé for papers to rail against injustice the Sun-Times had become “a lot more exciting by railing against itself....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The latest from where the sun don’t shine: Fadhel al-Maliki, a 35-year-old Iraqi national living in New Jersey, was detained at LAX in March after security personnel found a small magnet (wrapped together with some gum in a napkin, then in coils of wire) and a smooth round stone in his rectum. According to the local Daily Breeze, he explained that the items helped him fight stress....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Walking around the show sampling all manner of bonbons, crackers, snacks, oils, coffees, wines, create-your-own-cookie kits, sauces, and jellies produces the sort of addled sensory dislocation associated with the early stages of a lysergic tweak. For example, the industry types piled up to sample the Serrano at the table run by Ravenswood Spanish Food importer Solex, or the pate de foie de porc et gras smeared on water crackers by Elston Avenue’s European Imports Ltd....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the local news sources are reporting that “swine flu closes” a Rogers Park school. Technically, and I think this is somewhat important, caution about a suspected/probable case of swine flu has closed the school, and NBC5 is diligent in describing what probable actually means; it’ll be a day or two until the CDC confirms whether the cases are swine flu, since the symptoms aren’t all that different from seasonal influenza....
Space 570 square feet | Rent $843 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She moved into this vintage one-bedroom in a 1920s high-rise in January, but before that Agerbeck lived for years in a 425-square-foot studio. That’s where she learned to make every inch count; in fact, before she moved she obtained a floor plan of the new place and studied it to see how all her stuff would fit....
Gentle readers, I regard this column as a sacred calling, and I would never intentionally do anything to cause you to question my judgment. Sound judgment, after all, is the professional advice columnist’s most precious commodity. But every once in a while some do-gooder gets me shit-faced, and the next thing I know I’m raising money for some dumb-ass charity by auctioning off the right to give advice in this space....
