A letter to the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We find it a pity Peter Margasak failed to mention, in his article regarding the Independent Label Festival (ILF) [Post No Bills, July 26], that he graced the ILF with his acrid presence on the press panel last year. He also failed to mention that he got royally slagged by the audience and the other panelists for his narcissism....
Asked why he wants to be mayor, Nino Noriega has an answer ready. “Plato, in his magnum opus, said a man is ready to rule when he’s in his middle 50s. Why? Because by then he’s faced all the trials and tribulations of life. He’s no longer posturing. He’s really living. He’s no longer pretending.” Noriega picks up a pad of graph paper, on which is drawn a time line. “That’s the chart,” he says....
Here’s something to wrestle with: a PhD candidate in philosophy at NYU becomes a raving and ravenous Greenwich Village vampire and junkie–the two conditions are seen as interchangeable–while contemplating the victims of the Vietnam War and Nazi extermination camps and then promptly receives absolution. The dumbest, most pretentious script of 1995 is served up straight, with absolute sincerity and triple-distilled formal and thematic purity, by what may be the most beautiful and powerful direction in any American feature this year....
Anachronistic question of the week, from the Chicago-based newsletter Generation (June): “Was Jesus ever put in ‘time out’ by Mary? As a real-life baby in the care of a real-life mother, it’s hard to see how it could not have happened.” Uh huh–we can be sure she never laid a hand on him or did anything else that enlightened American parents of the 90s wouldn’t do. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
If AM stands for ante meridiem, PM stands for post meridiem, and AD stands for anno Domini, why is BC English rather than Latin? It seems curious to me that the inventor of our present year-numbering system, Dionysius Exiguus, living in Rome in the sixth century AD, would coin the term “before Christ” in English. Does BC also mean something in Latin, or did it replace a less-known Latin term? –Elton Raynor, Montreal...
One of the most striking pieces of art I’ve seen lately is this Australian Aboriginal bark painting of a fish, from the Northern Territories, made around 1920. One expert noticed how it resembled Aboriginal rock art–images scratched onto rocks by the inhabitants of western Arnhem Land, similar to Native American petroglyphs–but what struck me was the way the fish’s simple profile is cut away to reveal skeleton and guts. There’s no precise cutaway boundary; this is no textbook cross section....
A breakthrough feature by Lars von Trier–the postmodernist Danish director of The Element of Crime, Zentropa, and The Kingdom–this all-stops-out melodrama set on the remote north coast of Scotland in the early 70s produces some waves of its own. The plot concerns a naive young woman (a galvanizing performance by Emily Watson) who falls in love with a worldly oil-rig worker (Stellan Skarsgard) and marries him despite some opposition from her tightly knit Calvinist community....
Since he began recording a decade ago at the age of 16, guitar prodigy Charlie Sexton has had all the trappings of stardom: major-label support, the friendship of heavy hitters like Bob Dylan and Keith Richards, and performance experience with David Bowie and Don Henley. The one thing Sexton’s resume lacked was a standout record. His recently released third LP, Under the Wishing Tree, solves that problem. As you might expect from a resident of Austin’s singer-songwriter ghetto, the album’s packed with rootsy picking and crooning, much of it piquantly embellished with violin, mandolin, accordion, and Sexton’s knotty guitar playing....
Former alderman Anthony Laurino called himself an “alley-walking alderman,” claiming a meticulous level of constituent service. Descriptive as that term is, a new one may be needed for the extraordinary service provided by Alderman Burton Natarus. Perhaps “parking meter alderman.” But that’s getting ahead of the story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week the council voted overwhelmingly to allow the city to negotiate a franchise agreement with 21st Century Cable, a company whose principals have personal ties to Mayor Daley....
This month guitarist John McLean owns the Bop Shop stage from late each Friday till early Saturday: every week he hosts a different guest guitarist, and the next two should provide some serious fun. Ernie Denov, who performs this week, brings real jazz chops to his more visible rock work (A Band of Jimmies); on the other hand, he uses the pulsar energy of rock to light up his jazz gigs (including his frequent appearances with the popular pan-Latin band Chevere)....
A dynamite program. Happiness is the most famous and probably best film by the late, neglected Russian pioneer Alexander Medvedkin, “the last bolshevik” in Chris Marker’s recent video of that title (see separate listing). This late silent film (1934) with a music track was only recently made available in this country on video (which is unfortunately the only way Chicago Filmmakers can show it, though it’s a good transfer). It’s a hilarious and daring surrealist masterpiece that combines some of the pie-eyed “magical realism” of a Gogol with what might be described as a mordant communist folk wisdom....
Here’s the situation. A big-time divorce lawyer handling a big-money divorce case is in bed with an attractive woman who is not his wife. She is, in fact, his client, the one involved in the big-money divorce case. It doesn’t take a legal scholar to see that this is a situation fraught with ethical difficulties. Right? Here’s another situation. A tall, trim, handsome, expensively dressed divorce lawyer, the same guy as before, is in his La Salle Street suite, 34 floors up in a corner office with double exposure, an office big enough to accommodate a board meeting....
Little Voice Little Appreciated Broadway’s $1.4 million production of Steppenwolf Theatre’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice opened May 1 to a resounding cacophony of critical pans. One week later it closed with a thud, having lost all but $150,000 of its original capital. The swift failure stunned its New York producers and many within Steppenwolf; the company wasn’t involved financially, but in the past four years it’s sent three productions to Broadway and seen all of them lose money....
The Metro’s sound system was booming out Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back” when Liz Phair and her band took the stage Saturday night. It seemed like a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the backlash that’s followed her sudden celebrity. If fans came to see her shine, detractors came to see her fail. What I saw was something in the middle: an interesting presence who has yet to ignite onstage, an untested singer too often swamped by her own words, but at the heart of it all a gifted songwriter loaded with potential....
Luther Allison I heard in Luther Allison’s 1995 album Blue Streak something that transcended all these contemporary cliches. The 57-year-old singer from the west side, who spent much of his career in Paris before returning to Chicago in the early 90s, for once had used guitar playing to augment his songs instead of the other way around. Allison’s fast riffs, a mixture of Jimi Hendrix rock, James Brown funk, and his own imaginative stops and starts, weren’t the whole point....
“FBI agents are some of the most idealistic people you can imagine,” says former G-man Wesley Swearingen in John Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisitions, a new video documentary by Chicagoan Denis Mueller. Swearingen says he joined the FBI “to put bank robbers in jail,” but he soon discovered he was mixed up in a clandestine, and often illegal, war against political dissent. “We had a police state,” he admits, “and it was a secret one....
HATFUL OF RAIN, WEBSTIRS 1/6, CUE CLUB There are a couple of ways to look at these two acts. As a scene apologist I’d praise their technical competence, potential commercial appeal, and general professionalism. Speaking from the heart, I’d condemn the triumphant mediocrity of their music. On their recently released Alone, Hatful of Rain, a quartet from Lawrence who look like models for Chess King, offer a cloying pop-rock that might tickle the fancy of those who admire James Taylor, Elton John, and Jackson Browne, in addition to “contemporary” sluggers like Jude Cole and del Amitri (all of whom the band list as influences)....
SEAWEED, INTO ANOTHER 10/13, METRO Six years ago Seaweed were pimply-faced geeks from Tacoma pretending to be a metal band. Three albums later they’ve moved to Seattle, their skin has cleared up, their bodies have, um, filled out, and they almost sound like a real metal band. On their recent Spanaway (Hollywood) they don’t much alter their clunky marriage of pop hooks and quasi-anthemic hard rock cliches. It’s a good thing, too, as the best by-product of Seaweed’s writhing quest to be tough rocker guys is their persistent goofiness and pervasive gawkiness....
DAS EFX 2/4, OAK THEATRE This hip-hop duo brought its “diggedy” rap to moderate popularity with the 1992 album Dead Serious (East-West), elongating words with meaningless but rhythmic alliteration and drawing on loads of slang. As other rappers adopted their heavily rhythmic, nonsensical dance-hall rhymes, Das EFX were heading straight into novelty obsolescence, but on their new follow-up, Straight Up Sewaside, they’ve kind of bounced back, relying less on gimmicks and delivering straight, solid goods while maintaining a clever, if silly, bent (“I rolled two spliffs / So now I guess I’m double jointed”)....
In case you’ve missed it, 1995 has shaped up as one of the busiest years in memory for Chicago jazz musicians on disc. (And this wave shows no signs of crashing, with new albums by the New Horizons Ensemble, Kelly Brand, Tatsu Aoki, the Joel Spencer-Kelly Sill Quartet, Ari Brown, Marshall Vente, the NRG Ensemble, and Brad Goode all either recently arrived or in the pipeline.) This weekend pianist Steve Million joins the rising tide as he presides over a CD-release party for his new Palmetto Jazz album titled–with the artistic license jazz listeners have come to expect (and secretly enjoy)–Million to One....
