Black Dice drummer Hisham Bharoocha, who’s since left the band, was the malfunctioning safety valve on the steam boiler: if a particular passage of corrosive abstraction grew too unruly, he was equally likely to ground it in a fixed beat or explode it with a wild spaz-out. But he’s barely present on the new Creature […]
Tag: Vol. 33 No. 46
Issue of Aug. 12 – 18, 2004
Reel Life: they want to watch your home movies
“My parents never had a movie camera,” says Michelle Puetz, an experimental filmmaker and PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. “I had a very unusual relationship with them as a child. I was treated more like an adult, and they didn’t document my growing up in a typical way.” But by high school Puetz […]
Stages 2004: A Festival of New Musicals
Theatre Building Chicago hosts its 11th annual weekend-long showcase of new musicals, offered here in concert readings (with the actors at music stands) and staged readings (with the actors moving about while using scripts and scores). The eight works in progress assembled by artistic director John Sparks range in subject matter from the Wild West […]
MF Doom
Hip-hop antiheroes have pillaged the tropes of the comic-book heavy with a vengeance–maybe because both MC and archfiend traffic in outlaw charisma, eloquent scorn, and menacing aliases. Rap’s foremost evil genius remains the leering Dr. Octagon–Kool Keith’s splice of doctors Benway and Octopus–but if he’s got a rival, it’s MF Doom, aka Daniel Dumile, whose […]
Roger Brown
Though he’s best known as a painter, Roger Brown produced three-dimensional pieces that expressed his saucy, often biting satiric views even better; that work is surveyed in this excellent retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center. Brown famously preferred advertising to high art, and Galvanized Temple is both more solid looking than classical architecture and amusingly […]
White Guys Need Not Apply; Praise or Petulance?; Extras! Extras!
White Guys Need Not Apply The Tribune’s looking for a new movie critic, preferably a woman. It wants someone “to review major releases and to enhance our coverage of an increasingly important area in American culture and of heightened focus at the newspaper.” It’s the number two slot that opened up, but the job notice […]
Tail Eats Snake
TAIL EATS SNAKE, Side Project, at the Side Studio. The title for this showcase of nine short plays comes from a gnostic symbol of nature’s renewal. But most of the writers–aiming for “a socio-political look at the passage of time and the patterns that emerge,” according to artistic director Adam Webster–focus on war, civil disorder, […]
TRG Music Listings
Rock, Pop, Etc. Concerts ERIC BAILEY performs popular music from the 60s and 70s at the benefit “American Music in Vietnam,” which includes a buffet, commentary by author Robert Arnoldt, and a panel discussion by Vietnam veterans. Sun 8/22, 3 PM, courtyard, National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, 1801 S. Indiana. 312-326-0270. EDDIE BARRETT & THE […]
Sex, Cinema, and Politics: The Films of Bernardo Bertolucci
This 15-film retrospective of work by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci runs Friday, August 13, through Saturday, August 28, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton, 773-281-4114. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets members. Following are the films scheduled for August 13 through 19; a full series schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Films marked with an […]
Ralph Irizarry & Son Cafe
A veteran of Puerto Rico’s mighty El Gran Combo and bands led by Ray Barretto and Ruben Blades, timbales master Ralph Irizarry formed his first ensemble, Timbalaye, in the mid-90s. While the group’s arrangements, tunes, and extended solos are all squarely within the jazz tradition, you can still hear the influence of those juggernaut Latin […]
Telefon Tel Aviv
The second of Hefty Records’ bimonthly Immediate Action nights at Sonotheque is an event of note for electronic music enthusiasts. Fresh off a lap around the European festival circuit, Telefon Tel Aviv anchors the bill; since the duo of Josh Eustis and Charles Cooper last played their adopted hometown (opening for Amon Tobin at the […]
News of the Weird
Chuck Shepherd is on vacation. The following items are reprinted from the News of the Weird archives. Lead Story A police officer’s dream: In a police brutality lawsuit that went to trial in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1997, West Haven police officer Ralph Angelo claimed that the plaintiff, Vincent Morrissey, had provoked him by taking […]
Return of the Prodigal Goddess
Lisa Buscani’s back from New York with a new solo show.
Kilt; Anatomy of Revenge
KILT, Bailiwick Repertory, and ANATOMY OF REVENGE, Bailiwick Repertory. Jonathan Wilson’s Kilt is the better of the two muddled, mediocre plays now onstage at Bailiwick. This dramedy about identity features a young gay man, Tom (Scot Carlson), who’s abandoned the family tradition of Scottish dancing but wears the kilt he inherited from his grandfather as […]
Gary U.S. Bonds
Gary U.S. Bonds’s early-60s hits–“New Orleans,” the epic “Quarter to Three,” “Dear Lady Twist,” and a few others–exemplified the rock aesthetic at its most jubilantly unhinged. As the band brayed deliriously behind him, Bonds rasped, mewled, and bellowed tales of debauchery and lust, the rough production muddling his vocals to the point of semicoherence. Thankfully, […]