Tag: Vol. 35 No. 34

The magazine that bears her name is published in San Francisco, but the earthly remains of “Mother” Mary Jones have rested in the tiny Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive since 1930–a connection the town finally got around to officially recognizing last year. The Mother Jones Festival piggybacks onto the town’s annual homecoming celebration and […]

Get those cheesehead jokes out of your system now, because while the Great Wisconsin Cheese Festival may take place a scant 20 miles from the Packers’ home turf, there’s more going on here than funny hats. Launched in 1988 with a taste test in which the pride of Wisconsin handily took top honors against an […]

In its 1980s heyday northwest Indiana’s AugustFest brought the Guess Who, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Koko Taylor to industrial Hammond, but in later years it started to draw a seedy crowd. By the time the city canned it in 2000, it was known locally as “CritterFest.” Its replacement, the three-year-old, family-friendly Festival of the […]

These New England boys are a little too smart to be playing dumb rock, but no other description fits. It’s sometimes hard to tell if they’re doing it out of pure love or if their lobotomized, lowest-common-denominator riffage is actually a form of smart-assery, but on their eighth release, the brand-new Jaggernaut (Tortuga), they’re balls […]

Writer-musician Paul McComas and his former student Emile Ferris, a writer and visual artist, are both fascinated by monsters–he began making his own monster movies at 11, and in 2003 she published a story called “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Karen Reyes.” Now, for this program of collaborations organized by Jamie Horban, they’ve created […]

I’ve written before at much greater length about why I find Daniel Smith and his family act so fascinating: his expressions of Christian spiritual revelation are so startling, playful, and consistently, inventively weird that it’s easier to believe in their sincerity than that of more conventional testimonials, which just sound overly Sunday-schooled. Really, if God […]

Set in World War I Palestine, this immensely moving 2004 drama illuminates the origins of the Jewish state and the Palestinian diaspora as it tells the story of two friends–a newly arrived Jew and the Palestinian whose land he buys–and of the Turks, the British, and Jewish and Palestinian nationalists who stir a gathering storm. […]

Shortly after Seinfeld ended in 1998, Jerry Seinfeld did an HBO special called I’m Telling You for the Last Time. He wasn’t kidding–after that performance the master of his domain retired all his old stand-up material and started over from scratch. During that period he made surprise appearances at New York comedy clubs, notes in […]

Joe Meno’s adaptation of his forthcoming novel proves vibrant, funny, and at times strange and disturbing in the hands of House Theatre of Chicago. In Meno’s tale, a former boy detective has grown up and just been released from a mental institution. Before he takes his own life, he’s determined to investigate his sister’s tragic […]

Angie Edwards, aka SHARKIFACE, has that evil-cute look that lets you know right away she’s all about domination. A member of the Bay Area noise royalty who’s played in Caroliner, Tarantism, and the transplanted Ohio group 16 Bitch Pile-Up, she coaxes oceans of broken glass from tiny metal boxes. At high tide she’ll shred you […]