Monday, January 21, 2013

Reader's Agenda Mon 1/21: Freakwater, Fresh Meat's Cleave, and "Yuck!"

Posted by Drew Hunt today at 06.12 AM

Freakwater
  • Freakwater
Looking for something to do today? Agenda's got you covered:

Alt-country duo Freakwater perform at the Hideout, their first appearance in Chicago in seven years. They haven't cut a new album since 2005, so attendees can expect to hear material from their 1994 LP Feels Like the Third Time, but never fear: "The distinctive weave of their voices, broken in after so many years like a favorite pair of jeans—[Janet] Bean's is refined, [Catherine] Irwin's relatively coarse—will make it feel like no time at all has passed," says Peter Margasak.

The Inconvenience's staged reading series, Fresh Meat, presents Cleave, a fantasy about conjoined twin girls, bound together by their hair, whose lives are turned upside down when one of them falls in love.

At Saki, screen-printed work from Delicious Design League is collected in an exhibition called "Yuck!"

For more on these events and others, check out the Reader's daily Agenda page.

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Sunday, January 20, 2013

Stan Musial lived fully in Saint Louis

Posted by Michael Miner on 01.20.13 at 02:04 PM

A more innocent time
  • A more innocent time
Growing up in Saint Louis, I acquired an idea about the civic life lived by famous athletes that might not have been universally applicable. Stan Musial was accessible not only outside the ballpark after games but in it as well—in the old Busch Stadium, a catwalk over the concourse connected the Cardinals' dugout with their locker room, and if you spotted Musial in his cleats clattering across it he'd stop and sign an autograph. During the off-season you were likely to spot him at the restaurant that had his name on the door. And when the morning paper held its annual Old Newsboys Day, and local celebrities on street corners handed out the paper and collected donations for childrens' charities, Musial was one of those celebrities. And when a touring opera company staged Die Fledermaus in the Kiel Auditorium Opera House, Musial was one of the guests in the party scene. Saint Louis was a small city and Musial was someone who lived there and took part in its affairs. He retired there and died there.

In this regard, Musial was not unique then and he would not be unique now. But he'd come a lot closer.

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Weekly Top Five: The trouble with never having seen Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry

Posted by Drew Hunt on 01.20.13 at 12:00 PM

Strangers on a Train
  • Strangers on a Train
As part of Doc Films' typically stellar winter programming—check out the rundown that Ben Sachs posted to the Bleader—the venerable film club will screen Alfred Hitchcock's dark comedy The Trouble With Harry. I'm eager to see the film, as it's one of my most shameful blind spots.

Thankfully, I've seen the good majority of his oeuvre—how such a major work as The Trouble With Harry has evaded me, your guess is as good as mine—so I figure why not share my top five favorite Hitchcock films. Check it out after the jump.

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Reading Alone in Berlin in Berlin

Posted by Jerome Ludwig on 01.20.13 at 09:00 AM

Hans Fallada
  • Hans Fallada
I spent the holidays in Berlin, arriving on Christmas Day. One of my presents, from my friends Sabine and Jens, was a book. (I could tell by feeling through the wrapping and shaking it.) When I opened it I was pleased. "Hans Fallada!" I said. The title was Alone in Berlin. Sabine was quick to say, "It does not mean that you are alone in Berlin. You have friends here!"

I do have friends there. And I was happy to have a new Fallada novel, having been in thrall of his writing since I first read his brilliant and devastating autobiographical novel The Drinker, which was composed by Fallada while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum. It haunted my dreams.

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Reader's Agenda Sun 1/20: Vintage Garage, screamo band Underoath, and a new dance revue

Posted by Drew Hunt on 01.20.13 at 06:00 AM

Underoath
  • Underoath
Looking for something to do today? Agenda's got you covered:

The Vintage Garage hosts one of its seasonal sales, in which antiquers and spendthrifts alike can root around for the perfect piece.

At the Metro, screamo mainstays Underoath perform as part of their farewell tour. The band recently released a compilation album, Anthology: 1999-2013, collecting notable tracks and featuring "the hard-hitting hooks and growled vocals of their early days with glistening guitar and clean ballad singing," according to Leor Galil.

Margi Cole, artistic director and founder of the Dance COLEctive, presents a new revue titled "Free/Bound," which features the premiere of two original pieces: In Orderly Fashion and Leaving and Wanting.

For more on these events and others, check out the Reader's daily Agenda page.

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Saturday, January 19, 2013

Tape it or leave it: Considering the cassette release

Posted by Andrea Bauer on 01.19.13 at 09:00 AM

analoguetape-magnum.jpg
I probably haven't listened to anything on cassette since my formative years, which were deep in the 1980s—a glorious decade, mind you, in which sad new-wave boys wore makeup and cordless phones roamed free. And while I've noticed an increasing trend of bands releasing albums on the unlikely format of cassette tape, I'd rather not call the medium a "throwback," or this movement a "resurgence," because cassette tapes never truly went away . . . at least mine didn't, judging by my massive cardboard box of tapes which holds such hits as the Pretty in Pink soundtrack and, ahem, George Michael's Faith, which I will promptly listen to once I finish writing this. But anyway, with all kinds of bands dropping new releases on tape, a Carrie Bradshaw-esque voice-over in my head couldn't help but wonder: Why, in this digital age and vinyl revival, would a band ever release an album on cassette?

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Reader's Agenda Sat 1/19: Winter Bike Swap, Soul Summit turns three, and the last days of Fillet of Solo

Posted by Drew Hunt on 01.19.13 at 06:00 AM

Sweat Girls
Looking for something to do today? Agenda's got you covered:

Inclement weather has yet to deter the Winter Bike Swap—and in a winter that can adequately be described as creepily mild, that trend looks to continue. Both year-round cyclists and fair-weather pedalers are welcome to stop by Harper College and see what's what.

The third anniversary of Soul Summit goes down at Double Door. DJs Sloppy White, Dave Mata, and Duke Grip will be in attendance, spinning tunes so you and your friends can shake and shiver and slide around on the sweat-soaked dance floor like it's 1966.

If you've yet to check out Fillet of Solo, "Chicago's long-lived storytelling and Live Lit scene," there are only a few days left to do so. Check out our sidebar for more information.

For more on these events and others, check out the Reader's daily Agenda page.

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Friday, January 18, 2013

Deep into disco with a Tom Moulton mix

Posted by Miles Raymer on 01.18.13 at 04:36 PM

Tom Moulton
  • Tom Moulton
One of the first real breakthroughs I had after joining SoundCloud was stumbling upon a user called R_co, who, instead of posting their own creations (at the time the platform was mostly used for dance music and DJ mixes, although its user base has since expanded), would upload entire sets by other DJs. A lot of them were contemporary German techno types whom I wasn't particularly grabbed by, but interspersed throughout were ones by the DJs who more or less invented deejaying as we know it. Vintage sets by the likes of Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles, and Larry Levan from dance meccas like the Music Box and Paradise Garage would pop up regularly with no indication of how R_co got their hands on them and where they came from in the first place. It was almost unreal—the recordings captured the period of time when these DJs were proactively evolving disco into what would come to be known as house music, and as such they're extremely valuable documents. They were also the type of thing that even die-hard dance-music fans had mostly heard of but never actually heard, and here they were being released on a steady basis, for free.

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Eat better with lotus petals and other food news bites

Posted by Mike Sula on 01.18.13 at 03:32 PM

• Leela holds forth on the incredible versatility of the lotus in Thai cuisine at She Simmers.

• A developer with a sadistic definition of "interesting" wants to attract more chains to Lakeview, reports DNAinfo.

• Neil Steinberg pens the obit for his perennial column subject Harry Heftman of Harry's Hot Dogs.

• Chicagoist talks with the owners of Honey Butter Fried Chicken on their quest to find a space.

• The indomitable Mark Smrecek smokes kimchi at From Belly To Bacon.

• Lottie + Doof makes strange-flavor eggplant.

• The Local Beet has the goods on how to apply for a Wisconsin cheesemaking scholarship.

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Jean Rouch in Chicago: An interview with Judy Hoffman and Gordon Quinn of Kartemquin Films, part one

Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.18.13 at 03:01 PM

From Kartemquins Inquiring Nuns (1969), inspired by Rouchs Chronicle of a Summer
  • From Kartemquin's Inquiring Nuns (1969), inspired by Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer
The Gene Siskel Film Center continues its Jean Rouch series this week with his African-shot "ethno-fictions" Moi, un Noir (playing with the short Les Maitres Fous, aka The Mad Masters) and The Lion Hunters. These mid-50s works are some of the most radical experiments ever conducted with the documentary form, and they served as a major influence on the directors of the French New Wave. Of course Rouch was and remains a source of inspiration for documentary filmmakers the world over; in celebration of the current Rouch series, I decided to stop by the offices of Chicago's own Kartemquin Films to discuss his role in the history of nonfiction filmmaking. I spoke with Kartemquin cofounder Gordon Quinn (whose early film Inquiring Nuns was inspired by Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, which screened in the Siskel series last week) and longtime member Judy Hoffman, who briefly worked with Rouch in the 1970s. Our far-reaching conversation addressed everything from Rouch's biography—specifically his transition from ethnographer to filmmaker—to his influence on Kartemquin's output to developments in documentary theory between the 60s and the present. Below is the first part of our conversation; I'll post parts two and three next week.

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