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Music / Performing Arts Tonight: CSO, Muti, and Mason Bates

Posted by Deanna Isaacs on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 4:01 PM

Todd Rosenberg

Tonight's the last chance (this season, in Orchestra Hall) to hear Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra take on resident-composer and sometime-DJ Mason Bates's brand-new, electro-infused symphony, Alternative Energy, which includes sounds from Fermilab and junked auto parts, and was the hot item at CSO concerts last week. Word at midafternoon was that seats are available; $20 senior and $15 student rush tickets go on sale at the box office at 5 PM, the concert's at 7:30. Also on the program: Honegger and Franck.

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Crickets / Music Q&A with Craig Finn

Posted by Miles Raymer on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 3:43 PM

Mark Seliger

Through eight years and five albums the Hold Steady have earned themselves a reputation as the go-to act for big, broad rock anthems and life affirmation via power chords. Recently front man Craig Finn used some downtime between Hold Steady endeavors to record a solo album, Clear Hearts, Full Eyes (Vagrant), that's considerably more subdued and introspective than anything he's done with either the Hold Steady or his previous band, Lifter Puller. Finn's first solo tour comes to the Empty Bottle tonight. Last Thursday, the day after the first show of the tour, he and I talked on the phone. Hit the jump to see our conversation.

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Soul Week / Music The five worst covers of "The Tracks of My Tears"

Posted by Tal Rosenberg on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 2:32 PM

Crimfants/Wikimedia Commons

In order to research this post (about my five favorite versions of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears”) I had to make sure that my favorite covers were in fact the best ones. Which means I had to cross-check them against every available, YouTube-existing version of the song. Which means I repeatedly contemplated suicide.

In the process of being horrified by a song I previously thought to be infallible, I realized something important about the Motown sound: Everyone loves it. That means every no-talent bucket of contagious hate has to produce a rendition of a classic Motown song. As a result, the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have an inexorable soundtrack for their stay.

Here are the five worst covers of “The Tracks of My Tears.” Proceed with caution.

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Music / Post No Bills Diego Amador opens this year's Chicago Flamenco Festival

Posted by Peter Margasak on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:50 PM

Diego Amador

On Thursday evening the Chicago Flamenco Festival kicks off with a performance by Diego Amador's trio at Instituto Cervantes. His group, which also includes drummer Israel Varela and bassist Julián Heredia, will play again at the same time and same venue on Friday night. He hails from Sevilla—he's part of a big flamenco family—and he started out playing the guitar. When he first began performing professionally, though, it was on the drums, as a member of Pata Negra, a popular flamenco-rock group and a key part of the nuevo flamenco movement during the 80s. Amador emerged as a solo artist in the mid-90s, by which time he'd moved out from behind the drums, playing mainly piano rather than guitar.

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Mudville / Media / Politics This is halftime!

Posted by Sam Worley on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:14 PM

Esparta Palma

Oh, hey—did you catch the Super Bowl? Yeah, me neither. I still don’t even know who was playing. I was at the grocery store buying chicken thighs and canned diced tomatoes. But I did watch the halftime show! And I watched that two-minute Clint Eastwood spot—the one people are saying is basically a campaign advertisement for Barack Obama? “Halftime in America”? Nominally it was a Chrysler commercial. God, what a bunch of maudlin schlock, right? What was the deal with Clint Eastwood’s voice? If this is what the campaign’s going to be like, I’ll take those pie-in-the-sky proposals for lunar colonies any day. You know what else the campaign could use? Some YouTube videos of cute kids. A humble suggestion, after the jump.

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Film Oscar-nominated live-action shorts: Tuba Atlantic

Posted by J.R. Jones on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:00 PM

All this week I'll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for best live-action short, which open Friday at Landmark's Century Centre. Check back this time tomorrow for the next installment.

The Shore, an Irish nominee that I reviewed yesterday, dealt with two friends who hadn't seen each other in 25 years; Hallvar Witzø's Tuba Atlantic, its Norwegian competitor, is about a dying man who hasn't spoken to his brother in 30, so I think we all know which is going to take home the statue. Actually these two are about evenly matched as my favorite entries, each following a small number of lively characters through a simple story arc in about 25 minutes. The protagonist of Tuba Atlantic is a solitary old man living by the seashore (Edvard Hægstad) who learns he has six days to live; in order to die at home he requires a caretaker, and one arrives in the form of a goofy teenage Christian (Ingrid Viken) blithely calling herself his "angel of death." The ensuing comedy mostly derives from the fact that the old codger deals out plenty of death himself, blowing up fish with dynamite, shooting pesky gulls with a machine gun, even stomping on their eggs in "pre-emptive strikes." The title motif—a giant wind horn the man has constructed to communicate with his brother across the ocean—didn't do much for me, but the relationship between the man and the girl follows in the finest traditions of Scandinavian deadpan. A trailer follows the jump.

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Flotsam and Jetsam / Media / Lit & Lectures Walk a lonely superhighway

Posted by Sam Worley on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:30 PM

Archibald Ballantine

A suite of essays on Facebook in the New York Times Sunday Review this week includes a contribution by local legal scholar Lori Andrews, who was featured in December in the Reader's People Issue. (My boss, Mara Shalhoup, is treating Andrews’s piece elsewhere.) I was particularly befuddled by Evgeny Morozov’s “The Death of the Cyberflaneur,” which takes the discussion in a direction . . . you wouldn’t expect. Morozov laments the passing of what he calls the “cyberflaneur” (actually the term was coined on a website called, for some reason, Ceramics Today), based on the original, more corporeal flaneur—the boots-on-the-ground flaneur. A 19th-century French ideal whom Baudelaire and Benjamin (stay with me here) viewed as “an emblem of modernity,” the flaneur in Paris “would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades . . . to cultivate what Honore de Balzac called ‘the gastronomy of the eye.’ . . . His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism.”

OK, now think about GeoCities circa 1995.

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Broken Facebook can maybe wreck your life

Posted by Mara Shalhoup on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:15 PM

Bioethicist and all-around fascinating person Lori B. Andrews

Saverio Truglia
Bioethicist and all-around fascinating person Lori B. Andrews

And even if Facebook doesn't wreck your life, it can quite possibly leak all kinds of out-of-context minutiae about you to those who might possibly want to abuse that information. Maybe.

This is according to an opinion piece in Sunday's New York Times, "Facebook Is Using You," by Lori Andrews, a bioethicist, novelist, professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and one of 29 fascinating Chicagoans profiled in our inaugural People Issue late last year.

Andrews, who in the People Issue likened her past work to "the cleanup person, like in Pulp Fiction," was once tasked with swooping in (tuxedo-clad, no doubt) to assist "scientists [who] have done some humongo thing, and either the White House or the scientists themselves will call me and say, 'Oh my goodness, did we violate any laws?'"

Now she wants to come to our rescue—in part because we've become the largely apathetic prey of data miners and privacy plunderers, among them the big, bad (or at least big, opportunistic) Facebook.

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