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RT @Chicago_Reader: RT @dansinker: buzz.google.com is up now, by the way.
RT @Chicago_Reader: RT @dansinker: buzz.google.com is up now, by the way. twitter.com
RT @Chicago_Reader: RT @dansinker: buzz.google.com is up now, by the way.
RT @Chicago_Reader: RT @dansinker: buzz.google.com is up now, by the way. twitter.com
Chicago_Reader: RT @dansinker: buzz.google.com is up now, by the way.
Chicago_Reader: RT @dansinker: buzz.google.com is up now, by the way. twitter.com

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The Blog

Peter Margasak

Post No Bills Podcast #5

The latest episode features music from Vic Chesnutt, Peter Evans, Radian, Pit Er Pat, and many more.

The Blog

Politics / Clout City / News Great Reformers Think Alike

Posted by Mick Dumke on Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 12:22 PM

Thanks to Isaac Carothers, citizens are losing faith in city government.

"I think after the Carothers issue, people are losing confidence in government," Mayor Daley said yesterday, according to the Tribune. "It broke the camel's back."

The camel was apparently in fine health before Carothers pleaded guilty to bribery and tax evasion last week, becoming the latest local elected official to run afoul of the feds.

The camel wasn't at all affected by Daley's complete co-opting of the City Council, his use of patronage workers to bully opponents and win elections, the Duff scandal, the Hired Truck scandal, the illegal hiring scandal, his support for the installation of Todd Stroger as county board president, the decline of city services, the festering murder problem, the deterioration of the CTA, the deterioration of the city parks, the privatization of public space, the privatization of the public schools, the sale of the parking meters, or the use of taxpayer money to subsidize profitable corporations while the rest of us are trying to pay our property taxes or rent.

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Chicagoland / Music / Free Shit Cheap Classical: Sibelius 5 and Free Ensemble Shows

Posted by Whet Moser on Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 11:43 AM

One of the best deals in town are tickets to the Civic Orchestra performances at Orchestra Hall - monthly free performances (well, $1.00 seat fee) featuring guest artists and conductors. The next one, on March 8, features young Leo McFall, who served as Bernard Haitink's assistant, conducting Sibelius's 5th Symphony; tickets are still available, if you need a super-cheap Valentine's Day present. If you want more background on Sibelius, the great Alex Ross's essay "Apparition In the Woods: Rescuing Sibelius from silence" is a good start:

Joy is not the same thing as simplicity. The Fifth begins and ends in crystalline major-key tonality, but it is a staggeringly unconventional work. The schemata of sonata form dissolve before the listener’s ears; in place of a methodical development of well-defined themes, there is a gradual, incremental evolution of material through trancelike repetitions. The musicologist James Hepokoski, in a monograph on the symphony, calls it “rotational form”; the principal ideas of the work come around again and again, though each time they are transformed in ways both small and large. The themes really assume their true shape only at the end of the rotation—what Hepokoski calls the “telos,” the epiphanic goal. Music becomes a search for meaning within an open-ended structure—an analogue to the spiritual life.

If $1.00 is too rich for your blood, the Civic Orchestra also plays regular completely free ensemble gigs throughout the city, usually on a schedule of two or three different ensembles every week or two; check the CSO calendar for details. The woodwind ensemble plays the National Museum of Mexican Art next Friday; the brass ensemble plays Gage Park the same day.

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Film / Free Shit The Will to Survive

Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:11 AM

Working on Walmart commercials in Savannah, Chicago advertising executives Al Hawkins and Kathleen M. Humphries became intrigued with the Gullah/Geechee people who live on several islands on the south Atlantic coast, retaining the closest linguistic and cultural ties to Africa found in the U.S.

Hawkins and Humphries spotlight Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, site of the most intact Gullah/Geechee culture, in their documentary The Will to Survive: The Story of the Gullah/Geechee Nation.

It screens for free, Tuesday 2/9 at Noon at Kennedy King College.

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Bicycling / Bad News From the Past Wheel of Misfortune

Posted by Cliff Doerksen on Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 9:30 AM

Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1897.[Click on the clipping above if you can't make out the fine print.] A lot of bicyclists today pride themselves on their manifest moral superiority to the benighted "cagers" in their wasteful and dangerous automobiles. This is not unlike the smug glow that warms the hearts of many Canadians when they look south at the barbarians across the border. In both cases, it's largely a rationalization of relative weakness. Of course, it's historically nonsensical to imagine Canada existing in the absence of the U.S., but there was a time when the bicycle was the top predator of the urban traffic food chain. It didn't look so virtuous back then.

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Chicagoland / Visual Art Morning Art: Tacita Dean

Posted by Julia Thiel on Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 8:40 AM

Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), by Tacita Dean, part of Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out, a group show on display through 5/30 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660.

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