During my recent travels abroad, I was obsessed with the otherness of products in foreign supermarkets. While freely opening myself to new cultures everywhere else, I couldn’t shake my deep-seated Ugly American tendencies in grocery stores, and got so carried away taking pictures and snickering that a security guard in Hanoi escorted me and my camera out the door. Here, at long last, is my complete gallery of snapshots.
Five recommendations from the Chicago-based classical composer Seth Boustead, whose group, Accessible Contemporary Music, puts on a free concert at Sherwood Conservatory on February 20th. For info, acmusic.org.
Golden Boy
Larry Yando—a.k.a. Scrooge in the Goodman’s A Christmas Carol—as Everyman? We are so there. And to those who claim he never met a scene he didn’t chew to toothpicks: Bah, humbug! Yando stars in the toe-tapping immigration tale Goldbrick, inspired by the story of the Chicago-by-way-of-Wales musician Jon…
Don’t wait for a proposal to venture through Tiffany’s doors—they have terrific, modern, not-as-pricey-as-you’d-think home items as well as the jaw-dropping gems on which the store built its reputation. I popped in the Michigan Avenue store to shop for a gift the other day, strolled right past all the quintuple-digit diamonds settled on their first-floor, and took the stairs at the back, up to the gifts floor. Elsa Peretti has a sexy new collection of sterling-silver picture frames that look like liquid mercury, and the store is offering free engraving on them until Feb. 9. Her crystal vases, candlesticks, and vessels are pretty spectacular too, and you’ll also find crenulated Frank Gehry bone china bowls…
“To the east were the moving waters as far as eye could follow,” Nelson Algren wrote in 1951. Fifty years later, the abstract painter William Conger reinterpreted that famous first line from Chicago: City on the Make in his painting To the East Were Moving Waters. For Conger, who has lived most of his 71 years in Chicago, the relationship of the city to the lake is a central theme. “There’s the marvelous clutter of the city with its wild aspirations and energy, and the lake with its order and timelessness,” Conger says. “People go to the lake to see what forever is like, while the city is right now.” In advance of two shows opening in January—a retrospective at the Cultural Center and new works at Roy Boyd—we asked Conger to reminisce on a few of his most Chicago-centric paintings.
In one of the most stunning developments in the history of rock, longtime fans of the heavy-metal stalwart Metallica are complaining that the group’s recently released album, Death Magnetic, is too loud (read the angry posts at metallicabb.com). To put the noise level in perspective, we ranked the band’s SPL—or sound pressure level, measured in decibels—against other noisemakers.
The Xanadu aesthetic? That’s easy. “Think Casey Kasem–meets–Greek mythology–meets–drug-addled hallucinatory fluorescent roller derby,” says Christopher Ashley, director of the musical production—performed in part on roller skates—that hits Chicago in January. To help visualize the exceedingly campy universe, we grilled Ashley for specifics on the musical’s most crucial element: its props.
Bright spots on the month’s cultural radar
We found four readers whose official fitness conditions could be labeled “burnout” and asked them to keep a workout diary for a week. Then we called in a major-league expert—the director of conditioning for the Chicago White Sox—to help our readers reinvigorate their fitness routines for the start of the new year.
A dance group that plugs local fashion designers? That’s not all that’s unusual about The Seldoms
