Here are three Looptopian things.
1. The Ponys – Their hairs are getting long, their pants fit a little tighter and their style is thickening too. The show was on Daley Plaza with the black iron Daley Center and the Chicago Picasso as backdrop. They delivered a solid unhurried set. The third album, Turn the Lights Out, released this year on Matador is their best yet.
songs off Turn the Lights Out:
Double Vision
Turn Out the Lights
2. The Red Moon Theater – Red Moon cooperates with the city to put on some truly amazing public shows. Like the year they performed in Chinatown’s Ping Tom park along the sanitary canal and passed over by the CTA Red Line. The play incorporated train props as it passed overhead and a funeral parade on the canal culminating in a fire wall dropped from the 18th street bridge. Their Looptopia work included fire towers, which I didn’t get to see, but I dug the Green Classroom outside Marshall Fields. The green props included stacks of books improbably balanced on ladders and shelves, with a guy playing a drone instrument and a jibberish-speaking teacher. Red Moon aesthetics have a dark absurd appeal like a Terry Gilliam film.
3. The highlight was Turkish clarinettist Selim Sesler who played the magnificent Preston Bradley hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. The line was long but the show rewarding enough that I may never be bothered suffering a line again. The domed and mosaic-ed Cultural Center, formerly the main branch of the Chicago Library System and most famous from the building hopping scenes in the Untouchables, was a fitting place for Turkish wedding music. Check out Selim Sesler kill the clarinet in this Turkish coffee house filmed by a weird German crew…
*Redmoon photo from Meryddian’s Looptopia Collection on flckr.
Thanks for the tunes Kilian. I checken em out last night. I miss being in locations that have events like the ones you describe. There’s a pay off to being out here, no doubt… but still. It’s been about 8 years since we’ve been forging on in this Northern Exposure. Sometimes when we return to civilization, it’s so weird. So surreal. There’s shit on the shelves in grocery stores I never saw before. New highways and convention centers. People generally seem the same. Youth fashion culture has it’s dork hanging out getting slammed in doors as much as ever.. well.. especially up here for some reason. The fashion in Alaska is about 15 years behind, and there’s not much in the way of a learning curve. To be honest, I haven’t strayed from my hooded sweatshirts, extra tuffs or flip flops. I have never seen an umbrella in alaska. And you buy someone wind chimes as a joke.. probably alot like there in Chicago.
I’ve been trying to buy a dog on line. Isn’t this on a cutie?
Beatrice. That’s my grandmother’s name. I like her.
ya, i miss big city happenings sometiems, and this one seems like a cool one. Thats a really cool idea about the white night festival. Though it does sound like someone is going to confuse it with an all night coke party.
Get ready. It’s coming on the season for Northern big city happenings. I’ll probably write up at least two of them. And I’ll bet you can count on Heidi covering a couple.
Then back to hibernation. Hey – - Hiber Nation, band name?