evanevanevan

At last! I can finally get that custom tambourine I've wanted for so long with a drawing of me with Stevie Nicks!

Price: $187.00 for a tambourine with one portrait (Stevie, yourself, your friend, etc.), $210.00 for a tambourine with portraits of two people (Stevie and yourself, Stevie and a friend, or two other people!)

[johanna's art inspired by stevie nicks]

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne.

James Iha.

Bun E. Carlos from Cheap Trick.

Taylor Hanson from Hanson!!!

Horrible band name!!!!!!!!!

And somehow I almost kinda like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Once again, I'll be playing in The Encartagans, the house band of the Encyclopedia Show, a monthly showcase of new work by poets, writers, musicians, visual artists, and etceteras all based on a theme. It's happening on Wednesday, March 3 at 7:00 p.m. at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago. This month's theme is EXPLOSIVES...and we juuuust might be palling around with a certain special guest/Hyde Park resident who happens to know a thing or two about explosives...

Heaven Can Wait, Ernst Lubitsch's only completed Technicolor film, screens February 26 at 7 p.m. in the Thursday night Americanarama! series I programmed at Doc Films. This should not be confused with the Warren Beatty film Heaven Can Wait, which is itself a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which is an adaptation of the play Heaven Can Wait, which should not be confused with the play that the Lubitsch film is based on, which is called Birthday.

From now on, all my e-mails will include:

• stationery
• animated GIFs
• the following valediction:

Cheers,

Evan Chung, B.A.

- Sent from my iPhone

The waiting room of my doctor's office seems to have been furnished in the mid-sixties and left frozen in time. There was no sign of life at all in the room when I entered, save a child's Chicago Bears Starter jacket hanging on the coat-rack. The receptionist - who from my brief phone conversations I had gathered was an elderly black woman named Hattie - had apparently gone home sick. As I waited for 40 minutes for someone to enter, I perused the reading material - mostly made up of years-old Time Out Chicago issues and this children's book from 1959:

I'm disappointed that I didn't get to meet Hattie, but there's always next time. The doctor himself was a very kind older gentleman, moving about at a snail's pace, but lovably so. Co-worker dynamics have always been a funny thing to observe in the offices where I've worked. It's odd to think about the kind of relationship that must develop when the doctor and receptionist are the only two employees ever there, day-in and day-out for, in this case, probably all eternity. They spend practically as many waking hours with each other as they would with their spouses. Do they have private jokes? Secret handshakes? Have they inherited the same mannerisms from each other? The same love of Lawrence Welk and disdain for letterboxed movies? I wonder if it's anything like the relationship between psychologist Bob and receptionist Carol on The Bob Newhart Show.

Incidentally... my doctor's office is in the very same building as Bob's was. Hmmm:

"In mentioning the word gay (as in the close of the last chapter), it puts one (i.e., an author) in mind of the word spleen."

- Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

If the odd passive construction of the following sentence from the Honey Smacks Wikipedia entry is any indication, Dig'em Frog is a loose cannon, mad with power:

In the early 1990s, it had been discovered that the current mascot, Dig'em Frog, was just calling the cereal "Smacks", so the word "Honey" was dropped from the name, and the product was then simply called Smacks.

Dig'em unilaterally changed the name of the product he represents, going over the heads of everyone at Kellogg's. If changing the Blagojevich tollway signs cost the state of Illinois $15,000, imagine how much the rebranding of a popular nation-wide cereal brand would require. The time is nigh for Dig'em's despotic temperament to be exposed, leading to an Arthur Godfrey-like fall from grace.

As for his replacement, I would personally like to see the return of his predecessor: The Smackin' Bandit, a half-kangaroo/half-mule with big wet lips who tried to kiss everybody he saw. Sadly, there are apparently no pictures of The Smackin' Bandit on the internet (perhaps Dig'em's doing?).

Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons screens February 19 at 7 p.m. in the Thursday night Americanarama! series I programmed at Doc Films. There is no reason for you not to see this. It is very possibly the greatest film ever made. And it's not on DVD, either. Seriously, you just have to come.

The Heavy Boxes performing at Uke Valentino, the February 14, 2009 Chicago Uke Cabaret.