Almost every player can read and write should be to understand the language of different periods. A good actor can do whatever he or she wants to be grown. If you really want to stand out as an actor, you have your resume stand out for you.

Feature

11:34 a.m. · July 18, 2011
· by Chris Bosman

Oppressively, brutally hot days always happen a few times mid-July in Chicago. As anyone who has been to Pitchfork Music Festival in the past can attest to, those days typically happen on the festival’s weekend, to the chagrin of well-traveled hipsters in attendance. This year, Friday and Saturday were certainly hot, but nothing unbearable. On Sunday, the jig was up. The temperatures soared into the mid 90s with an oppressive humidity. If you stood out in the sun for more than fifteen seconds, you were covered with a liquid sheen. This forced Pitchfork to cut water prices from $2 to $1, caused Odd Future’s Syd to sacrifice her own water bottles to the crowd, and generally led to a ring of humanity at the edges of Union Park’s shaded areas. For those looking for a day to do nothing but visit the vendors, this was that day.

Arriving later than I desired, the first band I took in was Kurt Vile and the Violators. Vile’s Smoke Rings for my Halo is a beautifully arranged record of spindled guitars and Vile’s hazy vocals, and in the live setting it had a curcuitous, hypnotic effect. It’s notoriously difficult to engage a mid-day festival crowd, but one way to do it successfully is to tap into the sun-soaked zen, which Vile did admirably.

At 3:18, when Vile ended, tentative roars were coming up from the adjacent stage. Odd Future hadn’t even started and with only the scant appearance of a few members, the crowd was in a frenzy. Putting Odd Future at the warmest time of the day was probably a smart move, the energy and violence the group has been known for inciting during their live shows was sapped of just the slightest bit of edge, meaning that people lost their shit peacefully, even if there was a mosh pit with people tackling each other. The group played a well-balanced mix of the artists that were on stage: Hodgy Beats and Left Brain of Mellowhype, Mike G, and Tyler the Creator. Tyler’s songs of course played most to the crowd, and even “Yonkers”‘ Pitchfork diss line was received with cheers. Whatever you think of OF’s music, they are a group that knows instinctively how to feed off of and give back to their audiences, meaning they put on an impressive live performance.

I listened to some of the weirdo pop of Ariel Pink before heading over to see Will Weisenfeld’s Baths project. On 2010′s Cerulean, Weisenfeld created fractured beats that framed downtrodden yet triumphant melodies in such a subtle way that I was unsure if it would work live. But by putting the focus on his rhythmic strength, Baths’ live set ended up being surprisingly strong. Being at the side stage, where there was a bit more shade, also probably helped; the Baths crowd was loud and applauded hungrily after each song, and it seemed to bring out the best in Weisenfeld’s performance.

After a short break, I came back to watch Deerhunter’s set. The seminal indie rockers led by Bradford Cox were a pummeling, powerful force on stage, tapping into their love for shoegaze and psychedelia and giving it an increased intensity and, yes, quite a loud volume. At one point, the band segued from Microcastle standout “Nothing Ever Happened” into the legendary Patti Smith’s “Horses.” It was a bold decision, but one that Deerhunter pulled off with aplomb.

Toro y Moi then displayed exactly why he has outlasted many of his chillwave contemporaries from 2009. His set, featuring himself and three other musicians in a full band setting, far outshone that of Washed Out’s last summer. Displaying an excellent singing voice and a surprising amount of funk, the Causers of This and Underneath the Pine songwriter impressed the crowd that had chosen him over the beginnings of Cut Copy. One of those who was in attendance, was Tyler the Creator himself, who sang along with some of the Underneath the Pine tracks.

Once Toro y Moi had finished, Cut Copy took over my attention on the main stage. The Australian group had a stage setup and light show much like Friday’s closer Animal Collective, but while AnCo’s sometimes seemed to obscure the band and often just confused things visually, Cut Copy used their live setup to increase the attention on their music. With the sun finally setting, the band used the surge in energy that event brought to encourage exhausted hipsters to actually jump up and down for thirty whole seconds.

After Cut Copy, it was left to Tunde Adebimpe, Kyp Malone and the rest TV on the Radio to close out the festival. There were no threatrics for TVotR, just rock. In a year where Odd Future literally threw themselves at the crowd, and DJ Shadow pulled his best Lady Gaga, TV on the Radio were completely upfront, simply playing their instruments with a vibrant fervor. They pulled from their diverse catalog that explored a lot of the different tones they’ve explored from the Young Liars EP to this year’s Nine Types of Light. Then the band came back for an encore that found them covering Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” to an explosion from the audience and Twitter. It was appropriate that for all the hoopla that surrounded this year’s festival, that one good rock band paying homage to another was what ended 2011′s Pitchfork Music Festival.

That’s poppycock, you’re probably thinking. There’s no way that forward-thinking bands of the sort that played the Pitchfork Music Festival would ever consider introducing an instrument so prim, so saccharine, so shrill into their music. Didn’t New Age kill off the flute? Or Jethro Tull?

And yet there it was, twice, during performances by the purposefully and precisely schlocky soft-rock revivalists Destroyer and the angelically pleasant and soulless Fleet Foxes. It wasn’t much more than an accent piece, but possibly it augured things to come. In an era of voracious music makers everything old or tacky or obscure will be made new again.

These life cycles are played out in real time on Pitchfork, the music news and criticism Web site that, since it was established in 1995, has been a committed outlet for indie rock and its many tributaries, real and imagined. The Pitchfork Music Festival, which has been held in Union Park here each summer since 2006, is part of the site’s continuing quest to document and capitalize on artists looking for the next history to reclaim, and also a decent roundup of those acts from generations past: sometimes influencer and influenced perform just hours apart.

The 45 acts spread over Friday, Saturday and Sunday only partly encapsulated the Web site’s taste, or the movements more broadly in the music world. But several individual acts told bigger stories. Animal Collective, the Friday night headliner, performed on a stage decorated like a huge Etsy sale, with cloudlike stalactites and crustaceanlike cutouts hanging from the sky.

Its show was alternately psychedelic and straightforward, and sometimes majestic, a wonder of accrued small details filling up the air. Whether it wants it or not, Animal Collective could have a long afterlife on the jam band circuit; same goes for the festival performers Battles and Gang Gang Dance, acts that stretch their songs out past melodic relevance into rhythmic trance.

TV on the Radio, the Sunday night headliner, has inadvertently become the most exciting funk band of our time, and its show was searing, a precise collection of art-soul songs by a band that’s happy to appear sloppy from a distance but knows exactly how all its parts are moving.

Trombone was important to TV on the Radio’s set — another unlikely instrument, in the context of the weekend, but seemingly more of an isolated case than the emergent flute infestation. The flutemongers here were among the more adult-contemporary acts on offer. But still, maybe flute will become the new saxophone, which just two years ago was an outcast instrument but is now used in Lady Gaga songs and was deployed by at least four bands here. Sax has become the new cowbell, and there was some vestigial cowbell here too, in Cut Copy’s wildly popular, overlong set of slack-muscled almost-disco almost-rock.

More interesting than instrument revivals were other budding strategies. Connoisseur hip-hop was well received here — from the South there was Currensy, whose weed rhymes were more lucid than usual, and the excellent G-Side, a duo that delivered one of the festival’s high points with a crisp performance that bridged the space between moralist gangsta rap and spacey soul and gospel.

And there were several impressive D.I.Y.-minded women at the festival. Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards and Julianna Barwick built their songs from scratch, recording themselves live and looping and sampling the result. EMA — a k a Erika Anderson — had serrate vocals over gloomy, lonely backing that dispersed ineffectively into the air; she’s one good producer away from something magical. And Zola Jesus played manic goth-pop that was too large for her stage, the festival’s smallest.

She was one of a few artists who embraced the dark side here. Others included the morbid and clean-cut Sun Airway; Gatekeeper, with its brooding ‘80s-influenced club music; and Cold Cave, dressed in all black and playing fluent Depeche Mode-isms, for what appeared to be a site-specific art piece as much as a concert.

As the music industry struggles to find a way forward, Spotify, Ek’s little Swedish start-up, is riding the waves of its European success with an America debut.

Spotify is a music streaming service but it has a remarkably simple interface and connects well with social media, especially Facebook, so you can tell your friends what you’re listening to. Such referrals are gold in any industry, but especially so in the under-pressure music business, whose revenues are falling as fast as Lady Gaga’s popularity is rising.

The thing is, there have been other streaming services, but none have captured the popular imagination – in Europe, that is, where it operates in seven countries – as Spotify has.

“Music’s last best hope,” BusinessWeek magazine trumpeted about Spotify’s US arrival last week. The news magazine points out: “Worldwide revenue for the recording industry peaked in 1999 at $27-billion, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. By 2008, it had plummeted to $14-billion.”

At the heart of Spotify’s success is the same key impetus that makes all good products and services great: simplicity and ease of use.

Piracy – stealing music or movies – is just too simple. I’ve never used pirate software myself, but I have been shown how simple and quick it is to find songs, TV shows, movies, digital books, even comics, via various services.

Then iTunes came along and made buying music even easier – except in countries like South Africa where the licensing terms apparently haven’t been resolved and the internet market is supposedly too small.

Apple’s online store (which sells movies, TV shows, apps and other digital content along with the original music) has overtaken Wall-Mart and Best Buy to become the biggest seller in the United States. It’s hands down the leader in selling digital content globally, and also offers a cheaper renting option for movies and TV shows.

But, for every one track purchased, five are pirated, according to industry estimates.

Having used Spotify for the past year, I can attest to its simplicity – and genius. You can listen to millions of songs free of charge for 10 hours a month. If you want to upgrade to an advertising-free service it costs just à5 (R48.43) a month or à10 for the premium service which lets you use it on a mobile phone and store “local files” for playing offline. The US offers the same options, except in dollars.

Despite its simplicity, Spotify is so inherently clever you’re probably wondering why no one did it before. The thing is they did, most notably Rhapsody.

But it seems the right circumstances and ingredients have finally come to bear. Beleaguered big music labels have finally realised they are fighting a losing battle with an outdated business model (and world view) while social networking is now the de facto communication centre of the internet.

Faced with plummeting revenues, they have had to deal with Spotify and iTunes. Crucially, the big labels own small percentages of Spotify.

Only 28, Ek was involved with numerous internet successes before he started Spotify three years ago. He was chief executive of uTorrent, a torrent downloading app, and helped turn Stardoll.com into a 100million-user site that lets girls dress up dolls. His experience in peer-to-peer file sharing is part of the reason Spotify is so quick and easy. Piracy does have some positive results, it seems.

Jennifer Lopez is set to undergo her third divorce after it was announced that she is splitting with husband Marc Anthony — raising doubts over a TV talent show they were both due to appear on.

As the BBC reports, the pair have been married for seven years but have come to an “amicable” agreement over their break-up, which they said was a “very difficult decision”.

However, according to the Mirror, their break up casts concerns over a forthcoming Latin-based TV talent show both Lopez and Anthony were signed up to host. They were due to appear on the Simon Fuller-produced ‘Q’Viva! The Chosen’, but it seems like either Lopez or Anthony will now depart the line-up — with Lopez being touted as the one to make way.

Anthony, who is a Latin singer and actor, married Lopez in June 2004, with the duo having twins in 2008. This will be the third time Lopez has had to navigate through the rigours of a divorce, after previously ending her marriages to first husband Ojani Noa and later Cris Judd.

As previously reported by AOL Music, Lopez revealed in January this year that she was planning on having another child with Anthony — and she added that their twins made them the pair look at the “bigger picture”. Perhaps ominously, Lopez also said: “My kids make Marc and I stronger than we have ever been. But there have been tough times where I did not know what the end looked like.”

Watch the video for Jennifer Lopez’s ‘I’m Into You’

Though Pitchfork’s crowds skew young and fashion-forward, comfort took precedent over style. Mostly.

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“I saw someone in a sweatshirt yesterday,” said Jeff Mather of Cleveland, who brought a three-liter bottle of water to the gate on Sunday, the third day of the festival. “I was really confused.”

Across Chicago, residents turned to fluids, fans and air conditioners to cope with extreme heat that is expected to last through the week. The heat index hit 103 on the lakefront Sunday, and similar figures are expected until at least Friday, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters called for high temperatures in the upper 90s for most of the week, intensified by soupy humidity.

The roughly 18,000 music fans who packed into a sun-baked Union Park for the last day of the annual festival had access to cooling buses. Organizers on Sunday planned to pass out even more free bottles of water than they had the day before – 13,000.

The heat inspired entrepreneurs who lugged coolers from their nearby homes to hawk bottled water to concertgoers. As shirtless teenage boys shouted “ice cold water” from the traffic islands on Ashland, Jerome Tate, 39, hunched under the train tracks above Lake Street, unloading glistening 50-pound blocks of ice in cardboard boxes to replenish the coolers of bottles.

Repeating what seemed to be the whole city’s mantra for the day, he said: “As long as you stay hydrated, you’ll be OK.”

As if to illustrate the point, dozens of sweat-sopped bicyclists pulled up to Chicago Police Department headquarters Sunday afternoon near the end of the seventh annual Concerns of Police Survivors (C.O.P.S.) Cycle Across Illinois. The multijurisdictional crew of police officers and family members of fallen police were joined at the end of their ride of more than 300 miles by Chicago officers and supporters willing to undertake a more leisurely trip to a lakefront police memorial.

Asked if the cause of honoring fallen officers was worth the physical punishment of a four-day ride, a sweat-drenched Eamon Walsh answered without hesitation, “Hell, yes.”

“I’ll do this until my legs physically can’t pedal,” said Walsh, a juvenile detention aide in Orland Park.

A few blocks away, 30-year-old Ron Hamilton was attending to the needs of one person – his one-year-old daughter, Naomi. Hamilton drove to a tire shop on 43^rd Avenue to inflate a newly purchased kiddie pool, which he stuffed awkwardly into his silver coupe. He has a window air conditioning unit in his Bronzeville home, but it won’t stand up to the heat expected this week, he said. 

Hamilton and the rest of Chicago are directly in the middle of the prime time for dangerous heat and humidity.

About 37 percent of the nearly 2,000 days in which temperatures reached 90 degrees in Chicago from 1928 through last year were in July, more than any other month, according to data gathered at Midway Airport and analyzed by WGN-TV meteorologists.

Twelve percent of those days fell between July 15 and July 23, WGN-TV meteorologist Tom Skilling said.

While the Chicago area is accustomed to hot mid-summer stretches, the heat wave by which all other hot spells are measured remains the deadly July 1995 stretch that killed more than 700 area residents.

Forecasters said temperatures this week are unlikely to match those conditions – and no deaths were reported in the current heat wave as of Sunday – but the 1995 heat wave drove home lessons that continue to guide the response to extreme heat.

Paul W. Dailey, the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service’s Chicago office during the heat wave, was part of a commission created to study that hot spell. Members analyzed years’ worth of records from the Cook County medical examiner’s office and found that most days on which at least 100 people died – well above the city’s usual daily summer average – were not only extremely hot but also shared certain characteristics, such as abnormally high heat indexes and overnight temperatures.

“We used to treat (heat) as just something that was inconvenient for people (or) uncomfortable,” said Dailey, a part-time meteorologist with WGN-TV.

“But now we treat it as a true danger to life.”

Tribune reporter Liam Ford and Tribune music critic Greg Kot contributed.

dhinkel@tribune.com

rhaggerty@tribune.com

I heard an interview Schwartz did with NPR from a few years ago. In it, he told the story of how television executives were concerned viewers would not get how the castaways ended up on Gilligan’s Island (I always wondered why some of the passengers packed three months of wardrobe for a 3-hour tour, but I digress).

His solution was to tell the story in the show’s opening song. Harry Belafonte and calypso were very popular in those days and Schwartz wrote a very memorable theme song for Gilligan’s Island that I can still sing word for word to this day.

 I never miss Modern Famil y, but I couldn’t hum the music they use to open the show.

The interview got me thinking about today’s televisions shows.  Were their opening theme songs as memorable? I never miss Modern Family, but I couldn’t hum the music they use to open the show.  Does the C.S.I. franchise, which uses songs from The Who, and Hawaii 5-O, which kept its roots by using the original theme, count?

So what changed?  Are TV themes less relevant today, or have I turned into an old curmudgeon who waxes nostalgically starting sentences with “Back in my day…” and “Kids today have no sense of…”?

My guess is a little of both.  There are fewer “shared experiences” today.  One person is in the living room watching American Pickers while another is in the bedroom watching Dancing with the Stars.  We didn’t have that many choices (or number of TV’s) back then, so we watched shows like Gilligan’s Island together. 

Still, I wouldn’t mind sitting on the couch with my Ovaltine and humming along with a TV show telling anyone who will listen to my “back in the day” stories one more time. 

How many words in The Brady Bunch theme song do you know? Sing along……