According to many Chinese myths, says painter Shan-Shan Sheng, the sun contains a yellow bird that flies up into the sky in the morning and back below the horizon at night. One of Sheng’s favorite folktales about the sun goes like this: One morning, for no apparent reason, ten suns came over the horizon instead of one. Before long, the heat grew so intense that plants wilted and people and animals collapsed to the ground....
Basehead’s debut, Play With Toys, is an album, but it’s also something more complex: the record’s bookended with a mysterious twangy bar band offering C and W versions of things like “Sex Machine,” and interspersed throughout is a bruising commentary on the songs. As main man Michael Ivey sings, voices assuage and contradict him, go off on their own arguments, press him for details or solutions, provide on-the-spot analyses of the tunes....
At least three times a week Merriam Wamble, a 34-year-old south-side psychotherapist, makes the long drive up to 3249 N. Ashland to work out at the Midwest Aikido Center. After climbing the stairs to the second floor she bows silently toward three Japanese pictographs that mean harmony, spirit, way, or ai, ki, do. Then she quickly changes into a belted robe, or gi, and the wide floor-length black trousers that all holders of a black belt are entitled to wear....
On Sunday mornings, when most of her Lincoln Park neighbors are still sleeping, Patty Voloschin is making her weekly 25-mile trek to LaGrange. Inside a low-rise building tucked behind a parking lot for garbage trucks is WTAQ Radio Fiesta, a Spanish-language station that concentrates on music with a Latin beat. But on Sundays at 9 AM they turn off the music. En familia means “within the family,” Voloschin noted, and “we wanted people to feel that if they called in to discuss something on the air, it was still within the family....
Chicago’s neighborhoods have lately become one of the nation’s liveliest laboratories of grass-roots economic development. Over the past decade, dozens of nonprofit community groups have worked against great odds to keep factories in Chicago and to stimulate new commercial and industrial activity here. But many of these community economic-development experts were stunned by their late January meeting with mayoral aspirant Richard M. Daley. It was “a disaster,” “depressing,” “a truly horrible meeting,” in the words of a few participants....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nick Watters [Letters, September 13] expressed disapproval at David Whiteis’s description of Cookie of Maxwell Street [August 30], finding David’s observations in such bad taste that he concluded by making snide remarks about his mental condition. The implication was that in a healthy and tasteful society, when confronted with a less privileged life, the proper behavior is to ignore it....
One measure of a young singer’s artistry is the repertoire he chooses. Tenor Jerry Hadley, who has made impressive debuts within the last four years at the Met, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Covent Garden, has assembled a tantalizing smorgasbord of evocative and vocally daunting songs by three acknowledged and prolific masters of the genre: Richard Strauss, Sergey Rachmaninoff, and Benjamin Britten. Strauss’s “Morgen!” is justly celebrated for its uncharacteristic simplicity and sunny disposition; at the opposite end of the mood spectrum are a half a dozen early songs by Rachmaninoff, all wallowing in melancholic nostalgia....
HIGHWAY IS MY HOME J.B. Hutto Highway Is My Home, recorded on the French Black & Blue label late in 1978, is part of Evidence Records’ reissuing of the Black & Blue catalog. Chicago drum legend Fred Below is featured on this disc, although Slim’s regular drummer during this period was Nate Applewhite. Especially appealing is the presence of the late Coleman (“Alabama Junior”) Pettis on rhythm guitar. Although technically limited, Pettis achieved a synergy with Slim that can only be described as uncanny; the two seemed to fill in each other’s empty spaces with an instinct that bordered on the psychic....
MASTERGATE Why did the truth take so long? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you might expect from the genius who concocted MASH and Tootsie, Gelbart provides the most pointed political satire since MacBird savaged LBJ’s hypocrisy in Vietnam. Unfortunately, like MacBird and Rapmaster Ronnie, Mastergate is inevitably dated. That’s too bad, because its wicked exposure of “debilitating governmental self-abuse” and the consequent rape of the language skewers persistent thought crimes....
Al Hofeld is a candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against incumbent Alan Dixon and Recorder of Deeds Carol Moseley Braun. You have probably seen his ads on television by now. With little political experience, Hofeld is portraying himself as an outsider, an antipolitician. His critics accuse him of using his personal fortune to try to buy a seat in the Senate. The press has portrayed him as a candidate recruited by media adviser David Axelrod....
You can find whatever emotion you want in the retrospective exhibit of photojournalism from the Magnum agency, one of the world’s premier photo agencies for over 40 years. Want a look at the essence of anger, that sheet of red that slides up into your field of vision? Gaze for a while at Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1945 image of a Gestapo informer being exposed in postwar Germany to the jeers of refugees....
PARTY But once the game starts, everyone onstage gets swept up in a giddy energy. The questions quickly go from the innocuous (“What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done?”) to the decidedly dicey (“What’s the kinkiest sex act you’ve ever taken part in?”). The fantasies evolve similarly, so that before you know it two men are naked and approximating poses found in a porno magazine. In between, they discuss such things as coming out, safe sex, and relationships....
PEEPSHOW So have we come to the point where avant-garde theater can’t get arrested in this town? Not even highly pedigreed, handsomely mounted, self-consciously erotic avant-garde theater? Or is it just that Peepshow is nothing to get excited over? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reason number one, there’s that pedigree. Peepshow has impeccable credentials. The playwright is George Tabori, author of Brecht on Brecht, Flight Into Egypt, and the screenplays of Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony and Hitchcock’s I Confess–a man who at 77 is still referred to as an enfant terrible....
MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY It’s also true, as two programs of four different dances each made clear at Ravinia last week, that the Graham stereotype really only fits certain works, not her entire oeuvre. Indeed, that may have been the point of the programming. These eight works spanned 54 years, and a good half–most of them relatively recent–were lighthearted, abstract, or both. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Take El Penitente, a work from 1940....
“Silence actually does equal death,” says Tim Miller, referring to the AIDS-activist slogan. “Action actually does equal life. These aren’t metpahors–or gym wear.” In this evening-length performance, Miller uses plenty of action to tell stories from his life. His wry wit, sophisticated insights, and keen sense of dramatic detail recall the monologues of Spalding Gray, but his kinetic physical presence is the opposite of Gray’s sardonic stillness. Bobbing and weaving like a punch-drunk boxer or a postmodern dancer, Miller is gutsy, funny, and moving as he shares his experience as a gay man growing up in Whittier, California, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, then moving to New York just as the AIDs crisis was emerging (a clever Gene Kelly spoof sets the scene for Manhattan)....
Listening to Sheila Jordan’s songs–the sweet melodies she creates and the meanings in her lyrics–you can’t help feeling that nobody else has ever experienced the emotions she’s singing about. Her harmonies are sophisticated, her technique is skillful, her voice a fine instrument–but the quality she projects is fresh and bracing, like mountain springwater. There are two key elements in Jordan’s music. One is intimacy, something that, amazingly, she offers even when accompanied by big bands, though a sensitive trio or a single accompanist better enhances the unique bends, curves, and leaps in her lines....
SYLVIA’S REAL GOOD ADVICE Sylvia’s day wouldn’t be complete without some hanging out at Harry’s Bar, where her canasta-playing love interest, Harry, cheers her up by being even more depressed than she is. Elsewhere Sylvia either ignores, advises, or deflates Rita, her terminally trendy, health-nut daughter; Bill, Rita’s blue-collar boyfriend, a dude in mortal terror of being caught showing his feelings; and Clara, a smug package of ego and attitude who agonizes over her flattering “problems....
If your objection to Dirty Dancing is that it’s just not dirty enough, don’t miss the chance to see two purveyors of sweat-soaked primal raunch get scuzzy and fuzzy on one double bill. The suavely unkempt Tav Falco, who resembles a used-car salesman stepping out of a John Waters film festival, is the rockabilly equivalent of a bulldozer with no brakes. Although the trashman kitsch can wear pretty thin on record (even when the producer is a former Panther Burn named Alex Chilton), live Falco’s band works hard for the money....
“The dearth of true monuments in Chicago may be explained by the fact that nothing really significant has occurred here,” writes Paul Krieger in Inland Architect (May/June). “It is more likely, however, that Chicago has always been too busy being Chicago to build monuments to itself, especially the kind that cannot be leased out….There is always the chance for the chewing gum or deep dish pizza monument, and no doubt foreigners would flock to a 60-foot-high tommy gun monument to Al Capone....
From an epidemiologic standpoint, this year is different from 1984: apparently pennant fever evolves between outbreaks, in much the way that viruses change every time it seems they’ve been trapped and eradicated. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, the disease’s last phase remained the same. In 1984, after the 81st game had been played at Wrigley Field, three-quarters of the fans refused to leave the park until the team–many of whom had already begun to change from their uniforms–returned for a delirious extended curtain call, which consisted of strolling the playing field and basking in the cheers and thanks of the crowd....
