BEAU JEST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the center of the play is the mildly neurotic 30-year-old Sarah Goldman. As the faithful, somewhat wimpy daughter of Jewish parents–Abe and Miriam Goldman, from Skokie no less–she wants to make them happy. But making them happy means going out with (and maybe even marrying) some nice Jewish boy. A doctor, maybe? Or a lawyer? She could do worse....
BROKEN EGGS Latino Chicago Theater Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Central to the tensions are the accommodations people have made between the grandeur that was Cuba–a grandeur nostalgia has elevated to mythical proportions–and the realities of a new life in the United States. Though it is now 1979, some attitudes stubbornly resist assimilation. At one end of the spectrum is Dona Manuela, drilling her granddaughter in the lore of the aristocracy: “You are a Cuban girl–never forget that....
The eighth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, continues from Friday, October 2, through Monday, October 5. Film and video screenings will be held at the Three Penny, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at the Univ. of Chicago Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St.; at the Univ. of Chicago Cobb Hall, 5511 S. Ellis; at Columbia College Hokin Center, 623 S....
De La Soul’s new Buhloone Mindstate features a drawing of the group’s three members–Posdnuos, Trugoy the Dove, and Baby Huey Maseo–with their lips pulled off their faces and tied in knots. Now what are we to make of that? The threesome’s playful, swirling, psychedelic debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, sliced the top off rap’s head and scrambled its brains; in the place of braggadocio, heavy beats, and overbroad humor they presented a personal, indecipherable cosmology, an airy, goofy sound collage, and an almost ethereal sense of fun....
Doonesbury in the Desert: The Censored Strips Salem (like Fuller) was out of town when we made our calls. But Salem’s secretary said Tuesday that as far as she knew, the Tribune was the only paper in the country to yank these Doonesburys. Trudeau works about two weeks in advance. “Last year,” said Lux, “he almost really got in trouble when he was taking the Chinese student revolution extremely lightly. He realized almost too late he shouldn’t have been making fun of them, and he pulled a week’s worth of strips and substituted more serious ones....
FISHING It’s a beautiful legend, and fitting to Fishing, the second of Michael Weller’s 1975 coming-of-age trilogy (the other, more popular parts are Moonchildren and Loose Ends). The playwright wraps his characters–friends gathered in a cabin in the Pacific Northwest–in their own redemptive fog. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of Fishing’s three hours consists of dramatized group hallucinations. The only plot question here is whether Robbie and Bill will buy the decrepit fishing boat that Bill hopes will turn him into a deep-sea fisherman....
HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY Conte decided charm and glamour weren’t enough: he wanted Hubbard Street to include ballet and modern idioms as well as the company’s signature jazz. He announced that the company would soon be dancing more new works commissioned from outside choreographers, works created to challenge and stimulate rather than showcase and exploit. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Step Out of Love, its companion piece, is even more of a departure for the company....
Kenneth Patchen watches a rusty green car make its way up past the overgrown brush and massive trees that shade the winding entrance road.”You can tell what they want by how far they come into the property,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who come looking for the building, which is 45 miles northwest of Chicago on Wooster Lake near Ingleside, can easily miss the entrance road....
Nothing succeeds like success. The annual jazz fair produced by the Jazz Institute of Chicago is a veritable orgy of orgies–the crowds are huge, there’s too much variety to take in, and after a while it’s all the dazed attendee can do to wander from room to room, head swimming in music. This perfect antidote to jazzdom’s cabin fever sprawls over four floors of the Blackstone Hotel, and some of the action also spills over into Buddy Guy’s legends, two blocks away....
The mostly expatriate Art Ensemble of Chicago–one of the most famous acts to come out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians–seldom comes here to play anymore, and neither do its two saxophonists, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell, who continue to maintain careers separate from the group. So it’s almost miraculous that they’ll both be in their hometown this week. I have a strong hunch that Jarman has been the most consistently excellent saxman of the last decade, but verifying it with anything apart from his bare handful of stunning returns is another matter entirely: most of his few recordings since he left in 1982 have been within the Art Ensemble’s confines, and nonmusical interests (he is, for instance, a Buddhist priest) have claimed much of his time in any case....
MY OEDIPUS COMPLEX: MYTHS OF EARLY LIFE AND AFTERLIFE IN IRELAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the two authors’ work, James Stephens’s is the more rambling. A Rhinoceros, Some Ladies, and a Horse is every bit as cohesive a story as its title implies. Essentially it’s an account by James (Mark Richard) of how he came to get and lose a job running errands for a theatrical agency....
Lead Story Michael Nau won $15,000 from a radio station in Somerville, Alabama, when he dived into a wading pool full of cow manure and rotting vegetables in a “most outrageous stunt” contest in June. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Arthur Freer was evicted in June from the garage he was renting in Evanston, Illinois, after the owner became suspicious because Freer was using it to store over one million pennies, in 235 bags, weighing over seven tons....
Lead Story Scientists at Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California recently produced “sea gel,” an edible paperlike substance made from seaweed that is lighter than air. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An Australian government research organization announced in December that it is on the verge of breeding sheep whose wool secretes insect-killing proteins that make it moth-proof. The same organization recently developed sheep with wool so loose it could be pulled off by hand....
Drivers here actually stop at yellow lights. Ticket takers at the ballpark hold up the line by talking with each customer. So far, this is Roger Schank’s only complaint about Chicago: “It’s slow!” “He’s getting three professorships–that’s almost unheard-of in the academic world–and in unrelated fields,” sniffs Harvey Newquist, publisher of the Arizona-based industry newsletter AI Trends and no buddy of Schank’s. “Basically, either Andersen’s got a guy who’s spread way too thin, or else Northwestern has....
Busting out like a berserk convention of drunken novelty salesmen here’s Interzone, the latest offering from the bizarre fiction chest of William Burroughs. In the tradition of Burroughs’s most notorious works, this compilation is repulsive, hilarious, astonishing. Like Naked Lunch it’s sure to make the rounds among friends, to be read behind locked doors or on the sly in public with careful, periodic glances over the shoulder. (It’s always fun to read Burroughs on the subway, snickering mysteriously among the crowd....
The New Music Chicago Festival is back! This biannual confab of the best, the brightest, and the most outrageous midwestern composers and performers promises a cornucopia of the latest trends as well as homages to avant-garde masters. Among the headliners are Cube, saxophonist John Sampen and the Black Swamp Saxophone Quartet, and the Boston Composers String Quartet. A good first stop in this ten-day fest, I think, is the (free) piano recital by Ann Arbor-based Robert Conway....
MR. HOOVER AND I “Most American films were and are like Fords. They are made on assembly lines. John Ford is not an artist any more than Jerry Ford is a statesman. Harry Cohn said it all and the Capras jumped. Seeing the fascinating and hugely entertaining Mr. Hoover and I at the Toronto film festival last fall, about three months before de Antonio died of a heart attack at age 70, made me seriously rethink my ideas about him....
The Bulls returned home late last month from a seven-game road trip that saw them go 18 days between dates at Chicago Stadium. That’s not quite 40 days in the wilderness, and only James Worthy knows what temptations they were faced with and overcame on the road, but there was no denying that something happened out there that transformed the Bulls, quite suddenly, into the real thing. They departed in confusion and returned with a unity of purpose, and in their next two home games, as it’s written, there went out a fame of them through all the region round about, making believers of us all....
Why do all cereals have the same number of calories per serving, regardless of what’s in them? I have scrutinized countless nutrition labels over the years and have yet to see a cereal that didn’t have 110 calories to the ounce. –Listener, Dick Whittington show, KIEV radio, Los Angeles Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hold it right there, buddy. Not all cereals have 110 calories per one-ounce serving, as you’d know if you ever spent any time in a supermarket cereal section....
What’s the lowdown on the secret Mormon underwear? Also, can they baptize people posthumously? Do they baptize babies with blood? Is there a secret room in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake where they can convert anyone to Mormonism from afar without their knowledge or consent? I fear my wayward grandkids may turn me into Orrin Hatch. –W.J.S., Evanston Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What timing–the Straight Dope just began running in Utah, giving me the rare opportunity to PO an entire state....
