Last Sunday there was unfamiliar crispness to air; it gave one room to breathe for the first time, it seemed, in months. The sun was bright, and the sky was visibly blue. Wispy clouds rose far north along the lakeshore. As we sat in the upper deck reading the media notes for the day, we felt a freshness in the air–as if the poison had been turned into sweat and expunged an optimism that had been missing the previous Thursday....
What’s this I hear about “crop circles” being mysteriously flattened in the corn and wheat fields in the English countryside around Stonehenge? I heard that attempts have been made to duplicate these circles without success. What’s the Straight Dope? –Kimberly Moon, Dallas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh, God, not the alien spaceships again. According to a recent story in Skeptical Inquirer, about 165 of the flattened circles had been reported as of last year, some up to 150 feet in diameter....
Can operatic sopranos really break glasses with their high notes? What note does the trick? How come they don’t break windows and eyeglasses and whatnot at the same time? Can women do this better than men? Can I learn how? Or have I been the victim of an elaborate hoax? –Vox Clamantis, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The technique is simple. First you find somebody with perfect pitch and leather lungs....
THE THREEPENNY OPERA In Threepenny, Brecht and Weill turned conventional assumptions about human behavior topsy-turvy, specifically poking fun at the sentimentality of popular musical theater. You want romance? Sure, we’ll give you romance: an elopement between a handsome man and a pretty girl. Except instead of a student prince, the man happens to be a murderer and gang leader–name of Macheath, aka Mack the Knife–and the girl’s the daughter of a pair of con artists....
WILD MEN! When the Friends of the Zoo stopped performing regularly almost two years ago, the Chicago theater scene lost something vital. This talented troupe of singer-comedians had injected new life into musical theater and satire at a time when most comedy troupes were content to crank out tedious revues that were at best pale shadows of Second City’s work. Even companies like the plucky, constantly percolating Annoyance Theatre can’t hold a candle to Mark Nutter’s intelligent, witty lyrics or to the Friends of the Zoo’s inventive theatrical productions....
Since its debut in 1971, the Alban Berg Quartett has been a compelling exponent of the works of both the classical and 12-note Vienna schools; its recording of the complete quartets of Beethoven, Berg, and Anton Webern rival those of the Julliard and the LaSalle. The foursome’s playing is intense, but clear and exquisite enough to bring forth the lyrical undercurrents to modernism’s frequent tumultuousness. Two of the works the Berg Quartet has picked for this concert make it sort of a belated Valentine’s Day special....
APOCALYPTIC BUTTERFLIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hank and Muriel are the perfect mismatched, true-to-life couple; she’s too smart for him, he’s too immature for her. He can’t deal with the responsibilities of fatherhood, she can’t stand his coffee grounds in the sink. Forget that they can’t decide on a name for their seven-week-old daughter, these two can’t even agree on the sex of the Road Runner!...
Rock-and-roll lore holds that in his first public performance, in a Texas talent show, five-year-old Buddy Holly sang “Down the River of Memories.” That’s exactly where this British musical based on Holly’s life and legend aims to take its audience, and thanks to a package of great Holly hits and a warm and commanding lead performance by actor-singer-guitarist Chip Esten it succeeds as splashy, unabashedly sentimental entertainment. Tracing the rockabilly star’s whirlwind evolution from headstrong amateur to road-weary veteran–from his first unsuccessful Nashville recording efforts to his death at age 22–Alan Janes’s script is sometimes laughably simplistic in its depiction of the process by which Holly synthesized country, bluegrass, and blues into a fresh and highly influential sound....
FEBRUARY Saturday 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When you select heroes about which black people should be taught, let them be black heroes who have died fighting for the benefit of black people.” So spoke Malcolm X; perhaps those words were the impetus for today’s free daylong conference at the Harold Washington Library, Malcolm X and Afrocentricity: Education for Liberation. Three panels of local scholars and activists will look at Malcolm X’s continuing relevance at 9:30, 12:30, and 2:30; conference registration starts at 9....
CANTORIAL Ira Levin’s Cantorial, begun in l980 and completed during the early part of the decade, is very much a product of its time. The play is so filled with yearning for the past that it literally features a voice that cries in Hebrew, “Build your house the way it was!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The voice belongs to a long-dead cantor who haunts a home that was, until very recently, a tiny synagogue....
It’s well-known that Puccini and Gershwin wanted to set Ferenc Molnar’s play Liliom operatically, and that the Hungarian playwright denied them permission. But Molnar was so charmed by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first effort, Oklahoma!, that he granted them the right to set his play to music. When Hart’s alcoholism became so bad that he was no longer able to work (Rodgers always said he would have gone on working with Hart forever if it had been possible), Rodgers teamed up with the successful playwright Oscar Hammerstein II....
Forget the State Capitol. Forget Lincoln’s home. Forget Lincoln’s Tomb. The most beautiful man-made object between Interstate 80 and the Saint Louis Arch is the house at the corner of Fourth and Lawrence streets in Springfield that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Susan Lawrence Dana 88 years ago. But only a few of them are open to the public and then only once a year. So most of the time you can see only their outsides....
. . . advanced civilizations might be operating radio beacons, possibly to attract the attention of emerging societies and bring them into contact with a community of long-established intelligent societies existing throughout the galaxy. Do we call in the Soviets for advice? Understandably, extraterrestrial relations take a backseat to the space station on NASA’s list of priorities. But an independent, ad hoc group of scientists and scholars has been working on these questions, and after much mulling they have crafted sober suggestions for handling First Contact....
Of the one-tenth of 1 percent of the total population that thinks of giving books of black-and-white photography as Christmas gifts, nine-tenths of them will give books by Ansel Adams. The remainder will divide themselves fairly evenly among, probably, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, and oh, does Diane Keaton have a book out this year? The percentage that will buy Howard Seth Miller’s School is too small to be measured, even with sophisticated instruments....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether Mr. Taber (“Holocaust Letter Not Kosher”) likes it or not, I am from a Jewish family. I went to Hebrew school, (even being elected student council president there one year), was bar mitzvahed, and previously lived in Skokie. Mr. Taber may not like my opinions, but he should be assured that I do exist. The persons described in the two Reader articles I was reacting to were not strangers to me–I even attended school together with one of them....
AUSTRIAN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN: BEYOND TRADITION IN THE 1990s In the years approaching World War I Vienna was an international center of culture and intellect that produced such luminaries as Freud and Wittgenstein in the social sciences, Schiele and Klimt in painting, Schoenberg and Mahler in music. Early 20th-century Vienna also produced some of the greatest architects of the early modern movement known as the Jugendstil or the Vienna Secession. Designers such as Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Josef Hoffmann left behind the precepts of heavy German classicism and lavishly ornamented surfaces that made 19th-century Viennese buildings resemble wedding cakes, and conceived buildings that were pure geometry, with only the most severe and stylized decoration....
Ronald Reagan was president, and trying to make his conservative doctrine the ideology of the land, when the federal government took Atrium Village to court. But now the Justice Department has apparently flip-flopped. Last month it settled the case on terms the Atrium Village lawyers had been proposing from the start. After three years of legal fighting, and at a cost to Atrium managers of at least $250,000 in legal bills, Atrium Village is getting the message that for all intents and purposes they were right all along....
Perfect frankness in a city guide is as rare as perfect honesty in a politician. Proof of that proposition is offered in three new guidebooks from Chicago Review Press. The most interesting of these are Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide, by Sherry Kent and Mary Szpur, and Norman Mark’s Chicago: Walking, Bicycling & Driving Tours of the City. Each is the third edition of a deservedly popular guide, updated to reflect the updatings that Chicago itself has undergone in the last few years....
It sometimes seems that in the never-ending battle between blues traditionalists and modernists, only the music loses. In a corrupt variation on the feminist notion that “the personal is political,” aficionados too often argue that what moves the soul, what inspires the feet to dance, signifies more than individual taste–that it labels one not just as a connoisseur or a tin-eared philistine but as a representative of social forces that would preserve or destroy an entire musical canon....
It seems the most unlikely of combinations: single-room-occupancy hotels, those holding pens for the John Hinckleys and Travis Bickles of the world, and not-for-profit organizations, those bastions of goody-goodyism. Yet such a combination has emerged on the north side, and it may represent a new direction for Chicago in the provision of low-income housing. Housing for one has been with us as long as the city, answering the demand of railroad laborers and other transient workers, of immigrants saving to bring their families to America....
