Barbara Hillman fidgets. She hugs herself as she rocks forward, the index and middle fingers of her left hand grasping an invisible cigarette and beating a tattoo against her right arm. She sticks out her chin, purses her lips, arches her eyebrows, peers over her black-rimmed reading glasses–the right earpiece connected to the frame with what looks like a hunk of paper clip–and speaks quietly, deliberately, pausing between words: “We are not ....
APPARENT APPEARANCES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Take Hubert Santete, the most successful work of the evening. The aptly named title character is, simply, a man without a head. This disability is amusing by itself, but Hoyer goes beyond the obvious by placing him in a context and portraying him as an anonymous bureaucrat who is suddenly called upon to read an address at a corporate meeting....
ARCHY AND MEHITABEL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Call it “Cats Meets Kafka,” or “Aesop Eats the Big Apple”: Archy and Mehitabel is a study of human nature at its most fallible and fragile depicted through the antics of anthropomorphized animals. Its heroine, Mehitabel, has–let’s be frank–the morals of an alley cat. But that’s OK; she is an alley cat. Her pal Archy, who adores her from afar, is a cockroach who dreams of being blond and six feet tall so he can win Mehitabel’s affections away from the tough toms who come pussyfooting along....
When asked about printing, Deborah Maris Lader believes, most people envision imposing high-tech machines that spit out thousands of copies of just about anything in seconds. “One of my goals,” says Lader, founder and director of the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, “is to educate the public about the differences between commercial and fine-art printmaking. I get phone calls from people all the time asking, “Do you do business cards? Wedding invitations?’ I understand the confusion because many things are called a print....
Lester “Big Daddy” Kinsey is best known as the patriarch of the Kinsey Report, that rambunctious crew of fusion-minded blues funskters whose high-decibel audacity makes purists grit their teeth and seems to delight just about everybody else. In recent years the musical tension between father and sons has become palpable; they seem to barely tolerate his presence onstage, and he’s taken to leaving as soon as possible when they do play together....
AUGUST Satisfied? Happy? Reasonably well situated in a relatively accommodating world? Gaye Bykers on Acid and Elvis Hitler, two rock bands whose names do a fair job of reflecting their respective musical outputs, are not. You can hear their reasoning on this and other matters of philosophical interest tonight at Cabaret Metro, 3730 N. Clark. The music starts at 11:30 and should go very late. Tickets are $7; info at 549-0203....
Friday 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When a recent Oprah Winfrey show featured some lesbian separatists as panelists, the technical director insisted on identifying them to home viewers with titles that read “man hating.” The separatists had repeatedly asked for something more in tune with their women-affirming philosophies. By the end of the taping, they were furious with what they perceived to be a strong prejudice on the part of Winfrey and her staff....
The piano trio was invented toward the end of the Baroque era as a vehicle for ostentatious court pianists. Haydn, experimenting with the genre several decades later, elevated the violin from supporting role to almost the piano’s equal, and Mozart too wrote his trios as rich musical dialogues between the two haughty instruments. The cello had to wait until the mid-19th century and the piano trios of Schumann and Brahns for its emancipation, and by 1892, when Saint-Saens composed his second trio–a brilliant affectation of suave nonchalance enlivened by touches of the salon–this tried-and-true menage a trois was on its way out, displaced by more modern arrangements....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week [October 15] Jack Helbig reviewed Greek Streets, currently running at the Royal George Gallery. In praising the production, an adaptation of stories by Harry Mark Petrakis, he took a swipe at City Lit–among others–who have “done to death” a technique for adaptation (used in the production he praises) that “treats fiction as mere fodder for the stage....
THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE The Caucasian Chalk Circle may not be the greatest Brecht play, but it’s clearly the most Brechtian: a late work by a master who knows his voices and moves among them–plays among them–with tremendous assurance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on a 14th-century Chinese play called The Chalk Circle, Brecht’s script opens at a meeting of workers from the Galinsk and Rosa Luxemburg collective farms, away down South in Soviet Georgia....
The onset of winter has ended the fire season in Yellowstone. The fire fighting crews borrowed from as far away as California have gone home. The controversies engendered by the National Park Service’s so-called “let it burn” policy have cooled for the time being. They will heat up again when the new Congress convenes after the election. Hearings are promised. Various members of the Wyoming and Montana congressional delegations are hotter than the flames that almost incinerated the Old Faithful Lodge, and they will doubtless be looking for a chance to make headlines back home by skewering some bureaucrats....
The rats come at midnight, the raccoons at one, the demons sometime later. I watch the first two from my darkened bedroom, the glare of the nearby streetlight just bright enough to illuminate the garbage cans they’re picking their way through. Lately there’s also been a pack of unidentifiable varmints–a gluttonous throng of dachshund-size things that sounds like a gang of men as they hack their way through the underbrush on their march to the cylindrical mess tents....
Dear Mayor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then toured a prison. I was impressed with how prisoners receive only a bowl of rice, a thermos of tea, and a bucket for sanitary facilities. Recidivism is very low thanks to creative sentencing designed to ensure offenders won’t repeat. Theft rates are minuscule since thieves have their hands cut off. And ever since a man had his eyes burned out, there’s been a sharp decline in the number of overdue library books....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh. I know. It’s that young-white-male-heavy-metal-hard-rock stuff–who wants to hear that stuff? There’s too much of it being played anyway. Despite the fact that the “Blaze” and WVVX are the only stations playing that style of rock, it’s just too much. Well, of course, it would be too much for a hypocrite who talks about opening up the radio waves with one face, but closing them for certain “types” of music with the other....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Ervin in his article left out the most important element of the Buffalo controversy. He did this in a small swirl of confusing facts. Walt’s Tree Service did not show up during the first confrontation at the site of the sculpture when I climbed on top to prevent its destruction. Walt’s showed up several days later under the cover of darkness and after, as city officials were well aware, all judges had left their chambers....
DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES **** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Terence Davies With Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Dean Williams, Lorraine Ashbourne, Debi Jones, Michael Starke, and Vincent Maguire. Or consider the word “achronological.” The emphasis of emotional continuity over narrative continuity, the hallmark of several films directed by Alain Resnais (including Hiroshima, mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Je t’aime, je t’aime, and Providence), is certainly present here, but at the same time the overall film is structured around a certain narrative progression....
Lead Story Jill Moles, part-time track coach at a junior high school in Aspen, Colorado, was fired in May for showing the film Personal Best as a training film to her 13- and 14-year-old athletes. She claimed to have fast-forwarded through the scenes in which the two female stars show affection to each other but inadvertently missed a scene in which they kiss. Said Moles, “I had a hunch I was going to be in trouble when they all started chanting, ‘porno lezzie flicks!...
A picture hangs on the wall over my word processor as I write this. It is a picture of Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence, from the movie Lawrence of Arabia. He’s on camelback, leading his battle-maddened bedouin in their final dash to Damascus. He’s at the height of his glory as a desert god, and just about to crumble into madness. The picture serves for daily inspiration; it also acknowledges a shaping influence in my life....
Restraint of Funnies “For instance,” says the suit, “the Tribune and the Sun-Times have exclusive licenses to the 12 most popular comics. . . . A newspaper such as the Daily Herald that is denied access to the most popular comics . . . is at a severe disadvantage if it attempts to compete in any market . . . with newspaper companies such as the Tribune and the Sun-Times that are able to publish such popular comics....
At last–a teenage love story with real characters instead of cliches, poses, and attitudes. The promising directorial debut of screenwriter Cameron Crowe, the former music journalist who wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High (book and film) and The Wild Life (film), follows two very different high school graduates in Seattle–boxer Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) and Diane Court (Ione Syke), a brilliant student who has just won a fellowship to study in England–as, to everyone’s surprise, they gradually get involved....
