PAT MURPHY: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Artemisia is an artist-run cooperative gallery divided into several exhibition spaces, each featuring a different show. Murphy’s five oil paintings and 15 watercolors hang in a room to the right of the main exhibition area. In contrast to the polished presentations of the wood-framed works under glass in some of the other rooms, Murphy’s pieces are displayed sans packaging....
The feud and fallout from the bitter breakup of power-trio-cum-meteor-shower Husker Du continues. First it was Grant Hart’s melancholy single, “2541,” named after the band’s studio address. Then came guitarist Bob Mould’s Workbook album and tour–searing, monstrous, and dense. With Hart (it was said) experimenting with heroin, and bassist Greg Norton (it was said) selling real estate, there (it was felt) it would end. But now Hart’s back (and cleaned up, he says), with an organ-laden, rocked-up return called Intolerance....
In 1930, when Eric C. Kast was 14 years old, a fellow student at his school in Austria asked him, “Are you a Jew?” Kast hesitated, then said, “I, uh, don’t think so.” So the youth went searching for foundations to build his life on. When his mother joined the Catholic Church in 1935, Kast became a convert, too. When a family friend, the editor of a Viennese socialist newspaper, spoke movingly of the plight of the poor, Kast began studying the writings of Karl Marx....
If you’re a struggling young high-tech entrepreneur with a new product design and much more time than money, you might decide not to buy preprinted circuit boards and instead produce your own. “You start with a fiberglass board completely covered with copper,” says Casey Cowell, who spent a good deal of time at this in the late 1970s, “and the object is to remove the copper you don’t want”–sort of like a sculptor removing from a block of marble everything that is not the statue....
The Mekons’ first single, “Never Been in a Riot,” was the birth of postpunk self-awareness: its sarcastic lyrics skewered the Clash’s simpleminded anthem “White Riot” even as its chaotically lurching music outrocked them. The Mekons have sustained a balance between skepticism and exhilaration ever since, while exploring an extraordinarily wide range of musical styles, including dub reggae, country and western, rap, primitive electronics, township jive, spoken word with music, and rock and roll....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jeffrey Pederson and Laurie McDonald were arguing so loudly at a Toronto hotel in March that the clerk called the police. When Constable Andy Hickerson arrived, he demanded identification from the two, and Pederson produced credit cards and a driver’s license belonging to Hickerson, who had reported his wallet missing several days before. South Dakota newspaper editor Ward Bushee, who had written critical editorials about Air National Guard flyovers during patriotic ceremonies because they were noisy and dangerous (“What if a jet crashed?...
Metal chairs are arranged tightly in four rows of six. The shades are pulled down, but not far enough to hide the grids covering the outside of the windows of Ogden Courts, a public housing development on the near west side. A stack of manila folders, a pad of yellow legal paper, and a phone sit on the table facing the chairs. A meeting is about to begin. And the committee makes sure: The rules say members who opt for drugs or gangs are out....
Pionerr Press’s Second Guess But Pioneer’s deputy executive editor Alan Henry, and bureau chief Carol Goddard, who oversees 15 Pioneer papers in the northern suburbs, convinced Fullick to change her mind. She remembers them offering various arguments, which ranged from making it possible for her to enter the story in contests to the one that swayed her, informing readers who’d survived incest who she was so they could call. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
One more year like this, and we’ll have an institution on our hands. This second annual showcase of avant-garde theater in Chicago (with a taste of Wisconsin for good measure) is coordinated by Scott Turner, Valerie Turner, Jim Krulish, and John Oartel–with a bow to Salvador Dali, whose use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big) inspired the event’s name. It runs August 23 through 31 and features 22 different productions at four different locations: Latino Chicago Theater Company (the Firehouse, 1625 N....
Gather round the trough little piggies. “If history repeats itself, Sears will be offered substantial incentives to remain in Illinois” after it leaves the Sears Tower, writes Elizabeth A. Lesly in Chicago Enterprise (March 1989). “In 1984 Chrysler Corp. threatened to close its Belvidere auto plant [near Rockford] and lay off 4,200 workers; in 1985 Chrysler and Mitsubishi Motor Corp. offered to plop their 2,900-worker Diamond-Star auto plant in Normal; in 1986 the Chicago White Sox publicly considered moving to Florida....
“Nineteen-sixty-nine–I’ve heard enough about it,” said Don Zimmer. “And I’ve been asked enough about it, and my players have been asked enough about it, but in 1969 I was managing in Key West, Florida, in the Florida State League, and what happened to the ’69 Cubs–the fans remember it, and the ’69 players remember it, but these players wasn’t on that club, and it didn’t have no reflection on this ball club....
The Neo-Futurists are something of an enigma in an increasingly conservative age: a vocally political, openly experimental theater company that still sells out every weekend and has been doing so virtually from the moment their show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, first opened in December 1988. No other group in town takes ideas and performance styles from so many sources—performance art, poetry slams, TV commercials, avant-garde theater, stand-up comedy, the funny papers....
TANNHAUSER Peter Sellars’s star has shone brightly in the last few years, and he has been called a wunderkind and an enfant terrible. Since the program lists his age as 31 it may be time to drop the “enfant.” Lyric Opera’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado allowed Chicago audiences to get a taste of his method. In it he freely combined elements of old productions right out of the warehouse with electric guitars and modern sports cars, while turning the entire seating area of the house into a wide-bodied jet....
To the editors: We are both fighting alcoholism, have absolutely no insurance, and have about $25,000 worth of debts. My husband, having alcohol-induced convulsions, has been in and out of hospitals, and a $10,000 treatment center, which we can’t pay for. We aren’t working, and can barely pay each month’s rent. It’s a non-subsidized factory space, dirty and windowless, not hardly the “Eurostyle” loft this area is known for. A late-night, rowdy bar beneath, and bums in the hall really make the $250 rent increase we just got really worth it–yeah, right!...
“It really was a darling little thing,” recalls Rita. “Our maintenance man found it lying on its back on one of our window ledges, squawking.” Rita doesn’t get to see too many bats where she works–on North Southport near Fullerton. So the encounter, about a month ago, made this particular Monday morning special. It was a routine precaution that in this case had a less-than-routine result. The test for rabies was made at a city lab in the Loop on Tuesday....
Travel writers are perpetually rediscovering the five Great Lakes of North America. With each new tourist season they remind us that the lakes are the largest body of fresh water in the world, that technically they are not lakes but inland seas, and that skeptical merchant sailors from abroad quickly acknowledge the lakes’ waves, winds, and currents to be as treacherous as any salt water. They also tell us the lakes can be astonishingly beautiful and restorative....
West-sider Cicero Blake incorporates a good deal more blues in his soul stew than many other singers of similar musical persuasion. With an intense, keening voice that soars effortlessly into upper ranges where others would have to rely on falsetto screaming, Blake manages to give even the slickest blues and R & B arrangements a charge that’s both aesthetically pleasing and emotionally satisfying. The music is definitely on the mild side of the blues street; Blake’s longtime band, the Masheen Company, might be a bit slick for some tastes, but his steady professionalism and especially his rapport with the audience (probably his most distinctive feature) always manage to keep at least a few edges unsmoothed....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Episcopal mud-slinging contest (“Is Nothing Sacred?” June 9; “Letters” July 7 and 14) is most interesting. The banality has been marred only by Bishop Griswold’s balanced and reasonable reply (July 14) to an inane anonymous missive (July 7), and Ms. Thompson’s remarkable ability to express her feelings without impeaching the motives of the other side [July 7]....
YOUR HOME IN THE WEST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But let’s not forget John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, from whose kitchen-sink working-class dramas Your Home in the West has devolved. (There actually is a kitchen sink in the Steppenwolf production, though it’s sort of hidden stage left, more like a reference than a part of the set.) Nor should we overlook Jean Genet, whose phrase “When slaves love one another, it’s not love” is quoted in the program notes....
FALLING UPWARD The first few scenes of Falling Upward treat the audience to Bradbury’s lame conception of the Irish sense of humor. These scenes contain local color, shenanigans, and the sort of wordplay that would make James Joyce glad he’s dead. Hold on to your hats for the “comic” reenactment of a bicycle (pronounced buy-cycle, not basic-ul) accident. But the real corker is an elaborate, and gratuitous, interlude about the late Lord Killgotten’s will, which stipulates that the contents of his first-rate wine cellar be poured into his grave....
