If you haven’t seen Goat island, I suppose I can forgive you. They only perform in Chicago about once a year and then for only one weekend. But if you don’t call right now and make reservations for their two weekend gig, you have lost all of my sympathies. Goat Island’s work is about as challenging and delightful as Chicago has to offer. Somehow they elicit delicate imagery from coarse physicality, taking the pedestrian into the realm of pure metaphor....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First let me make clear that my link with this group is a strong one–though I am not an Ensemble member, I am currently performing with them in Despoiled Shore/Medeamaterial/Landscape With Argonauts and have known several of the Ensemble members for a number of years. I am both happy and proud to admit this association. They are a vital, tenacious, caring group of people determined not simply “to do good plays,” but to challenge themselves and their audience....
LOVERS AND KEEPERS “At first you were incredibly stupid,” he answers. “but then you got smarter and sweeter.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These two may not always have liked each other, but they are each other’s mundane destiny; they are content to stay together because they’ve maneuvered through the mine fields to a safe place. But there’s a sad lining to their ordinary nest and a reservoir of dissatisfaction....
One Burner Cookery, published in the 1940s, was meant for people in the war years who cooked on an electric hot plate or served from a chafing dish. In the cookbook’s narrative portion, however, author Flora Harris seems to speak strictly to the chafing-dish crowd. Owners Barry Bluestein and Kevin Morrissey, who were new to retailing when they opened Season to Taste last July, now stock some 2,000 titles, including works by Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and Fannie Farmer....
SMOOCH MUSIC Still, novels, films, plays, and TV shows continue to put forth the party line. And the propagandists make no distinction between love and morbid dependency, for example, or mere sexual attraction. Yet no one has been willing to speak out and label this propaganda for the nonsense it is. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one, that is, except David Cale. In Smooch Music, his ingenious solo performance at the Goodman Theatre Studio, he treats romance with refreshing irreverence, blending fantasy, dreams, and anecdotes into a painfully graphic picture of love’s real face....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Masson, “a lot of the issues [calling for the abolition of therapy] revolve around the issue of informed consent.” So he informs us: of the games analysts play (e.g., the insincere personae they put on), of the character flaws of the leading theorists of psychoanalysis (Freud’s questionable treatment of data, Jung’s narcissism and opportunism, Campbell’s self-aggrandizing pedantry), of the debilitating, but well concealed, personal limitations of most analysts (their hang-ups, self-interests, prejudices–not to mention the troubling ways the demons of misogyny and racism have lingered about the very core of the discipline....
THE EMERALD The stories of Donald Barthelme offer actors a lot to sink their teeth into. His writing is concise, imaginative, and clever without being arch. His plot lines, when his stories have them, move effortlessly forward. His stories are playful, though the elements he plays with have deep psychological associations; the result is that his writing seems paradoxically flip and heartfelt at the same time–and therein lies its beauty and power....
Why don’t magnets stick to aluminum? –Les, Los Angeles Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First some facts. Fact number one: magnets only stick to other magnets. Fact number two: big magnets are made up of jillions of tiny magnets. Fact number three: so are the metals the magnets stick to, notably iron, nickel, and cobalt, which are called ferromagnetic materials. The difference is that in the big magnets the tiny magnets are organized–that is, they’re all lined up with their north poles in one direction and their south poles in the opposite direction–while in ferromagnetic materials, the tiny magnets are scattered every which way, and their magnetic fields cancel each other out....
The other day one of my professors asked why moths were attracted to light. Someone thought it might be because they thought it was the moon. But even granting that moths might not be bright enough to tell a porch light and a celestial body apart, why should they be interested in the moon? Please, Cecil, this may be worth extra credit to me. –Shannon, Montreal Best of Chicago voting is live now....
While watching a recent World War II documentary, I noticed the U.S. flag with 48 stars in a six-by-eight matrix. Of course now we have 50 stars, with alternating rows of five and six. This raises several questions. When we add a state, who makes the decision on how the stars will be arranged? Is there a Senate subcommittee on star arrangement? Or is it done by some bureaucratic pencil pusher–another example of the American public having no say in matters of national importance?...
I have never been able to figure out helicopters. The big propeller obviously makes them go up and down, but how do they go backward, forward, and sideways? I happen to know the little propeller in the back is needed to keep the helicopter from spinning like a top due to engine torque, so that can’t be it. Any ideas? –L., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Any ideas?...
DESERT CANTOS Richard Misrach at the Art Institute Misrach is good at capturing changing light and the subtleties of atmospheric conditions. In the canto “Desert Seas” are several views of the Salton Sea, a desert lake in southern California, that are reminiscent of Turner’s seascapes in the gradation of color and the melding of the air and water tones. The effect is simply beautiful. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Eteri Chkadua-Tuite, a 25-year-old painter from Soviet Georgia, knows at least one difference between Americans and Georgians: the way they express their emotions. Georgians, she says, “show it in their eyes and their brows,” but not Americans: “My husband is an American, and you can never tell what he wants by his expression. With Georgians you can tell every little moment.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since her marriage three years ago to a Chicagoan, Chkadua-Tuite has divided her time between Chicago and her hometown of Tbilisi....
Friday 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over a 50-plus-year career as a photographer Arnold Newman has traveled the world, taking portraits of leaders both political and cultural. Tonight he’s the special guest of the local chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers, meeting at the Ross Ehlert Photo Labs, 225 W. Illinois. Newman will talk, show slides of his work, and sign his new book, Arnold Newman’s Americans, at the shindig, starting at 7....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Children in quality child-care programs–the kind available to upper-income families but not to those on welfare–do as well on most measures of social adjustment and development as children whose mothers are at home full time. Susan Faludi reports on the relevant studies in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, and concludes by noting, “Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the American family ....
COPING WITH LIFE Theatre Shoppe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The all-over-the-map trio begins with Christopher Durang’s Naomi in the Living Room, a three-character absurdist journey into the living room of a batty, foulmouthed woman named Naomi who is paid a visit by her son and daughter-in-law. Durang once wrote a play called The Actor’s Nightmare; this show is essentially “A Daughter-in-Law’s Nightmare”: Naomi jumps from mood to mood, smiling sweetly before launching into a vitriolic verbal assault on her guests....
Four independent shorts by women about mothers and daughters. All of them are original and well worth seeing, but I was especially struck by Anna Campion’s English documentary The Audition (1989), in which her famous filmmaking sister Jane auditions their mother, a former stage actress, for a small part in An Angel at My Table. Charting the subtle shifts in power and control between mother and daughter, this intimate family piece seems partly scripted and partly improvised, and the complicity of the participants makes it wholly convincing and riveting....
The last thing a legal-services agency for the poor needs is internal labor strife. Yet that’s just what the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago faces, as its attorneys protest plans to lay off staff and close two of six neighborhood branches. “When I interviewed for the job I asked whether the job was stable, and Sheldon said yes,” says Norma Barnes-Euresti, an attorney in the Pilsen office. “I turned down another offer to come here....
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the three Dutch artists represented on this program are probably the best players of their respective instruments in the world. Gustav Leonhardt was not only a pioneer in the field of early-music performance practices, but one of the first performers to work with period instruments. He is arguably the most sensitive harpsichordist playing today, and his performances in the States are few and far between....
IN TROUSERS Almost any gay man has gone through what Marvin goes through in In Trousers. Even if there hasn’t been a wife, there’s inevitably a girlfriend who’s been hurt, and the sense of failure and guilt that goes with the experience can be unbearable. But such situations, as intense as they are in real life, rarely translate effectively into good art; the specifics of the story tend to reduce the emotions involved to melodramatic bathos....
