The top of Jeanna Hasan’s worktable out on her sun porch is filled with paintbrushes, small tempera bottles stacked on top of each other, and several drinking glasses full of water. Popsicle sticks used to mix paint sit in another glass, and a bottle painted with angels lies in the middle of the table on top of newspapers. Within easy reach are two cigarette lighters and an ashtray brimming with butts....
The dominant view of labor relations these days is that workers should ask not what their employers can do for them, but what they can give back to their employers. As the pundits see it, organized labor–if it must be organized at all–should cooperate with management to promote our “competitiveness” in the “global economy.” For many years only a few rogue employers, most of them in the south, took advantage of that Supreme Court opinion....
There is something curiously generous about Goat Island’s performance pieces. Curious because on one level the company gives its audiences very little: their highly physical, utterly nonlinear performances not only don’t make literal sense but defy singular, uniform interpretation. But their images are so carefully and playfully constructed, from the most ordinary gestures and objects, that they seem to take on their own significance. In other words, Goat Island’s work is as frustrating, mysterious, and ultimately exhilarating as falling in love....
We know two things about global warming. One: in the last 100 years the average temperature has risen between two-thirds and one degree Fahrenheit. Two: in the same time the amount of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere has risen about 40 percent. That may not seem like a lot–Halsted is often that much warmer than the lakefront–but remember it’s an average, and the average temperature during the most recent ice age was only nine degrees cooler than today....
“The West ain’t what it used to be / and it’s getting ain’tier every day,” grumbles Chicago poet Carlos Cortez. “Colonel Sandhog and McDunghills / with authentically expensive / Indian curio shops. . . . and I can’t find a sack of Bull Durham / anywhere!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sandra Cisneros, who makes her home in New Mexico, writes of remembering at the last minute to shave under her arms before meeting her family in Mexico....
The storm last February that sent waves crashing into the condos on Sheridan Road and threatened to relocate the Oak Street beach to the lobby of One Magnificent Mile made lake levels a hot political issue. The idea seems simple. The Great Lakes are too full of water, so let’s pull the plug and drain some of it out. The machinery is already in place to do this, thanks to the engineering wonders that turned the Chicago River around....
To the editors: I have long thought it self-evident that an infinite number of angels could dance on the head of a pin, because angels are by definition incorporeal beings. Professor Bernard Welt’s commentary [Letters, July 14] on Cecil Adams’s earlier discourse [December 23] sheds additional light upon this important matter; but I must take exception to Professor Welt’s premature closure (“So there.”) on the subject. At least two points require further clarification....
One of the first photographs in Robert Del Tredici’s book At Work in the Fields of the Bomb shows a mustached young man standing on the steps of a federal building in Washington, D.C., holding a model of a hydrogen bomb. The man is Howard Morland, who achieved notoriety in 1979 when the federal government sued the Progressive to stop publication of his article on how to build a hydrogen bomb....
RUNNING ON EMPTY With Christine Lahti, River Phoenix, Judd Hirsch, Martha Plimpton, Jonas Abry, Ed Crowley, and Steven Hill. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The present of Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty is, in effect, little more than the past of two 70s radicals combined with the future of one of their sons. The couple, Annie and Arthur Pope (Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch), have been living “underground” for 15 years, ever since they helped to bomb a napalm laboratory, accidentally blinding a janitor....
PRIVILEGE Approached as a narrative, Yvonne Rainer’s sixth feature takes forever to get started and an eternity to end. In between its ill-defined borders, the plot itself is repeatedly interrupted, endlessly delayed or protracted, frequently relegated to the back burner and all but forgotten. All the way through, the action proceeds like hiccups. The essay is a lot more important, interesting, and persuasive than the story, but the essay needs the story in order to exist, and we need it, too, if we’re going to proceed any farther....
MISS EVERS’ BOYS The ugly facts of Miss Evers’ Boys are these: Starting in 1932 hundreds of black men suffering from syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, answered government advertisements offering help for their “bad blood.” They were treated with a combination of mercury and arsenic and enjoyed an 85 percent rate of cure. Money for the treatment soon ran out, but the doctors running the program didn’t want to abandon their experiment: instead they renamed it “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” and began giving their subjects placebos....
RELAX . . . YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT! The Loofah Method at Chicago Filmmakers May 8-9, 14-16, 22-23, and 28-30 With Relax . . . You’re Soaking in It!, the group’s latest offering at Chicago Filmmakers, Loofah is now showing signs that it’s making a transition. In fact Relax is a showcase of Loofah’s best and worst, offering a firsthand look at artists grappling with the next step, with managing their maturity....
In his second inaugural address, in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt pointed out that one-third of the nation was living in poverty. Two years later, Studs Terkel used this speech as a point of departure in Home Sweet Home, a radio play about life in urban slums during the Great Depression. Written under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, the play advocated the creation of government-funded public housing, a solution now decried as a tremendous failure....
Orchestral Association Goes to Plan B The powers that be at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have gone back to the drawing board and come up with an expansion plan to replace what now appears to be an unworkable proposal to buy the Borg-Warner building next door to Orchestra Hall. That plan, announced last summer, was to raze the Borg-Warner structure and erect a new one that would include office space, a recital hall, rehearsal facilities, a music library, and a cafe, among numerous other amenities....
‘Bout every Saturday people gather from miles around at the Bible Grove opry house to hear local musicians pick and sing. Not much else to do on a Saturday night in this part of Illinois. Besides, it’s free. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This opry’s been held in an old town meeting hall for 20 years. It’s come a long way in the 10 years since the Barbee brothers, Jim and Bud (Bud’s the one with the hat), bought the place....
KARL HENDRICKS TRIO, 12/31, LOUNGE AX The moderate appeal of this Pittsburgh combo’s early records seemed to revolve around the conceit of decidedly nerdy guys playing tuneful but clunky ditties about girls, drinking, and puking. Their blatant nonhipness somehow made a straight cover of “She Was Hot” kind of acceptable, although it was a big snooze on a purely musical level. Maturity has brought a new seriousness, though, and on the group’s new Misery and Women, puerile playfulness has been replaced by hackneyed lovey-dovey moaning....
Now you can enjoy an actual symbol of third world exploitation in your own living room. Real Estate Profile (July 29-August 11) explains why some aquarium fish cost more than others: “One fish, the Black Tang, is hand-caught from the lower depths off Christmas Island . . . . many divers have been killed from the bends in going down to bring back one or two of these fish. To reflect this, they cost close to $500 each”–the fish, that is....
What can you tell me about the Masons, i.e., politics, bylaws, who belongs, etc? I have always assumed they were one of those semisilly men’s associations like the Elks or the Odd Fellows, but occasionally you hear rumors of something more sinister. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The origins of Freemasonry are obscure. The best guess is that it’s an outgrowth of medieval stonemasons’ guilds that began after the mid-1500s....
It was the classic Hollywood success story: from mail room to boardroom. Robert Morse oiling his way up the corporate ladder in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Michael J. Fox transforming himself from a naive country boy to a crafty executive who nudges his uncle out of power by means of a hostile takeover in The Secret of My Success. “When our agency was sold, everybody said, ‘Well, Stuart, you better start looking around for work....
30 MINUTES OF TRUE FIDELITY at Sheffield’s School Street Cafe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Angelich is a stand-up comedian, and the experience shows in her dialogue. It’s not that she writes jokes. In fact, she seems to steer clear of them, which was a terrific idea. But Angelich has the comedian’s rhythm–setup, payoff, build, turn away, return–and it turns out to be good for drama, too....
