Posts

From a distance Schreiber Playground Park, on the far north side, a block north of the intersection of Devon and Ashland, looks much like any other play lot. Next to a tiny field house, low black-and-gray retaining walls surround a large sandbox, two playground areas, and a couple of flower beds. On a warm late-summer morning, hordes of kids congregate around the water fountain, drinking and splashing. The Park District began collecting jugs and bottles at its field houses at the end of June....

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time–a group of unabashedly feminist musicians, powerful in spirit and funky in attitude, able to fuse deep blues passion with the joyful assertiveness of liberation. Not as overtly political as, say, Holly Near or Sweet Honey in the Rock, they pay jaunty tribute to the great women blues singers (including Ida “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” Cox), and fill their set with everything from “take no mess from that man” type anthems (“Take It On Back”) to aching testimonials of vulnerability and despair (“Drown in My Own Tears,” the lovely “Silent Thunder in My Heart”)....

SPEED THE PLAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Speed the Play begins a little shakily with Lux in Tenebris (“Light in Darkness”), an early and somewhat dated Bertolt Brecht one-act about prostitution, morality, and hypocrisy. One Mr. Paduk seeks to profit from the public’s prurient interests by opening an exhibit on the horrors of sexual disease right across the street from the local brothel....

New horizons in management science. “Managers who exhibit Type A behavior are involved in a constant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time,” according to a press release summarizing a study in Personnel Journal. “They see their enemies as the clock and other people, and typically try to measure their accomplishments in terms of numbers and speed.” We look forward to the new-style manager who struggles to achieve less and less in more and more time....

When it was built 15 years ago the gym at Clemente High School was the pride of Humboldt Park. Today it’s the pits. “Call it a hellhole, because that’s what it is,” says Richard Tomoleoni, a gym teacher and the varsity baseball coach at Clemente. “It’s a disgrace.” “We wrote letters to just about everyone we could think of, asking for help,” says Jim Dagostino, a gym teacher and varsity basketball coach....

THE HOUSE In the Aeschylus tale the torment begins when Atreus and Thyestes, the two sons of the king of Argos, fight over their father’s throne. Later Thyestes seduces Atreus’s wife, which causes Atreus to seek revenge by feeding the unwitting Thyestes his own children. Thyestes lays a curse on the house of Argos, which comes to fruition during the reign of Atreus’ son Agamemnon. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA This is not to take anything away from Koussevitzky, who rightfully occupies a special place as godfather of many important 20th-century scores, most of which would probably never have been written if he hadn’t commissioned them. But most of today’s maestro (to say nothing of recording companies and orchestra managers) are far more interested in serving up the Tchaikovsky Sixth for the hundredth time than in learning a new score–even though it’s probably accurate to say that no really new interpretive ideas about the Sixth have surfaced since Toscanini....

Fifteen years after Goodman, Prine, and the whole rich scene that nurtured them peaked, the very notion of folk music is anathema to most, and a genuine mystery even to those who have been saddled with the designation. And yet, from time to time there arises from the folk-ooze of musical ambivalence and contradiction a voice that is undeniable and unique. Andrew Calhoun has such a voice. Although he’s generally thought of as a folk musician or a singer-songwriter, even the most casual listener can tell that he transcends categorization....

When tenorist Harold Land first hooked up with vibes player Bobby Hutcherson to form a quintet in the late 60s, it was at once an unexpected puzzlement and an only-natural affirmation of jazz’s ability to combine innovation and tradition. On the one side you had Land, the smooth and steady hard-bop veteran best known for his work with Clifford Brown. Next to him, and a musical generation away, stood the youngish Hutcherson: having helped Eric Dolphy push the envelope of tonal music, he had already laid claim to the mantle of Milt Jackson as the next important voice on his instrument....

Friday 27 In this century Armenians have suffered an attempted genocide, constant political oppression, and a devastating earthquake, but they remain determined to keep their culture and history alive. For the past 14 years Chicago photographer John Mahtesian has been traveling to Armenia, capturing its people, landscapes, and architecture in black and white. An exhibit of his photos, Armenia, opens today in the Public Library Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. The show is open 9 to 7 Monday through Thursday, 9 to 6 Friday, 9 to 5 Saturday....

Friday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saturday 15 “We wanted to do new musicals but found out there were very few new musicals that were any good,” says Joan Mazzonelli, company manager for New Tuners Theatre. “It’s incredible, but we don’t have a production company in the country that produces new musicals regularly, not even in New York.” So WIT decided to create Making Tuners, its own program of workshops on creating new musical scripts....

Chicago Lawyer: New Management, Less Muck The September issue of Chicago Lawyer comes out in a few days and you’ll find Rob Warden inside saying goodbye. It’ll be clear from the rest of the issue that he’s already gone. No Chicago newspaperman as seasoned as Judge (he’s worked at both the Tribune and Sun-Times and for a while ran City News Bureau) could say that about the little guy and be happy with how it sounds....

A woman at one side of the room has a question: “You know those corsets with the built-in garter belts? The ones that are real stiff along the sides? What’s the best way to get those off?” The instructor bends over and peeks through her legs into the mirror behind her to survey her own scantily clad behind. “Looks like I need a bleach,” she says. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

CLEVELAND, MAY 1, 1991–Mayor Daley stopped here briefly en route to Washington, D.C., for a firsthand look at Cleveland’s longstanding but little-known experiment with competing electric utilities. He acknowledged good-humoredly that Chicago might learn a thing or two from the city that has been described as the “mistake by the lake.” “In the neighborhoods here,” Daley observed during an impromptu street-corner press conference, “residents can choose which electric utility they want to be served by–the city-owned system or the investor-owned system....

Those of us who were lucky enough to hear the supreme collaboration of soprano Jessye Norman and conductor James Levine in act one of Wagner’s Die Walkure last July at Ravinia, will never forget the experience: it was music making of the very highest order. Norman is at the height of her vocal talents and is quite simply the greatest American soprano presently singing. Her power, her range of dynamics and vocal color, her expressivity and musicianship are second to none....

We sat on our front porches at night and sang “our songs.” It was a tradition we had learned from our parents: Mitch Miller sing-alongs at family gatherings–birthdays, communions, or picnics in one of the city’s forest preserves. The adults gathered in a circle around a keg of beer, swung their feet up on it, and sang “Bicycle Built for Two,” “Danny Boy,” and “Sweet Rosie O’Grady”–the “old songs,” the best songs....

I recently got some news about my writing career from a most unlikely source: my mother. While browsing through a mystery magazine at the supermarket–she gets the Star at home–she saw a book-club ad with one of my novels among the introductory offerings. “Oh yes, that’s right. By the way, Paul, whatever happened to your book by John DeLorean?” Bill said Dick was a terrific guy, a consummate professional, easy to work with....

Jon Amiel, a British director best known in this country for the miniseries The Singing Detective, directs a wonderful Italian family chronicle with a lot of style, lyricism, humor, and emotion. Tony Grisoni’s script deftly juggles a number of full-blown characters over 20-odd years while successfully employing a few touches of magical realism that Amiel makes the most of. Everything of consequence that happens stems from an incident in Italy that occurs without dialogue in the first few minutes: Danilo (Joseph Long) literally steals his lover Rosa (Anita Zagaria) away from an arranged marriage, and the angry groom Barbariccia (Vittorio Amandola) swears to take revenge....

“Well now that they’re weakening the Rukns, we’ll soon see crack starting to overrun Chicago,” Rudy asserted, as we watched dozens of officers from various law enforcement agencies break into and generally swarm all over El Rukn headquarters at 3947 S. Drexel. “You see, the only reason Chicago don’t have the same crack problem that cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, even Milwaukee and Kansas City have, is because the Rukns wouldn’t let it in....

When Josh Samos, manager of the Buckingham Bike Shop, read the city’s new report on cycling strategy in the 90s, it made him happy. “I loved the thought that they are really trying to accommodate bicycles in Chicago. I like the fact that the city has recognized the difficulty of bicycling in Chicago and made a decision to do something about it–to make bicycle parking widely available and to open up a lot of new routes and paths....