Mitchell Duneier, the author of “Slim and Bart” and the book from which it is excerpted, sat at a table at Valois cafeteria on 53rd Street ten hours a day every day for four years. That’s roughly 10,000 hours and 2,000 cups of coffee. Known locally as “See Your Food” because of a large sign out front, Valois (Val-OYZ) offers home-style dishes like Yankee pot roast and boiled potatoes, baked chicken and succotash, and enormous meat pies....
Slick Home Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » America is about to get a taste of Chicago-style culture. The Illinois Office of Tourism under the leadership of Lynda Simon is preparing the nationwide launch of a striking new print and broadcast tourism campaign for Chicago with the focus squarely on culture and the aesthetics of life in our city. Arts organizations have long criticized both state and city tourism offices (which have been legion in the case of the city) for not doing more to promote the city’s burgeoning cultural attractions; this campaign should help quell the griping....
THE ANSWER MEN They do in fact offer up improv, a few sketches, some stand-up, and feints at audience participation. But most of it isn’t convincing. Topicality–a staple of political comedy, particularly improv–is curiously absent. The political satire includes a bad Bush imitation and dated jokes about canned presidential aide John Sununu. There are no issues here, no ideas. In fact, there’s little to distinguish the Answer Men from any of the other improv groups in the city, with or without a political billing....
Imagine yourself panicking, quitting work, subletting your apartment, packing up, and tearing west on I-80 in a gas-guzzling old beater. In a few hours you’re across the Mississippi and the landscape is flat as ocean. Suddenly it dawns on you: This is crazy. You have no plans at all! The sky turns gray; then comes a cloudburst. Scared, you drive on anyway, windshield wipers churning. You feel just like someone in a song by the Service, and it only figure you’d think of them at a time like this, for even at their most raucous and rocking they still capture the kind of lost feeling you’re experiencing now....
It’s conventional wisdom that modern soul music arose out of the marriage of the sacred and the profane that occurred in the 50s when Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and others melded traditional gospel with secular lyrics. The revolutionary music that resulted was a source of widespread enthusiasm, but it also bred consternation, and not only among the faithful: even veteran bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, about as undevout as they came, was uneasy with it....
There’s not much left in Bible Grove these days. The grocery and tire stores have closed, and even the post office is gone. But one event that keeps this unincorporated town of about 200 people on the map is its opry, where people have gathered to make music every Saturday night for the past 20 years. It’s nothing formal, just kids and old pros who sit down side by side to play country and gospel music....
The Chicago Sinfonietta takes pride in its multiethnic roster and eclectic, offbeat programming, and after five years in the business it is thriving as a niche player–arguably one in a handful of successful new ensembles nationwide. Come November it will go on tour in Germany, a rite of passage designed to trumpet its growing renown. The formula of the sinfonietta’s success includes its founder Paul Freeman, a talented and tireless maestro whose penchnt for highlighting unusual works is unmatched (in the Chicago area anyway)....
Tony DeBlois, 18, has been blind from birth, and he is autistic, which means he has enormous difficulty speaking and understanding. Yet despite these handicaps DeBlois is an extremely gifted pianist. He can play virtually any piece of music after hearing it once, and he also improvises freely. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Music and the Brain” will attempt to provide some answers. The three-day symposium (November 16-18) will bring together neurologists, psychologists, and musicians who will deliver public lectures (in plain English, the organizers promise) on the latest research into how the brain creates and perceives music....
To the editors: As the Subject of a jab in The City File of 11/10/89, I have to point out that Mr. Henderson is wrong on three counts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second, while I confess to inexactness of terminology, I, an alumni of North Carolina’s predecessor to the Illinois Math & Science Academy, refuse to let anyone say unchallenged that I think “smoking creates matter....
If you want to know what’s wrong with any of the current candidates for president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, check out his opponents’ TV sound bites on the news at ten. If you want to know what’s wrong with Cook County government, consider the massive, decrepit structure on West Harrison Street that serves as Cook County Hospital. Even the existing facilities are poorly used. A new study of county government by the Office of Social Science Research at the University of Illinois, “Cook County: The Sleeping Giant,” reports that there is a costly lack of coordination between city-operated clinics and the County Hospital; for example, patients sent from the clinics to the hospital often have to repeat diagnostic tests because the doctors at County don’t trust or can’t get access to the results obtained at the clinics....
Lucyna Migala is expounding the rich though admittedly obscure heritage of Polish music. “Polish culture, with its distinctive language and customs, has flourished since the year 966 when the king of Poland was converted to Christianity by the pope. The size of the country has changed over the centuries due to invasions and alliances–that’s why there are major regional differences in the music. In the Carpathian Mountains to the south, the Podhald [highland] music is dissonant and wild–like the people there; it uses light voices absolutely devoid of schooling....
Back when she was working at Second City, before she moved to LA to launch a TV career, Dear John’s Isabella Hofmann could be frequently found in nightclubs hereabouts vocalizing with singer-songwriter Tony Zito, whose long track record ranges from the 1970 road show of Hair and the pop recording duo Frannie and Zoey to writing a string of scores for plays and musicals at the Body Politic, Goodman, and other local theaters....
GONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Theater Oobleck specializes in mind-screws, plays whose summarized plots sound more like heinous LSAT word problems than traditional theater pieces. Their plays drop numerous political and cultural references and develop anarchic alternative worlds in which confusion seems to be the desired audience reaction. And yet the clique that gathers to see these efforts laughs uproariously at the insider jokes and raucously applauds every brilliant, semibrilliant, or completely gross effort of this troupe, defying any stranger who might conclude that the emperor is not wearing any clothes....
Lead Story Arthur Bringe, 60, a Chicago nursing home resident, tried to rob a branch of the First Chicago bank in May on the same day a nearby police precinct got paid. He was arrested when the teller signaled a uniformed sergeant in her line that Bringe had handed her a holdup note. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Michell, 40, a prison escapee from Montana, was arrested in August while attending a Seattle Mariners game....
RICHARD’S CORK LEG Richard’s Cork Leg was begun near the end of Behan’s short, wasted life. He dashed off one act on assignment; by several accounts, it was the rejection of this draft that launched Behan on the round of drinking that soon killed him. A somewhat more complete draft, still lacking an ending, was discovered in 1971 and hammered into stageable form by Alan Simpson, one of Behan’s many biographers and the original producer of the playwright’s masterpiece, The Quare Fellow....
RICHARD III Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, maybe one idea. It’s possible that McCabe’s drive to direct Shakespeare stems not so much from the plays themselves as from a deep-seated desire to see Tom Mula act in them. A few years ago McCabe directed King Lear at the Body Politic; the production groaned under the weight of a ponderous concept having something to do with the Balkan Wars....
Rose Brooks sat in a gray reclining chair and pulled a thin white blanket up to her neck. The blanket slid off her left arm, where two fat hoses full of blood hung from three-inch-long track marks. For the moment, the track marks–hard, puffy, and raised due to frequent needle jabs and operations on the veins underneath–were no longer the most prominent feature on the underside of Brooks’s forearm. The clear, long tubes coursing with blood were....
AMERICAN VOICES In “Sucker,” by Carson McCullers, the story is told in the first person by Pete, a 16-year-old who describes how mean he has been to his 12-year-old cousin, who has lived with Pete’s family since infancy. The younger boy, known as Sucker, got his nickname by being trusting and gullible. “Once, a couple of years ago, I told him that if he’d jump off our garage with an umbrella, it would act as a parachute and he wouldn’t fall hard,” says Pete....
Let’s face it, the guy was a bum. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some 400 people crammed into Lotte’s Pub last December to celebrate Algren nonetheless. It was the committee’s first Algren bash. “We had to turn people away,” says Stu McCarrell, who was once Algren’s pal. Saturday, December 1, the committee will be at it again, this time at the Bop Shop, 1807 W....
Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672) has never been a household name, even though he’s widely acknowledged by musicologists as the greatest German composer before Bach. Chief among his innovations were the introduction of Italian madrigal styles to northern countries and the use of German texts instead of Latin ones in liturgical music. Schutz almost didn’t become a composer; as a young man he pursued an education in law. But several trips to Venice, where he studied composition first with Gabrieli and later with Monteverdi, convinced him (and his patrons) that he was not cut out for a legal career....
