ALMANAC OF FALL Problems Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year, I was bowled over by my first encounter with Bela Tarr when I saw Damnation (1987), his fifth feature. And now that I’ve seen Almanac of Fall (1984), his fourth (showing this week at Facets Multimedia Center), I want to see his earlier features–Family Nest (1977), The Outsider (1980), and The Prefab People (1982)....
A Reporter on the Heart Beat Back in ’72, when Fischer was challenging Spassky and the Sun-Times city room went chess crazy, we sat down with Thomas J. Moore one night and licked him four games straight. So Moore bought some chess books and boned up on the openings. Over the next six months, during which we played him almost every day after deadline in the Sun-Times cafeteria, we were lucky to cop one game a week....
The Whitewater Group, founded in 1985, was the first tenant and first graduate of the Technology Innovation Center Small Business Incuba- tor of the Northwestern University/ Evanston Research Park. The flagship product of this small, specialized software company is Actor, described as an “object-oriented programming language and environment” designed to make programmers’ jobs easier when they are creating applications for Microsoft Windows. A “window” is a system in which the computer user calls up, say, a spread sheet by pointing (e....
Tonight is the last night of the 27th Chicago International Film Festival; screenings take place at the Fine Arts, 418 S. Michigan, and the Esquire, 58 E. Oak. Tickets can be purchased at the theater box office one hour before show time or at the film festival store, 828 N. State. General admission is $7, $6 for Cinema/Chicago members; the first show of the day before 6 PM is two dollars cheaper....
The Five Blind Boys of Alabama aren’t quite as well-known as the original Five Blind Boys, a Mississippi-based gospel group formed by Archie Brownlee in the 1940s, but they go back almost as far and are capable of creating the same spirit-elevating excitement. Lead singer and founder Clarence Fountain exhorts and proclaims his faith in a gritty voice that’s been compared to Wilson Pickett; mixing European choral harmonies with African American cadences and intonation, the Boys still perform their standards (including their original big hit from 1949, “I Can See Everybody’s Mother but Mine,”) and have updated their repertoire to include modern spirituals and even the occasional secular R & B number (“Steal Away”)....
LADIES’ NIGHT OUT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JoEllen (JoAnn Montemurro) and Delia (Christine St. John) are trapped one night in a small-town motel in the middle of a blizzard; there’s no way to travel, and even if there were there’s nowhere to go. JoEllen knows this all too well, since she lives in the town: she’s spending her first night away from home in the five years since she got married, the occasion being a conference on careers for women being held at the motel....
“The sound of laughter to me is better than sex,” performer Marcia Wilke says, laughing herself. “I’ve been working on the road as a stand-up comedian for about a year now, and I really enjoy it. But the problem I have with it is that you really don’t get to make a statement or say anything that’s in your heart. You have to concern yourself with making people laugh because that’s what you’re paid for....
A pleasantly unpretentious low-budget musical from Zimbabwe (1990), written and directed by Michael Raeburn, author of a well-known nonfiction book about Zimbabwe, We Are Everywhere. The plot concerns a sort of working-class rural Candide called UK (Dominic Makuvachuma), who is knocked unconscious when he falls out of a taxicab and then falls in love with the woman, Sofi (Sibongile Nene), he gazes up at when he comes to. He’s determined to marry her, but her father insists on a “bride price,” an expensive stereo and a lot of cash....
HOUSESITTER With Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Julie Harris, Donald Moffat, Peter MacNicol, Richard B. Shull, Laurel Cronin, Roy Cooper, and Christopher Durang. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Housesitter nearly all the lies relate explicitly to marriage and implicitly to class. But before we get to the lies, we’re treated to a prologue. Newton Davis (Steve Martin), an unfulfilled Boston architect, presents a literally gift-wrapped house he designed and built in their New England hometown of Dobbs Mill to Becky (Dana Delany), the woman he loves, as a marriage proposal, and she promptly turns him down....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago seems more and more like a huge psychology lab experiment, with a gigantic white-coated scientist from “The Far Side” looming over the city and pushing everything closer and closer together. The case of people speaking out against the development of Navy Pier, near where they live [Neighborhood News, August 10] could be multiplied many times over....
Floyd Webb still remembers a game he played at Boy Scout camp during the summer of 1967, when he was 14. “We had to guess what time a clock was set,” he says. “It was in a paper bag so none of us could see. I tied with another guy who happened to be white. They sent us outside so they could set it again. I guessed the time exactly the second time....
My temptations revolve around clothes and desserts. My daily cheap thrill is to power-walk past the Gap at the corner of Division and Dearborn to see if they’ve gotten anything in stock that isn’t muddy burgundy, muddy green, muddy teal, or muddy plaid. Then, instead of turning east so I can see the other window, I have to keep on going straight so I won’t be tempted by Saint Germain’s French pastries....
Savage Appeal We called Jarrett and asked him what in the world he was doing. It turned out that young Reynolds rubs Jarrett the wrong way. “Reynolds has a wide reputation as being a sort of mysterious phony,” Jarrett told us. “This man works incessantly to convince people he is some kind of deliverer. He’s very ambitious to go to the top quickly.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jarrett’s own language was troublesome enough....
It was vanilla week at the candy factory down the way, and without the help of Lake Michigan winds a saccharine blanket would smother the neighborhood, creep through the window and mess up your sleep. Puddles shimmered with an oily film, scattering sunlight into swirling rainbows. A gasp of vanilla-soaked air nudged the film, creating new iridescent eddies. I stood on the curb wondering “What was here?” On this spot, back four centuries....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What was missing in your fine article exposing priestly pedophilia was how the Church’s refusal to redefine sexual ethics based upon current psychological and physiological evidence adds to the disease itself by reinforcing one of its sources, i.e. cultural/internalized homophobia. By “covering up” gay priests and transferring them to other parishes as punishment, they miss the therapeutic remedy needed: acceptance and responsibility to end sexual violent (nonconsenting) acts and treating both the victim and the offender with psychologically healthy resources for sexually viable relationships with adults later....
Possibly the most radical of the “black exploitation” films of the 70s, this movie was an overnight success when it was released in 1973, and then was abruptly taken out of distribution for reasons that are still not entirely clear. A mild-mannered social worker (Lawrence Cook) is recruited by the CIA as a token black, and then proceeds to learn (and later apply) the techniques of urban guerrilla warfare in Chicago (although most of the filming was done in Gary, Indiana)....
Two questions. Often Soviet authorities will brand a person as a “cosmopolite” in order to signify his or her lack of good Soviet citizenship. Why? What pejorative connotations does this word have in their minds? Second, they often seem to use “hooliganism” as a specific criminal charge like theft or assault, although the term as we use it is vague, covering a host of activities. What types of crime(s) does it cover?...
I’ve heard off and on for years that talcum powder is asbestos. Recently I was reading Coroner by Doctor Thomas Noguchi, and in the section on Janis Joplin where he talks about cutting agents used in heroin, he comes right out and says talcum powder is asbestos. If this is true, Bhopal, India, just took second place in the egregious industrial negligence contest–I’m selling my Johnson & Johnson stock before the shit hits the fan....
What is the origin of the expression “hip hip hurrah”? According to one book I’ve read, it derives from an abbreviation of the Latin Hierusylema est perdita, “Jerusalem is destroyed.” Apparently, medieval anti-Semites yelled “Hep! Hep!” as they exiled or executed innocent Jews. Can this be true? Can modern expressions such as hip, hipster, hippie, and hip-hop have such an odious etymology? Say it ain’t so. –Name withheld, Washington, D.C....
Tinkering With the Tribune At first glance, the ongoing shuffle of personnel at the Chicago Tribune would seem to be just another of the paper’s irregular upheavals designed to provide the illusion of corporate vitality to the people working there. In fact, though, this one may prove to be a good deal more methodical than merely madcap. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you’ll notice, the Tribune is never at a loss for loading up the bureaucracy with subtly graded job descriptions....
