Everyone knows that nowadays artificial insemination is used to breed everything from cattle and horses to rhinos, gorillas, and humans. I know how they get sperm from humans, but how do they get it from bulls and male gorillas? Do they show them dirty heifer pictures? Gorilla porn? Do they use blow-up female rhino dolls? The mind boggles. –S.J. Cowdery, Dallas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Go boggle on your own time, pal....
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO B.B. JANE? Like any camp act, the premise of Whatever Happened to B.B. Jane? is so silly it sounds like a bad joke. Take a film that no one in a million years would think of turning into a musical–say, the cult classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?–and turn it into a musical. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wayne Buidens, who is given credit in the program for “concept design,” has taken an almost word-for-word transcription of the film and subverted wherever and whenever he could the seriousness of the original story, which is about a pair of has-been sisters, one a demented alcoholic who was once a popular child performer on the vaudeville circuit, the other a former movie queen who has been wheelchair bound since an auto accident....
GRANDMA MOSES–AN AMERICAN PRIMITIVE I don’t like shows about makeup. I don’t like shows where we’re supposed to appreciate how much time a star spent applying putty to her nose, and how true-to-life it looks, and how valiant she is to undergo such rigors, and how undergoing them signifies a superior talent. I think shows like that are cheap. The whole idea in a show like that is to signal the rubes that they’re getting their money’s worth....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I do not intend to dismiss or belittle the suffering of people who have had a beloved one succumb to cancer, or the people who are currently suffering from cancer or any other disease. I hear people say that AIDS is not important, but the point should be made that, unlike certain types of cancer, the afflicted part of the body cannot be removed....
ABINGDON SQUARE Resembling a fusion of Anna Karenina, The School for Wives, and The War of the Roses, Fornes’s domestic potboiler is original only in form–intriguingly incomplete slivers of life that precisely trace this marriage’s unraveling. But Abingdon Square is more than an exercise in minimalist technique. Fornes’s snapshot style and her stiffly uncertain dialogue perfectly complement characters we see only from the outside, who hardly see themselves, let alone each other, and whose long speeches are transparent attempts to convince themselves they know what they feel....
Friday 26 Maybe the organizers of these three retrospectives scheduled them on the same days at the same times to help rid baby boomers of ugly middle-aged spread: from the look of things, devoted attendees and overlapping speakers will have to sprint between locations. The most extensive commemoration seems to be the Chicago ’68+20 Conference, which runs today from 9 to 5 and tomorrow from 9 to 4 at the International Amphitheatre, 4220 S....
Ciosoni–Esperanto for “sounds of all kinds”–is an unusual chamber trio devoted to the music of our time. The odd combination of clarinet, flute, and double bass makes for a team in search of a repertoire, but the trio’s technical prowess and rising renown are piquing the interest of a diverse group of venturesome composers. Already it’s established a solid reputation as a sympathetic interpreter of works as wide-ranging as those of Cage, Charles Wuorinen, Frederic Rzewski, Ben Johnston, and Sal Martirano....
French-Canadian experimental filmmaker Vincent Grenier, currently a teacher at the Art Institute, will show and discuss his most recent works: the 14-minute short Time’s Wake (1987) and the nearly hour-long I.D. (1988). Part of the fascination of both stems from Grenier’s capacity to build his images and sound tracks in densely woven yet constantly interacting and changing layers. Time’s Wake–made from diverse materials shot over a decade in color and black and white, and described as “a collection of ‘windows’ on a personal past”–features lyrical superimpositions and a very musical sense of camera movement....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently, he attended a third rate stenography school some time between his “conducting a seminar on a Sioux reservation” and “pissing in the baby pool.” He is able to retell the story line of a play. But he has the annoying habit of the loud mouth who gets first tickets to the latest “who done it” then spills the plot and names the culprit....
The music we call Delta blues is actually a complex interweaving of many regional styles, each with its own distinctive harmonic and rhythmic subtleties. Around Bentonia, Mississippi, on Highway 49, Nehemiah “Skip” James and Jack Owens developed an introspective, gentle music characterized by moaning falsettos and precisely articulated guitar patterns that were conceptualized with a more formalized, systematic approach than the emotionally explosive music that developed in other regions. At 84, Jack Owens is one of the last living purveyors of this distinct regional style....
Jack Schaller is a hops man. That’s not what you might expect, considering the breweries he’s worked at: Hibernia, which during his tenure there put out its malty Eau Claire ale, and Falstaff, where he helped develop the less malty but still rich Ballantine India Pale Ale. Nevertheless, in the world of specialty beers–where connoisseurs can be divided into the malt crowd and the hops crowd–Schaller knows where he stands....
“When my oldest daughter came home from third grade with a note from teacher saying she had musical aptitude, my wife said, ‘Let’s buy a piano so she can learn to play,’” recalls Michael Schwimmer. “I said, ‘Oh, no. She’ll turn out just like me. She’ll take lessons for a while, quit like I did, and we’ll be stuck with a piano nobody can play.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
River North Dealers Attack a “Tacky” Gallery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vance’s taste in art and the way she has chosen to market it have bothered some gallery owners. AK Galleries is very different aesthetically from the majority of galleries in the River North district,” says Susan Sazama of the Sazama Gallery, adding, “We’re quiet and low-key.” Another dealer said simply, “It’s tacky; I don’t think Vance is upholding the standards that the rest of us uphold in River North....
This hilarious Italian farce, the fourth comedy feature of writer-director-actor Maurizio Nichetti, is everything The Purple Rose of Cairo (or Gore Vidal’s novel Myron) should have been and more. Nichetti himself arrives at a TV studio to present his feature, also called The Icicle Thief–a somber black-and-white drama set in the postwar era with a strong resemblance to The Bicycle Thief, starring Nichetti himself as an out-of-work father struggling to support his family....
Only a few blocks from the spires and gargoyles of the University of Chicago, but far removed from the neatly kept houses and clipped lawns of Hyde Park in every important sense, squats an odd-looking building without any identifying signs. Its windows are covered with crosshatched metal bars, and a 12-foot-high chain-link fence topped with shiny, spiraling razor wire encloses a concrete pad and a small yard. At 10 in the morning, two vehicles are parked within the fence; a couple of hours later, their places have been taken by women and small children, the latter pushing themselves about on tricycles or stumping along, piston-legged, while their mothers watch....
J.S.G. Boggs literally lives off his art, drawing and spending his own currency. British pounds, Swiss francs, or American dollars come fresh from his pen each day and are traded for sundry items like plane tickets, lunches, and taxi rides. Seated with a Rolling Rock beer and speaking with a mid-Atlantic accent, he describes a transaction he made earlier that day. “Henry Hanson from Chicago wanted to meet me at Pump Room at 12....
Vocalist Bonnie Lee has been gracing Chicago stages for decades, but only recently has her reputation extended beyond a tight coterie of south- and west-side admirers. In an age of screamers and shouters Lee provides a welcome dash of elegance: her deep, sweet contralto is a stripped-down version of the sophisticated crooning of singers like Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. Despite her smoothness and her occasional forays into scatlike vocalese, however, Lee remains an unreconstructed blueswoman: her church roots come through in everything she sings, and she’s especially adept at bringing an aching passion to songs of longing and desire such as “I Need Someone’s Hand to Lead Me Through the Night....
Friday, January 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Brigid Murphy isn’t presiding over her zoo-cum-revue, Milly’s Orchid Show, she’s a thoughtful performance artist who goes after the usual subjects–sex, womanhood, marriage, domesticity–with an intensity enhanced by a variety of props. In Brigid Murphy Tells Tall Tales, parts of which she’ll be encoring in this series, she uses everything from an ungainly pair of stilts to a “dress” made up of pots and pans....
Cookie used to dance in the Maxwell Street Market, on the vacant lots where the blues bands play. She wasn’t a performer; she spent most Sunday mornings hustling beer, cigarette lighters, and often her body to anyone who’d buy. But in the afternoon, after she’d accumulated enough money to buy her fill of alcohol, she’d sometimes prance out in front of the Maxwell Blues Band or the Black Knights Blues Band and careen, walleyed and gap-toothed, through the crowd....
GODZILLA VS. LENT Theater Oobleck, a troupe recently transplanted from Ann Arbor, fits right in. The boys in the group look like hippies, complete with beards, flannel, and denim. The company is a collective, working in consensus without an artistic director. They write their own material, the group embellishing an idea that originates with (and is credited to) a single member. In a more contemporary vein, they fret that they don’t have enough original material by women (although women do play male roles throughout, without explanations or apologies); they also reflect more than a touch of Second City influence (though they’d probably deny it) and pepper their material with up-to-date urban angst and irony....
