PVT. WARS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A play about soldiers coping with physical and emotional wounds? A play that questions America’s political and moral mission and its support of its fighting men? James McLure’s Pvt. Wars seems a shocking anachronism in the parades-and-platitudes atmosphere of post-gulf-war America. This is the kind of show politicians have in mind when they talk about the “Vietnam syndrome” and how the war with Iraq ended it....
Ford Heights is a rough town. In 1989 the far south-side community of less than 6,000 won the title of poorest suburb in the country–for the second year in a row. The poverty level is nearly 40 percent; unemployment is more than 40 percent. Neighboring areas, such as Chicago Heights and Sauk Village are reviving, but in Ford Heights only a few operating stores stand at the main intersection. Beyond them, shuttered buildings quickly give way to small dilapidated houses on side streets that generally run a few blocks and then peter off into scrub grass....
The second annual festival of contemporary video by and about Native Americans, ranging from animation to documentary. This program, cosponsored by the Chicago American Indian Health Services, originated at the National Museum of the American Indian. Screenings, which run from Friday, May 31, through Tuesday, June 4, will be held at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont; admission is $4, $2 for Filmmakers members. For further information call 2818788) Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Pay a robot to say nice things about you. The new “Hug Line” offers “an ‘upbeat’ message that tells you that you are a very special person” to any touch-tone phone user who can dial its 900 number. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It was evident during our site visits that neighborhood park employees had been ‘warned’ by the Chicago Park District administration that Friends of the Parks was making random visits,” report Anne Ryder and Debra Nelson in Recreational and Cultural Programs in Chicago’s Parks: The Need for Change....
Ogden Avenue, named after William Butler Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor, was at one time a major four-lane diagonal that sliced from Lincoln Park all the way to Naperville. Other than Archer it was the only way to head southwest out of the city: most of Chicago’s diagonal streets–Clark, Clybourn, Elston, and Lincoln– head northwest, away from downtown. But Ogden’s status as a favored thoroughfare collapsed when the expressways came. Its northeast end has been vanishing, a few blocks at a time, for 25 years....
THE FIR TREE Chi-Town Puppet Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Fir Tree is a rather bare little fable of the life and death of a Christmas tree: the sapling longs to grow up and learn more of the world, then regrets the loss of its idyllic youth (a message probably lost on most children). As adapted by James Engelhardt, however, The Fir Tree also becomes a parable about heroic fathers, widowed mothers, reverence for wildlife, preservation of the environment, and the inherent maturity of being good to others....
Comiskey Park is in the midst of a renaissance in this its final season. The White Sox are winning, and the fans are back–both to an extent that no one expected. Two weeks ago, the Oakland Athletics came to town, and when the Sox won the first game of a four-game series they closed to within a game of the first-place A’s. The rest of the series saw crowds of 40,000 stream into Comiskey, including the largest crowd since opening day 1984, that occasion meant to celebrate the division title of the year before and the championships soon to come....
My friends and I adore your column and read it every week before the festivities begin at Captain White’s Oyster Bar and Clog Palace. Recently we were discussing a word we’ve all heard but have never seen in print. It’s pronounced “skosh” (long “o”). Whenever I ask somebody to spell it, they always say, “you mean as in ‘a skosh more room’?” I contend that it’s not a real word but was created solely for the purpose of a jeans commercial (I’m not sure which brand)....
THOSE WHO FORGET THE LESSONS OF HISTORY . . . This consensus is convenient for artists and activists who need to make a point about other causes. To underscore the terror they feel, Palestinians tortured by the Israelis compare Israeli tactics to Nazi tactics. Gays imprisoned in the 1960s in Cuban “reeducation” camps refer to them as concentration camps. Fascism as exemplified by the Nazis has become a form of political shorthand....
The last three days of a four-day festival, now in its ninth year, that highlights film and video shorts as well as features by women, including documentaries, animation, narrative, and experimental works. Tickets for individual programs are $6, $5 for WIDC members, and $4 for students and senior citizens with a valid ID; festival passes are also available. Screenings will be held at Columbia College’s Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan, and Columbia’s Hokin Theater, 623 S....
PHYSICAL VISION Lynn Book is one terrific performer. Her presence onstage is utterly captivating. From the moment that I walked into the gallery, discovering Book onstage methodically arranging flowers in a large ceramic vase, she commanded my attention. Her gestures were short, efficient, restrained, like those of a classically trained dancer. Her expression was severe, her gaze penetrating. She seemed perfectly in control of the finely tuned instrument that was her body....
Arts of the Timeses: Tribune Pales in Coast Comparison Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paul Goldberger, the cultural news editor at the New York Times, oversees a staff of 60 editors and reporters whose sole job is covering the arts in New York and, increasingly, around the world. Goldberger doesn’t expect his staff to grow in upcoming months, though some familiar bylines will leave and new ones will appear....
JULY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sure nature abhors a vacuum, but what does it have against Cinema Borealis, the three nights of free outdoor film screenings put together by movie-projection wiz and School of the Art Institute faculty member James Bond (sic!)? Last year, Bond tried to show three wide-screen wonders (including Ran and 2001) on a 70-foot outdoor screen in Lincoln Park, but heavy rains dampened the weekend’s festivities....
DESIGN FOR LIVING So ordinarily I wouldn’t accept an assignment to review a Coward play (though I do find him hysterically funny). But Design for Living, his scandalous 1933 hit about a bohemian trio moving through the art worlds of Paris, London, and New York, is something of an exception. His running motifs–the playful disregard for accepted sexual mores, the sexual independence of the “modern woman,” the titillating suggestion of a bisexual menage a trois, and the thinly veiled suggestion of homosexuality–are all issues that today send the NEA into a cold sweat....
My parents spent their honeymoon there. My Aunt Faye and Uncle Harry had their high school prom there. They wanted to dance on the Beach Walk, but the 17-year cicadas were swarming, so they had to stay indoors in the Marine Dining Room. I don’t remember the place, but I do remember my dad driving us by in 1970 to watch it being demolished. We sat in the back of his black Thunderbird while he took home movies of the wrecking ball crashing into the pink stucco structure....
EMERALD CITY Zebra Crossing Theatre’s production of David Williamson’s Emerald City gives its audience plenty of time to grapple with these questions as it lumbers along through a story that is interminable, predictable, and cliche ridden. Williamson is a leading Australian playwright and screenwriter known chiefly for his script for Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli and for cowriting Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (you remember–white people screw as brown nation burns)....
“Before someone gives a knockout punch in a cartoon,” an inspired fanzine writer once wrote, “he sticks his thumb in his mouth and inflates his fist until it is ten times its original size. Evan Johns is that fist.” Fireburner guitarist Johns came originally from those same D.C. suburbs that–thanks to toxic waste dumps, a nuclear accident, or what I don’t know–also produced ax gods Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanon. He’s now based in Austin, and his band is well named–they’re a roots-rock ensemble crossed with a sidewinder missile....
It’s 1990 and Rubber Bands has closed. Not that it was ever really called Rubber Bands. That’s just what my brother and sister and I used to call it. The store on the corner of West Pratt and North California was really called Roband’s, but it hadn’t been Roband’s since it was taken over by Melvin Schoenwald in the early 70s and became a Sun Discount Drugs. But Rubber Bands is what we called it anyway....
HELLO AND GOODBYE The Body Politic Theatre has been with us a long time. Founded 20 years ago in Lincoln Park, back when Lincoln Park was a fringey, sort of dangerous, sort of bohemian kind of neighborhood, the Body Politic was in its own way kind of fringey and bohemian. Once willing to take risks with the likes of Paul Sills, Alan Gross, and even David Mamet, the theater has recently fallen into a kind of mediocrity that is made all the more disheartening by the knowledge of its illustrious past....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over 26 hours in 1982, I listened attentively to testimony at 14 public hearings held by the Illinois Commerce Commission, stretched over the length and width of Commonwealth Edison’s service area. We witnessed the same piteous event repeated and repeated that Christ told of in the parable of the unjust judge and the poor widow woman petitioning him ....
