To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, the article neglects to put the circulator in the context of what is happening to mass transit in Chicago today: namely that the financially strapped CTA, in the face of a $57 million deficit, is proposing to cut 23 el stations and 11 bus routes and to raise fares by as much as 15 percent....
For a few years, it looked as if Love Tractor was going to lead the way to the reinvention of the instrumental band. You could listen to them for hours, swept along by the dreamy riffing and gentle melodies, never giving a thought to vocals on the one hand or surf rock or the Ventures on the other. But hampered somewhat by being only the third best band (after R.E.M. and Pylon) in the extraordinary Athens, Georgia, music scene, the band recorded three neat records (I’m particularly fond of the EP ‘Til the Cows Come Home) and disappeared....
TRACK 29 With Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, Sandra Bernhard, and Seymour Cassel. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem with that kind of thinking is that it commits the same error commonly seized upon by producers: it assumes that creating a work of art is a matter of following certain recipes. In point of fact, Track 29 is not totally devoid of the virtues promised by the collaboration of Potter and Roeg on an American subject, but it is not a simple matter of addition and multiplication, either: Potter plus Roeg times America doesn’t equal exactly what you’d expect, because each of them tends to cancel out portions of the others....
The defending champions, a crew of eight or so Italians, their hair gray and faces lined, stand behind a table loaded with plates of macaroni, pasta e fagioli, and eggplant parmigiana. Spitz surveys the room. It’s packed with tables, each stacked with a variety of enticing, delicious-smelling foods. Over in the far corner is the Cajun table, prepared by a group of blacks from the west side., Close by is a table piled high with fried chicken....
You say you’re looking for a musical experience that’s really–despite overuse of the word–unique? You say you really do give a hoot about that fabled Rubicon between the jazz and classical avant-gardes? And you want to actually enjoy the occasion, too? Then you’d be crazy to miss this weekend’s performances by ROVA, the San Francisco-based saxophone quartet. Combining the shock of the new with the traditional sonorities of a finely tuned sax section, ROVA can be counted on to try almost anything, and to make it sound good in the process....
SCREWTAPE He does this by creating an inverted moral order. Those values promoted by “the enemy” (God)–honesty, chastity, humility, and prayer–are abhorrent, while pride, envy, lust, and anger are desirable. When Wormwood expresses joy in the fact that World War II has started (Lewis wrote the book in 1943), Screwtape urges caution. Human carnage is entertaining, he admits, but the horror tends to turn humans toward God. “Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy’s party, prepared,” Screwtape writes....
Triple whammy. From Greenpeace (January/February 1989): “Percentage of productive hours worked by women: 47. Percentage of world’s wages earned by women: 10. Percentage of world’s property owned by women: 1.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s getting harder to find the ‘public’ in public TV,” writes Pat Aufderheide in Extra! (November/ December 1988). Public TV stations seem to share the wide-spread notion that labor is a special interest, while business is not....
THE DAY ROOM But absurdist literature is diabolically difficult to create. It’s supposed to spring from the unconscious–the true source of human motivation–and the only way to tap into the unconscious is through unfettered free association. The unconscious, however, delivers its nuggets in a geyser of dreck. You can’t spread that dreck over a page and create a play any more than you can splatter paint on a canvas and produce art–without method, you wind up with a mess....
THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES Here are just a few of the stupid things about this adaptation. First, it’s set in Japan, which virtually assures the perpetuation of insulting cultural stereotypes. Second, it has a Kabuki motif that has almost nothing to do with Kabuki theater except that, you know, it’s kind of oriental and it justifies a cheap set and a couple of black-costumed stagehands who make an elaborate, unnecessary, and insufferably cute ordeal out of changing scenes....
Audrey Reich is convinced that the fellow in blue jeans she saw hopping over her front fence had something to do with the theft of her lion. Unfortunately for her, she has no proof. The fence jumper–who works for a construction company that’s rehabbing the row house next to Reich’s–denies her accusations, and police have cleared him and his coworkers of all her charges. Reich and the renovators had clashed several times before the day her lion was stolen....
The Bulls own the Bucks, but while the Bucks dominate the Pistons, the Pistons can’t lose to the Bulls. The Knicks can’t be beaten at home, but neither can the Cavaliers, and they win frequently on the road as well. The Celtics are crippled, but who’s to say they can’t knock off anybody if they can get Larry Bird back and adjusted to the new team? Best of Chicago voting is live now....
It’s a smooth Friday night in May, and the World Tattoo Gallery is rocking. Hundreds of people dressed in everything from evening clothes to almost nothing at all are crammed into the third-floor gallery in an old warehouse at 13th and Wabash, flaunting their hipness or hoping a little of Tony Fitzpatrick’s might rub off on them. The party is a celebration of the gallery’s one-year anniversary and the opening of its spring show....
To the editors: Maureen Cole voted to expel Tyner. She is a nonsmoker. Mark Storer voted to let Tyner stay. Mark is a smoker. I voted to expel Tyner. I had not smoked tobacco for over nine months at the time of this vote. After Tyner’s eviction, he and his two supporters who had left with him made repeated attempts to regain access to our building against our wishes. Under the emotional pressure of the situation I feared I might well lose my temper altogether and become violent towards these would-be trespassers if I did not calm down my rattled nerves by means of some nicotine....
EUGENE ONEGIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eugene Onegin makes clear why Tchaikovsky is not numbered among the Russian nationalist composers known as “the five”: Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. The musical style of the entire opera is from somewhere well west of the Vistula, with the possible exception of the obligatory “happy Russian peasant” chorus at the top of the first act....
All of the compositions on this program sponsored by the midwest chapter of American Women Composers are by women, but that in itself would mean very little if it weren’t for the extraordinary creativity that each of these composers displays. Janice Misurell Mitchell’s Transfusions is a brassy bebop romp emphasizing canon and musical gesture, while Laurie Lee Moses’s Raindrum Song asks the musical question: what if Charlie Parker had jammed within a sea of electronic sonorities?...
The wait for a table at Centro Ristorante, the red-hot eatery in River North, has stretched past the hour mark, and those stupid or unlucky enough to have arrived hungry are cooling their heels at the long bar in the front room. Centro has been designed to look like an Italian backyard, with muted colors and big photos of food and food shops on the walls. But only the neophytes are looking at the walls....
The most intricately and cleverly plotted of all the recent body-exchange and/or heaven movies, written by the sisters Perry and Randy Howze (Maid to Order, Mystic Pizza), and directed by Emile Ardolino (Dirty Dancing). I don’t want to give away too much of the story, which invites the spectator to flirt with the idea of at least two kinds of incest, but suffice it to say that the setup involves a happily married young lawyer (Christopher McDonald) who dies and is then reincarnated (as Robert Downey Jr....
RIGOLETTO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse might as well have been written specifically as the basis of a blood-and-thunder opera by Verdi. The tale of the hunchbacked court jester who is the evil genius of his patron but a loving father to his daughter passed virtually unchanged through the hands of Verdi’s librettist Francesco Maria Piave. In an allegorical device favored by moralistic storytellers, the external deformity of Rigoletto is meant to mirror his character....
Extra! Extra! Ice-T and the Fraternal Order of Police exercise their constitutional rights! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Concert security at the Vic, says Jam Productions’ Nick Miller, generally consists of the venue’s in-house squad and personnel brought in by Detente, Jam’s usual security-squad contractor. Some percentage of both is off-duty police. (The promoter likes the arrangement because it keeps up good relations with the cops and provides reputable sources of communication between the security force and the police in the event of trouble....
HAMLET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although this is clearly a “concept” production (director Myron Freedman has done some major tinkering with the script), I can’t say I know what Freedman had in mind. Judging from his director’s notes, it seems he believes Hamlet is a semiautobiographical work. The bizarre rearrangement of the text must be tied to this notion, but it confused rather than clarified....
