Midmorning the sky is a deep and cloudless blue, straight out of a dream; a new, high-pressure breeze is blowing cool but still short-sleeve September weather from the north. And today, thanks to a little foresight and a lot of luck, we have tickets to the actual Field of Dreams–the bleachers, where the sun shines brightest, and the crowd is better than most of the games. In fact, we have three more tickets than we can use....
To the editors: I have a number of reasons for having been fascinated by Bryan Miller’s article “Is Nothing Sacred?” [June 9]. Christened into the Church of England, I joined an Episcopal parish when I moved to the United States fifteen years ago. Since then I have attended both St. Paul’s-by-the-Lake, home to many of the most committed adherents to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and St. Luke’s Parish, Evanston, which combines incense, a boys’ choir and the Great Litany with an ordained woman on its clergy staff....
I did some early-morning birding at Wooded Island last week. It was a very unpromising morning: there was an icy wind out of the northeast, overcast skies–a typical spring day in Chicago. A wind off the lake usually means terrible birding along the lakefront. Jackson Park was at that time a natural landscape featuring three long sand ridges running parallel to the lakeshore. These low ridges were once shorelines of Lake Michigan and its immediate postglacial ancestor, Lake Chicago....
August 12 1927: Charles Lindbergh is in Chicago, three months after his triumphant flight from New York to Paris. The Chicago Tribune reports: “From 1:45 p.m. until 3 while Lindy swung the big winged monoplane three times around the Loop and as far north as Chicago avenue, the din of this city was for the man and his plane, but from then until 10 in the evening thousands cheered at sight of the man himself....
In what’s becoming an annual tradition, Chicago-via-Boston reedist Ken Vandermark is joined by his former Beantown cohort, drummer Curt Newton (who works with the fascinating freebop guitarist Joe Morris). In years past they’ve presented scalding free-jazz duets in honor of pioneering saxophonists Jimmy Lyons and Eric Dolphy, and this performance expands their scope with a joint homage to the late composer/pianist/visionary Sun Ra and P-Funk guiding light George Clinton. It’s easy to imagine the Clinton part: Newton’s large reserve of free-floating power seems well-suited to the guttural R&Bish honk of Vandermark’s tenor (witness the Vandermark Quartet’s funky “Dog Cliches”)....
GET WELL SOON In the first room, the pristine elegance of a work by New York artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Blue Mirror), soothes the senses while raising disturbing questions. A two-foot-high stack of offset-printed paper has been placed on the floor. On each sheet, a medium blue rectangle is framed by a pale blue outer border. This deceptively simple work comments directly on the value and relevance of a “unique” art object in a world of limitless reproduction....
This free event at the Green Mill offers an excellent opportunity for the jaded and/or curious to become acquainted with the widely varied sonic worlds of several young and hungry Chicago-area avant-garde musicians while drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon. That this program is being staged in a bar rather than an academic auditorium or an oh-so-serious loft space is hardly incidental; it’s expressly designed to appeal to the uninitiated. This is music to be sensually enjoyed, not just examined and and explained–once you relax and open your ears you may find it surprisingly accessible....
You could say that Luciano Castelli lives life and art as an inseparable whole. Since 1973, the Swiss-born artist has concocted elaborate fantasies, costumed himself for them — dressing as women, animals, pirates — and documented them (and himself) in photographs and film footage that in turn became the basis for his beautiful, often erotic paintings. As you flip through a recently published book that traces Castelli’s career from his youth in Lucerne to his current flamboyant life at the heart of Berlin’s counterculture, compelling images jump from the pages: childish watercolors from 1969, when Castelli, then 17, decided he wanted to be an artist; photographs and jewel-toned paintings of the artist in drag as “Lucille,” a female alter ego not unlike Marcel Duchamp’s “Rose Selavy”; collaborative canvases by Castelli and artist/colleagues Salome and Rainer Fetting, depicting brothels, bodies on meat hooks, and men on trapezes....
Madness, impotence, adultery, prostitution, alcoholism, and sadomasochism are all ingredients for a light comedy in the hands of Georges Feydeau. Interestingly, it was in the mid-60s that Flea, now the most popular Feydeau play among language audiences, first reached those audiences in a major way. In 1966, Great Britain’s National Theatre presented Flea in a translation by British author John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey), starring Albert Finney and directed by Jacques Charon of the Comedie-Francaise....
Flavor of the month in alternative land is Pavement, an amiable, somewhat obscurantist LA group noticed both for their efficient parroting of all the right Pixilated, Sonic Youthful moves (which don’t impress me, and probably won’t you) and for their occasionally open and oddly ingratiating songwriting (which does me, and might you). On Slanted & Enchanted, the band dicks around with the best of them (“Chesley’s Little Wrists,” for example, and other songs with titles too precious to repeat); but the leadoff track, “Summer Babe,” is spacious and somehow stately, as subversive and ultimately explosive (in its own way) as the song whose name I forget by that band from Seattle last year....
Down in Springfield last February Lincoln’s ghost walked, as it does every year about that time. The capital took part in an authentic 1865 political rally, looked at family snapshots in period frames, was reminded of Lincoln’s winning tactics in the election of 1860, listened as an MD explained why, in his opinion, the late president did not suffer from Marfan’s syndrome, and heard learned men and women speculate about Lincoln’s association with Queen Victoria....
As the mostly mournful parade of 60s anniversaries continues down our nation’s broad media avenues, 25-year commemorations are beginning to bump into the remaining 20-year observances. We seem to be cursed to relive those years forever–a generation doomed to slip into senescence while arguing about the real meaning of Woodstock. Will the rehashing ever end? Is there really anything new to be mined from that exhausted lode of cultural memory we call “the 60s”?...
“Superman is dead. Long live Superman,” shouts a 30-ish guy, fist clenched, arm waving wildly in the cold night air. A hearse with the famous S emblazoned on its window pulls up, and a coffin draped in red is carried into the Toontown Comic Company, on Southport just south of Irving Park. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The gallery is full of original comic-book art, but the big draw here are seven artboards in a cordoned-off corner at the back of the gallery....
Sonic Youth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sonic Youth have been negotiating a tense accord between pop and art since 1982, when they first welded sheets of Branca-esque guitar noise to a rock ‘n’ roll chassis to create their mind-blowing debut EP. On each album after that, to the disappointment of some and the delight of others, they increasingly emphasized the pop side, slaking their thirst for adventure in side projects....
They were in love. They were together in the way only teenagers can be: oblivious to the honks and yells of truckers, to the disapproving stares of old ladies and the sad, envious glances of old men. Sitting on a couple of milk crates borrowed from the Jewel down the street, they’d set themselves up in front of a pay phone, and it looked like they might never leave. The girl was sitting in her boyfriend’s lap kicking her legs restlessly, one hand softly rubbing his back, the other hand holding an enormous slice of pizza....
Tele-Visions The average household, Jacobs explained. And most households didn’t have television. “We’re in the wonderful position of selling a good product. Now I just have to get eight million people to remember the phone number.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We” is Jacobs and his partners in this caper, Norman Langill of Seattle and John McGowan, a Chicago marketing whiz. Dial 976-8080 and you’ll hear the time, and the weather, and a plug for Channel Two–which hasn’t invested its own money but did give Jacobs a space to set up shop....
“The fear that many citizens have of being murdered by an unknown assailant is contrary to statistical evidence,” reports the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority in Trends and Issues 90. “Only 14 percent of the 989 murders reported in Illinois during 1988 involved verified situations in which the victim and offender were strangers to one another. In more than half the murders [57 percent], the victim and offender knew each other in some way…”...
An honorable failure, this Vietnam war drama and action film attempts to do something that, to the best of my knowledge, no other commercial movie about the war has attempted: represent the point of view of the Viet Cong as well as that of American soldiers. Given this ambition, it’s regrettable that director and cowriter Eric Weston leans as heavily as he does on previous Vietnam films: acerbic offscreen commentary (as in Apocalypse Now), choral music over action (as in Platoon), and a division between pure good and pure evil to describe soldiers in the same platoon (American sergeants in Platoon, Viet Cong fighters here)....
The turning point–irreversible, as it turned out–in the play-off series between the Bulls and the Detroit Pistons came here at the Chicago Stadium, in game four, on Memorial Day. The Pistons emerged looking shaken and frazzled following their amazing loss in game three, two days before, in which they had blown a 14-point lead in the final eight minutes of play. The Bulls led the series two games to one and would all but advance to the finals against the Los Angeles Lakers if they padded their lead to 3-1....
Thank you for your answer to my question on the cost of the Vietnam war [January 11]. I was astounded to think we spent the equivalent of 32 years’ worth of Vietnam’s GNP trying to kill half the people who lived there. Now I have another question. Imagine that instead of the Soviet Union rushing headlong toward capitalism, the rest of the world decided to become socialist. If all the world’s wealth were divided up equally among all its inhabitants, how much would each of us have?...
