For those of us who first encountered Magic Slim years ago at his legendary Sunday-afternoon blues jams at Florence’s Lounge at 55th and Shields, it’s hard to believe that this former best-kept secret of the south side has become an international celebrity. Unlike some, however, Slim hasn’t let success go to his head, or his music. He sounds as hungry as ever–he doesn’t just play a solo, he attacks it and drags it screaming into submission....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We of the Central Committee of The Ghana National Council of Metropolitan Chicago want the general public to be aware that the advertised dance at the Longshoreman’s Association Hall is not the official celebration of the 33rd anniversary of Ghana’s Independence by the Ghanaian Community of Chicago. We want the public to be aware that the dance is being organized by a private individual from Nigeria who has no Ghanaian roots and connections whatever, and that we, the Ghanaian Community do not recognize that dance as representing our sovereign independence or having been sanctioned by The Ghanaian Community in Chicago....
“Shakespeare had it wrong,” Washington Post senior writer Joel Garreau said on a recent visit to Chicago. “Instead of ‘Let’s shoot all the lawyers,’ he should have written ‘Let’s shoot all the planners.’” His treason is twofold. First, he no longer automatically disapproves of such places on principle. Having compared planned communities with those that grew up under comparative anarchy, Garreau suspects that anarchy works better, reminding us that the prototypical beautiful European city, Venice, grew without benefit of a plan....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Wyman’s comment [“Bringing the Noise: Public Enemy on the Front Lines,” August 31] that “Public Enemy blows every other rock ‘n’ roll band on the planet away,” makes me feel embarrassed for him. I saw P.E. last New Year’s Eve at the World in New York, and it was the worst, most disappointing show I’ve ever seen....
As Fred Rosen sees it, the odds against him in his fight against Wal-Mart are the most lopsided since “David took on Goliath back in the biblical times. Just the fact that most people never heard of me but everyone’s heard of Wal-Mart proves my point. With all their money and political clout, they could crush me.” “My father, me, my brother–my whole family–all worked hard to make that name Sam’s mean something,” says Rosen....
Shrinkin’ Centers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Litwin and the village of Skokie have until December to decide what to do now; if they don’t move ahead they risk losing more than $10 million in state funds allocated to the project. Litwin insists the Skokie village trustees are committed to the venture; they are exploring the feasibility of a major capital drive to come up with the additional millions needed for a larger facility....
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO Similarly, in The Marriage of Figaro it is crucial that the countess and Susanna can be mistaken physically for each other. The comedy is of a decidedly different nature when the two are completely opposite sizes, yet the other characters in the opera pretend they can’t tell which is which simply because their faces are covered. Both women should be more or less the same size–consistency, not size, is the issue....
THE NIGHT HANK WILLIAMS DIED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setting is 1952, in the sleepy dump of Stanley, a west Texas backwater that never produced oil and whose soil wore out long ago. Now it can only watch itself die. But Thurmond Stottle, the play’s 27-year-old hero, isn’t going down with the town. A former football star now reduced to a pump jockey, he leads a band called the Stompin’ Cowboys and dreams of becoming the next Hank Williams....
With its extraordinarily expressive story-theater style combining pantomime, silent-cinema acting, sign language, traditional speech, and unusual sound, the National Theatre of the Deaf is uniquely equipped to dramatize Homer’s legendary adventure epic. NTD’s The Odyssey is set in the belly of the Trojan Horse, where Odysseus and his nervous soldiers entertain themselves by spinning fantastic tales–of sirens and sorceresses, one-eyed monsters and holy cattle, journeys through the worlds of the living and the dead-whose poetic subtext concerns man’s confrontation with his own confounding nature....
When I was a little kid my mother always warned me not to sit too close to the TV because it would “ruin your eyes.” Now I am saying the same thing to my two sons. Is this really true? Exactly what eye damage can occur? Is there an optimal distance from which to view a television screen? I am aware of the mental damage that children can incur from watching television but have never been clear about the adverse physical effects of this pastime....
Is man a meat-eater or a vegetarian by nature? According to the enclosed clipping from a vegetarian magazine, “The intestinal length of carnivores (meat-eating animals) is three times the body length to allow for quick removal of flesh wastes that putrefy in the intestines. Man’s intestine length, like other herbivores, is six times his body length and is designed for digesting vegetables, grains, and fruits.” I’m not a meat-eater but my girlfriend is and she is not convinced man is a natural vegetarian....
In Science magazine a while back an article about the latest attempts to calculate pi to the umpteen zillionth decimal place made a passing reference to a curious Oklahoma law. It said Oklahoma legislators had passed a law making pi equal to 3.0. I also remember Robert Heinlein in one of his novels mentioning that Tennessee had passed a similar law. Did either of these states ever pass such a law?...
Are human beings still evolving? Or are we devolving? Are our genes, when passed on to our kids, copied faithfully like a digital recording? Or is the process more like a photocopy of a photocopy, deteriorating more and more with each generation? I hope it’s not the latter, because if the results are anything like those from the self-serve copy place down the street, we’re in big trouble. –David Westwood, Santa Monica, California...
In an earlier time Philip Klass and Stanton Friedman probably would have shot each other by now in a dramatic predawn duel. Earlier still they might have bludgeoned each other with crude wooden clubs. Today’s custom dictates that they meet under less civilized circumstances, such as talk shows. Until his death in 1986, Hynek was the quintessential ufologist, a respected Northwestern University astronomy professor who coined the phrase “close encounters of the third kind....
Toshiko Akiyoshi is one of jazz’s more intriguting phenomena, in that she single-handedly gives the lie to so many misconceptions all at once. She did not move to America (from Japan, where she had moved from her native China) until she was in her mid-20s–yet she plays a distinctly American brand of jazz piano with no “accent” whatsoever to her music. She has established herself among the music’s most innovative composer-arrangers for jazz orchestra, not to mention big-band leaders–both realms considered to be the province of males....
Washington or Bust: Kennedy Center Chicagofest Fizzling? Chicago’s long-planned big moment in the national cultural spotlight may fizzle for lack of funds. As of late last week, arts executives here and in Washington, D.C., were feverishly rushing to raise much of the whopping $3 million needed to take nearly a dozen Chicago arts organizations to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in late spring. In the planning stages for months, the “Chicago Festival at the Kennedy Center,” scheduled for June 12 through 24, would feature the Goodman Theatre, Free Street Theater, the Windy City Gay Chorus, the Hubbard Street Dance Company, the Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Company, Second City, Center Theater, and the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble, among others....
Like the auteurs behind, say, Pleased to Meet Me and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey is a rock ‘n’ roll zealot, a true believer, someone you can’t imagine doing anything else but fronting a band. Unlike Messrs. Westerberg and Springsteen, however, he never takes himself too seriously, nor, in my experience, has he ever had an off night. McCaughey skips barefoot through almost any musical genre you’d care to name; the latest YFF record, This One’s for the Ladies, dances lightly from heavy metal (the title song) to C and W (“Deep Down and Inbetween”) and almost all the way back again....
Friday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Park District’s chrysanthemum collection–the largest municipally owned assortment in the country–will be put to the task of saluting the Soviet landscape design today in PUF: A Salute to the USSR at the Lincoln and Garfield park conservatories. (“PUF” is for “peace, understanding, and friendship.”) Two landscape designers from Kiev were commissioned to do something with the two conservatories; you can get tours of the resulting gardens, hear Russian music, and see displays of Russian art and architecture daily....
The merchants and property owners who make up the Greater State Street Council have a plan to make State great again. For $60 million, they want to demall State Street, restreet it, repave, replant, and relight it, recar, rethink, and revive it as the heart of a new Loop. In 1979 the government was not underwriting shopping malls. It was, however, paying for “transit malls.” The U.S. Department of Transportation ponied up $10 million (out of a total project cost of $17 million) to convert the street between Wacker and Congress into a transit mall a la the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis....
PIERROT LE FOU All the good movies have been made. –Peter Bogdanovich to Boris Karloff in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) Godard’s statement that all remains to be done, on the other hand, carries an acute degree of historical pathos, if only because the movie that made him optimistic in 1965, Pierrot le fou, is even more unsuited to present tastes than Citizen Kane is. For all their differences, Godard and Welles share a certain aesthetic that guarantees that none of their best movies can be entirely consumed in a single viewing....
