Out here in the northwest, it’s becoming increasingly common to put gallon milk jugs half filled with water on the perimeter of your lawn. Supposedly this discourages dogs from relieving themselves and they move along to a jugless lawn. Can this possibly be true? Or is this the pink flamingo of the 90s? –Ralph Goldstein, Oregon City, Oregon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And Oregonians think people from California are flakes?...
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s interesting how things are becoming sharper, clearer. Barriers are down and yes, we do see through things. Democracy is the word. Everywhere there must be democracy as in the West, the free, democratic West. Composer, musician Bright Sheng, from China, is at home here in residency at the Lyric. He likes the freedom of the West....
Those who think of Virginia Woolf’s sharp, witty, brilliant essay A Room of One’s Own–denouncing England’s stuffy, classist, patriarchal society and calling for the intellectual, artistic, and economic independence of women–as merely an early feminist polemic sell Woolf short. True, Woolf’s essay, based on lectures she delivered at two Cambridge women’s colleges in the 20s, says plenty about the myriad ways female writers have been stifled over the centuries. But as Eileen Atkins’s much lauded one-woman show proves, Woolf’s ideas speak to anyone yearning to be artistically free, man or woman....
CANDIDA James Morell is a Protestant minister and socialist activist, acclaimed for his oratorical charisma and beloved by most women, certainly by his wife Candida. Much of his charm lies in his innocence–that is, his obliviousness to reality. The charm is double-edged and dangerous; it can bring pain to others–such as Proserpine Garnett, the secretary who languishes with love for him–and to himself, as when it prevents him from recognizing the potential threat posed by a younger rival....
“In academia, we tend to think of writers as a bunch of dead people–mostly dead white males. My goal as a teacher is to make these dead writers real,” says Fred Gardaphe, an English professor at Columbia College. “We can’t meet Theodore Dreiser or Nelson Algren, yet these people have such an impact on the way we look at Chicago literature.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The result incorporates Gardaphe’s editorial experience, Osborne’s underground publishing experience, and a mutual fascination with multiethnic literature....
Hayden Thompson lives in Highland Park and makes his living as a chauffeur, but he has a past that includes playing rockabilly music at countless road gigs all over the south, and recording at Sun, the very same studio that hatched Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison. And although there was a time when he thought he’d hung up his rock ‘n’ roll shoes for good, now his blood is running again....
Are they newspaper vending machines? One stands alongside a Trib and a Sun-Times box, but its tiny storage space is bereft of newspapers, filled instead with candy wrappers and empty juice bottles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Are they billboards, maybe? Some of them invite us to try WXEZ and a Big Mac, but that can’t be their only purpose–surely it’s against the law to place a simple billboard on a public sidewalk....
IF YOU SEE YOURSELF, SAY AMEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet embattled minorities do need to know they’re not alone; do need to declare who they are and what they believe. Call it self-affirmation or solidarity, but there’s something to be said for entertainment that preaches to the converted, rallies the troops, and tries to reclaim a buried history (or herstory). In that spirit, If You See Yourself, Say Amen also wants to expand the conventional notion of love to fit all lovers....
MADAME BUTTERFLY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » COT has usually employed a three-pronged approach to its seasons, combining an old favorite, one comparatively obscure work, and a more contemporary piece. When picking the old favorites, COT must act with some discretion. The number of bodies required for Aida would surely drive the long-suffering priests of neighboring Saint Alphonsus (which owns the theater and parking lot) over the brink....
Just Say Now: Help Stamp Out Nostalgia By “bunch,” Dlllenburg, who is a 29-year-old records officer at a small Chicago college, is referring to himself, his pal Bruce Elliott in LA, and Elliott’s pal John in New York. Dillenburg can’t remember John’s last name. Their movement advances under the banner of the National Association for the Advancement of Time (NAFTAT). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dillenburg and his cohorts are sick of baby boomers and the undigested 60s, “This huge generation is obsessed with themselves, obsessed with their own past, and that’s why we have this classic rock and crap like The Wonder Years....
It’s hard not to feel a bit annoyed at first with Ken Jacobs’s 1991 film Keaton’s Cops. He has printed Buster Keaton’s hilarious silent classic Cops so that except for a few early shots and the final title only the bottom fifth of the image is visible– the top 80 percent of the frame is black. While it’s surprising how much can still be seen–small fragments of events, some of the final chase–the effect is to remove the narrative causality around which the movie is organized....
Labor Wars: A Cease-Fire at Pioneer Press Management wasted little respect on the union negotiating team. “They were leading us by the nose,” pressman Pete Wagner would remember. Wagner, a late addition to the Guild team, said that a company negotiator sneered at one point, “You don’t even have 30 percent membership! How can you ask for anything?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally, the rank and file awoke....
“We wanted to build a space for performance that wasn’t dangerous,” explains Sharon Evans, artistic director of the new Live Bait Theater, which opens its doors to Chicago audiences for the first time this weekend. “I once saw a woman and her chair fall off a riser in a gallery. Who wants to go through that to see a performance?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If you’re just starting out,” Evans explains, “you perform at Randolph Street Gallery....
Pay More at Door: Museums Adjust to Hard Times Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MSI executives say the switch to a paid admission system has also resulted in a more accurate count of attendance and, consequently, a lower number of “real” visitors. “Before the admission fee was instituted,” explains spokeswoman Deborah Lucien, “People may have stopped at the museum just to use the restrooms on the way to the lakefront, but they would have been counted as visitors by the clickers at the door....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the factors which most of the proponents of the Canadian system overlook is the major demographic and social differences between the U.S. and Canada. Our emergency rooms are packed with the results of gang violence, a social ill from which Canada does not suffer to as great an extent as the U.S. The author also dismisses the litigation problem that is prevalent in the United States....
Call him the Sixth Wilbury: like a whole bunch of graying rockers, Randy Newman has had a career revivification courtesy of former Electric Light Orchestra leader Jeff Lynne, whose sprightly production gave much of Newman’s latest album, Land of Dreams, its oomph. But it must have been hard for Newman, who ten years ago reamed Lynne and ELO nicely in the song “Story of a Rock and Roll Band.” Still, Land of Dreams is a major work–side one has the beginnings of a lovely autobiography; you want it to continue....
Entering the restaurant pool with a splash isn’t all that hard to do–remember Cucina Cucina?–but toughing it out over the long haul is another matter. Times and tastes change, and a savvy restaurateur has to stay flexible while keeping his old customers and good employees. Mi Casa-Su Casa at 2524 N. Southport seems to have managed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The change in the neighborhood hasn’t really forced us to change what we do,” Gomez says, but one casualty has been lunch–“It was popular when there were a lot of factories around here; now that the neighborhood has changed, we don’t bother with it anymore....
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam–the honorific was bestowed on It recently in recognition of its 100th birthday–has always been one of my favorite European interpreters of Mahler and the German Romantics. On the right night, under the right conductor, the Concertgebouw players are capable of lyrical, precise, high-intensity performances that put the Berlin Philharmonic (and the Chicago Symphony, for that matter) to shame. The orchestra had become more and more uneven under the often dull direction of Bernard Haitink, but it just may reclaim its former glory under new maestro Riccardo Chailly....
Now that commie student radical war protester Bill Clinton has been elected president, and 12 years of Republican rule will soon be a memory, it’s safe for lefties to be lefty again. That’s easy for those of us pure hearts who kept our ideology sacred and our bank accounts dry. But for others who, um, went in another direction, becoming (just temporarily, right?) neoconservatives, Reagan Democrats, tax gripers, hard-hearted greedy little fascist bastards–for those who ....
Best known for his work as an actor (he played the young Roy Scheider in All That Jazz and the lead in Home Movies), writer-director Keith Gordon makes his directorial debut in this odd, cold stylistic exercise set at a Catholic school and based on a novel of the same title by Robert Cormier. The plot involves the school’s drive to sell twice as many boxes of chocolates as it sold the previous year, and the intervention of a sadistic hazing club at the school known as the Vigils....
