To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I support socially responsible businesses. I shop on the northside at health food stores, because 1) I live north, 2) I receive good service, 3) I and my children am treated with the utmost respect, and 4) I am a vegan who supports the food and life principles that closely resemble those of African holistic health....
CHOREOGRAPHY: BOB EISEN/JAN ERKERT Chicago is rich in such dance, partly because for so many choreographers here money is limited and performance spaces small. That means small dances and small audiences; but it also opens up a wealth of opportunity. Bob Eisen and Jan Erkert showed off their mastery of the form on a double bill, including one collaboration, last weekend at MoMing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eisen’s work often has a rough, unchoreographed look: he throws flourishes, finishing touches, out the window....
Lead Story In January an Ontario, California, police officer gathered evidence for an arrest by buying heroin from two people selling from the back window of a motel room. All the undercover officers in his unit had gone home for the evening, so he tried making the buy dressed in full uniform. He was successful because the sellers’ peephole allowed them a view only of the buyer’s face. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Do the offerings of the city’s semiofficial film fest look a trifle dull and mainstreamy? If that’s how you’re feeling these days, perhaps you’d enjoy a little movie called C’mon Babe (Danke Schoen), which combines footage of lemmings scurrying to their deaths with bits of song by Wayne Newton, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Cash. “A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent”–the rich, fruity tones of the nature-film narrator alternate with Newton’s lisp–“Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen....
MEFISTOFELE Mefistofele, which first saw the light of day in 1868, is the major work of a minor composer, Arrigo Boito. As an operatic composer Boito is a cut above Leo Delibes, but only just. Boito’s true contribution to opera lies in his work as a librettist for the aging Verdi, particularly in his masterpieces Falstaff and Otello. The music in Mefistofele has a few high points, such as the celestial choruses in the prologue and epilogue, but most of it is composed in a workaday Italian set-piece idiom that can’t support the difficult subject of Goethe’s Faust....
Sun-Times Keeps a Secret It was merely something Dowaliby’s lawyers would like to have known about–but didn’t. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We don’t know exactly what Baumann told Rossi, because Rossi never wrote a story. But here’s Baumann’s account, as his lawyers described it months later in a petition to Judge Neville: On or about February 15, 1990, Baumann was lifting weights in the Division One yard at Cook County Jail....
The epidemic might have gone largely unnoticed had it not been for the inspired work of a tireless research team who just last month uncovered the insidious ill now subtly contaminating America. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In searching for the origins of this yet unnamed and seemingly irrepressible affliction, the researchers appear to be at odds in their conclusions. Most speculate that the Reagan administration, with its tacit enshrinement of unprincipled and remorselessly cruel business practices, unleashed the pathogen–giving license to the indiscriminate joining of the word Mean to the word Business....
County Stadium is a tall, faded, red brick structure that rises suddenly on the left–seemingly from the very vapors of a nearby brewery–for traffic heading west on Interstate 94 out of downtown Milwaukee. It has a lived-in look about it: not antiquated, but firmly in middle age, poised before an impending decay. In its corners and upper regions it has a darkened, smoky appearance, like the hood of a grill in a greasy spoon....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As was reported correctly, “THE HASH” as it is simply known is an international running group with 1,200 HASH groups throughout the world totaling nearly 100,000 runners who are best described as a “cross between Animal House [and] the National Geographic Explorers Club.” And as is the case here in Chicago, CH3 tends to point itself to the wild side of the running spectrum as compared to more speed oriented traditional running groups....
“It’s my property. I can do what I want.” You’ve probably heard it a thousand times–but not from someone who cares about reducing air pollution and saving the last of the black-footed ferrets. Private-property advocates tend to view the environment as a dubious cause for mush-minded liberals or, worse, as socialism in green clothing. P.J. Hill: It’s true private-property rights have a pejorative connotation. Sometimes they’re used by people who are polluting to say, “Look, I can do whatever I want–it’s my property....
The Girl in the Light Summer Dress. Could he possibly use that title? Who would arrest such a creature? A stern warning, that’s the thing. “My dear. We have a speed limit in here. Harumph. Harumph!” “Don’t you worry! I’ll just call in a radio check.” It’s the academy again, doing his thinking for him. She has a state ID card; he reads from it, calls her name and date of birth in to the dispatcher....
This five-day festival, now in its eighth year, highlights film and video shorts and features by women, including documentaries, animation, narrative, and experimental works. It starts Wednesday, March 8, and runs through Sunday, March 12, at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont. Films and videos are grouped under such program headings as “Take the First Step,” “Go Out of Bounds,” and “Lie Between the Hammer and the Anvil.” Festival tickets are $5 per program for the general public, $4 for members of Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago Filmmakers, or the Center For New Television; students; and senior citizens....
Dotty Christine Tell all thats gone wrong Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dotty Christine has stilts for legs and a tiny head. Her arms are soft, like tentacles. They curve around a chicken she cradles. Behind her, a cobbled path diverges, its two branches leading to two houses, and the ground rises steeply to a narrow ribbon of sky. Everything tilts a little precariously, but Dotty looks straight out at us....
Friday 31 Saturday 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ants, prairie poetry, and the effects of fire will all be discussed at the ninth Northern Illinois Prairie Workshop. Jointly hosted by the North Branch Prairie Project, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, and Northeastern Illinois University, the all-day affair offers 41 presentations. Registration begins at 7:30 AM at the university, 5500 N. Saint Louis....
Friday 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In my work, you always have to do something to the object to get something more out of it. You know, push a button, move a lever–something,” says Jim McManus, who was trained at the Art Institute and is now a maintenance man for a retail chain. One of his pieces, which is now placed outside a window at Artemisia Gallery, is a podium with video-game handles that manipulate a white surrender flag....
The 12th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, November 13 through 15, at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont. Tickets ($4 for most matinees, $6 for most evening shows) go on sale a half hour before the first show and can be purchased in advance. For further information call 281-1981 or 281-8788. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not the Nicholas Ray feature but a program of nine short films and videos, leading off with Sadie Benning’s lovely, funny, and affecting video It Wasn’t Love and concluding with Suzie Silver’s outrageous and funny music video The Spy (Hester Reeves Does the Doors)....
For residents of a certain vintage, State Street will always be Chicago’s great street. But these days, to tourists and suburbanites as well as some locals, Chicago means North Michigan Avenue. They’ve embraced it as a big-city theme park, the closest thing to a Rouse-ian festival market that the city offers. A 1989 survey of downtown pedestrian patterns found that on a typical summer Saturday the two sides of Michigan Avenue near Water Tower carried more than 53,000 and 46,000 people during a nine-hour sample period, tops among all downtown blocks surveyed....
Federico Camacho and Herman Kogan died about a week apart. They were both in their 70s, and both had lived in Old Town in the days when it had a deserved reputation as an arty neighborhood. Kogan was a newspaperman in the finest tradition of Chicago journalism, a writer of classic Chicago history, an award-winning broadcaster, and a Marine combat correspondent in World War II. Camacho came to the U.S. from Mexico illegally (at first) and became a success by running the Cafe Azteca on North Avenue....
George Clinton is responsible for some of the most powerful monster dance grooves ever recorded–and when it comes to unadulterated hard funk R & B, his influence looms immense: second only to that of James Brown. The complete story is too complex to get into here; let’s just note that it was Clinton (along with Sly Stone) who first merged funky soul with psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll in the late 60s, and it was Clinton (along with Stevie Wonder) who first taught the cold, hard synthesizer to sing with messy human warmth in the late 70s....
Although musical settings of the passion of Jesus date back to the early Middle Ages and were extraordinarily common up until the 18th-century culmination of the genre in Bach’s magnificent settings, one can count on one hand the important passions of the 20th century. The eight-year-old Latin Saint John Passion by Estonian composer Arvo Part signals a stunning return to the genre. Part has revitalized the ancient form by cross-fertilizing a pseudominimalist style with the melismatic flow and phrasing of Gregorian chant....
