To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In response to Mary Shen Barnidge’s overtly bitter review of Big Fun’s Howard Be Thy Name [March 16], I must speak out against reviews as low-brow as this. While she raised a few valid points (yes, there were too many gunshots, yes, there were too many TV parodies), Ms. Barnidge quickly lapsed into blasting the show without substantiating any accusations....
THE INDIAN WANTS THE BRONX Stark Raving Ensemble at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stark Raving Ensemble’s extremely low budget production of The Indian Wants the Bronx–with its dirt-poor minimal set in Cafe Voltaire’s cold, musty, unswept basement–is a case in point. I would be surprised if the three actors who put together this revival of Israel Horovitz’s disturbing 1968 play, about a pair of delinquents who torment a poor East Indian lost somewhere in New York, make enough after expenses each night to buy themselves three bowls of chili upstairs....
FILMS BY PHIL SOLOMON At a number of points in The Secret Garden we see an image of a small boy, usually in profile, possibly lying propped up in bed; one infers he is ill. An adult speaks to him; a subtitle reads “Once upon a time.” Intercut with these shots are images from several commercial films–The Wizard of Oz is recognizable–and a variety of other material. Through chemical modification of the emulsion and optical printing (the same frame-by-frame rephotography used in creating special effects), Solomon turns this imagery into variegated, unstable, shifting patterns of color and light....
When my unemployment checks from the steel mill ran out, I went to the employment office. Anything but welfare. The woman there wasn’t very helpful at first–“Do you have any references?” I knew my old boss would give me one, but I didn’t have anything written down. Finally she lined me up with a dry-cleaning job–not much money, and I wouldn’t get paid for two weeks. But it was better than nothing....
Why do the digital alarm clocks advertised in catalogs or magazines always show 12:08? What’s so special about that time? I’m desperate for an answer! –Oliver “Mr. Cc” Markwirth, Richardson, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now stop that. They don’t all say 12:08. I have an ad here showing a whole passel of digital watches set for 8:07. It was sent to me by some character who wrote in the margin, “Signals of THE 4 HORSES OF THE APOCALYPSE?...
WOMAN IN A SUITCASE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m still not sure what to call whatever it is Goell does, except to say that her one-woman show blends all of the above into something funny, engaging, and–most important–easily understandable. The woman of the title is an adventuresome young lady based, says Goell, on the Eloise character of Kay Thompson’s stories. She ventures from her humble home (and a suitcase, even one with a sunshiny window painted on the inside of the lid, is certainly humble) somewhere in eastern Europe to the United States for the purpose of attending a recital at Carnegie Hall in New York City....
Despite the building’s landmark status, it’s easy to miss Louis Sullivan’s last work, a highly stylized two-story terra-cotta facade at 4611 N. Lincoln. Over the past several months the building has undergone subtle restoration on the outside and transformation on the inside to accommodate a gallery with collections that are unerringly appropriate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The building was commissioned in 1921 by William Krause as a music store with an apartment upstairs for his family....
The tenth edition of the annual festival of black independent film continues Friday, August 9, through Monday, August 12, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, and the DuSable Museum of African American History, 56th Place and Cottage Grove. Tickets are $5 ($7 for True Identity), with discounts available to Blacklight and Film Center members. For more information call 509-2981. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » FINZAN A young widow dares to reject the West African practice of “wife inheritance” when her brother-in-law claims her as his third wife in Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s feature from Mali, a picture that’s highly recommended by my colleagues (1990)....
Bombed by the USA? “I feel that a sector of the U.S. government, this one wild sector, almost killed me and did kill some of my friends,” he said. “And I think it is perfectly capable of doing it again if we don’t stop them.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We asked Avirgan what he thinks about being turned into a comic book. (A better term would be “graphic docudrama,” which is what the book calls itself It’s square-bound and 80 pages long....
The Hammond School City was one of the first districts in the country to try school-based management, but its position as a pioneer is being outstripped by events. Today scores of districts in six states, notably Minnesota and Florida, are experimenting with moving decisions downward. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Enthusiasm for the Miami reforms was such that last spring Dade County voters passed a $980 million school bond issue, the largest bond referendum in U....
Ethics News A stickler for seemliness, Bingham made some changes. Pierce, whom he describes as “sort of an old-time newsman” who couldn’t see what the problem was, became a Sunday feature writer and actually took to milking the shift in after-dinner speeches. “It made his career,” says Bingham. “He has the most recognizable byline of any reporter who works for the Courier-Journal.” Publishers often call city desks, but not to order their own embarrassment....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They are just as hate-filled and reactionary as the Nazis who once persecuted them. The comments in the article on the Holocaust Museum concerning their supporters’ opposition to German reunification and hope that the German people “suffer” further was just one indication of this. For years now, Jewish religious, political and cultural organizations have been engaged in a shameful ongoing crusade to persecute 70, 80 and 90 year old retired janitors and the like who served as concentration camp guards, 50 years or more after these men were forcibly drafted into the German army during the war–serving no conceivable rational purpose at this late date....
Spring arrived officially at the beginning of this week. As is usual in Chicago, its arrival was signaled by snowstorms and subzero windchills and celebrated by the local inhabitants with wisecracks and lots of shivering. Even when we have an unusually warm winter, it seems we can count on a cold spring. Tundra swans have probably been passing through here on their way north since the end of the last ice age, but the mute swan is a rather new addition to our avifauna....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hey [Michael Ervin], about that concert last Friday night (the Concert for Inner Peace) . . . did we go to the same one [Our Town, September 20]? Sure there were concession stands open but what sport arena have you been to where they weren’t? In fact, when I was standing in line to get my Coke before the concert started, I saw a girl in a sari asking them to close....
A WATER BIRD TALK and Four hundred years ago the Florentine Camerata attempted to raise ancient Greek drama from the dead. They gathered the items that had belonged to Greek drama–music, drama, verse, chorus–and reassembled them. But when they connected the dead parts, what they got was not exactly what they expected; instead of reviving an old creature, they gave birth to a new. But between 50 and 150 years after its birth, opera seemed headed toward extinction as an art form....
The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure. Here the whole sense of the life is epitomized. Needless to say, the hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave. –Joseph Campbell Clearly this was serious stuff, and I sat, stunned, staring at that cover until my barber summoned me to the high red chair....
The key to Michael Feinstein and Rosemary Clooney’s musical partnership, in existence since she guest-starred on his 1985 debut album Pure Gershwin, is contrast. In their concert “Say It With Music,” which blends classic songs by the likes of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, and George and Ira Gershwin with less familiar material by such writers as Dave Frishberg and David Ross, Clooney takes the role of the well-traveled, worldly-wise, tender but tough old dame, while Feinstein is the exuberant, eager-beaver idealist....
Leady Story In December, a school bus driver in Del Valle, Texas, was running a half hour late on his route because he stopped to write up reports on unruly children. Several worried parents began to search for the bus, but when they found it they were not able to retrieve their kids because the driver had locked the doors, citing rules against discharging passengers except at official stops. The driver drove away with angry parents banging on the bus and hanging on the doors and with others chasing the bus in a 20-car caravan....
Lead Story A Macon County, North Carolina, man, showing off in front of friends in May, grabbed a rattlesnake out of the back of a truck and began kissing it on the body and head and slapping his hand with the snake’s open mouth. When his hand began bleeding, he threw the snake back in the truck and drove off in his own truck. Police, who arrived at the scene later, alerted the local hospital to be ready....
The stage is bare except for an old metal music stand and a microphone. Off to the side, David Sedaris straightens his cotton T-shirt and then politely weaves his way through the crowd to the stage, carrying a small piece of paper, his introduction for the performance artist Cheryl Trykv. He adjusts the microphone, then recites a series of adoring adjectives–such a torrent of outrageous, parodic hyperbole that you can’t wait to see the woman described....
