TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE: A DIALOGUE WITH FEAR “He loves me, he loves me not,” says a woman’s voice, “She loves me, she loves me not,” says a man’s, over and over in an alternating singsong. From another speaker a woman tells of hearing a crying baby she cannot assist, ending with the question: “Where are you now, burnt baby boy in the blackened room, and why do you live on so fiercely in my memory?...
FISH HEADS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This premise has possibilities. Memories, in a sense, are reminders of death. They last only as long as we do; when we die, our memories die with us. And in a way, we are not completely dead until all those who remember us are dead too. So the old man in Fish Heads is fighting against death itself....
In Praise of Pranking So now Steinberg has written his “toilet book.” It is not a novel, but it does have a publisher. It is a collection of college pranks called If at All Possible, Involve a Cow. Steinberg poured his heart and soul into it. It brims with displaced consequence. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Think of prankishness as burbling from the same spring as literature....
A while ago Channel 11’s Chicago Tonight gave nine Republican mayoral candidates three minutes each to speak. The parade included a man in dark glasses proposing the creation of some kind of secret service to patrol the subways, a bungalow dweller who seems to think life would be better if the non-Aryan populations left town, a University of Chicago political science major, and a man who reminded public-television viewers that the mayor’s office isn’t nearly as powerful as the mass media....
There’s a new breed of blueswoman on the scene: assertive and sassy, more likely to send a musical warning to a recalcitrant lover than to bemoan his mistreatment of her and unafraid to fuse sexy flirtatiousness with a take-no-mess strut. Nora Jean Wallace typifies this persona. She’s also capable of moving effortlessly from a torchy rendition of a soul ballad to an exuberant blues shout, then launching into a contemporary standard (“Down Home Blues”) with little worry about whether she’s straining the boundaries of genre or style....
Performing Arts Center: Who’s Paying? Who’s Buying? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a meeting last week of the committee, headed by Sara Lee Corporation chairman John Bryan, fund-raising consultant Charles R. Feldstein reported that the funding support needed to build a performing arts center does exist in the community, but he wouldn’t name names. According to sources present at the meeting, his report was purposely vague to prevent the funders he surveyed from being approached by other groups looking for money and to keep potential donors safe from possible attack by the project’s detractors....
The lines extend from the auditorium out into the corridor of Stockton Elementary School, a microcosm of Chicago’s population. There are blacks, American Indians, Romanians, Poles, Southern whites, WASPs, Jews, Irishmen, Latins and Asians from a dozen different countries–all living together in a four-block square area. There are elderly, disorderly looking residents of the Wilson Club Hotel and svelte young home owners from the Dover Street Neighbors Association; there are welfare mothers and professional people, janitors and landlords, babes in arms and ancient ladies....
BLAZE “Dirt’s a funny thing,” the Boss said. “Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension....
Sun-Times Whiffs on Sox Stadium Lease The trouble with good news is that it usually means somebody’s overlooking something. To begin with, the Sun-Times was overlooking what serious critics of the stadium deal were actually saying three years ago. God knows they weren’t saying that in the very first year of the new park’s existence, even if the Sox found themselves in a scorching pennant race, no one would come. What concerned them was the way the deal was structured....
Can you tell me the meaning of “Ollie, Ollie oxen go free”? I’ve been playing hide-and-seek for years and don’t know what I’ve been saying. –Carolyn Henning, North Aurora, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aren’t we getting a little old for this, Carolyn? Then again, I don’t know that having parties to watch Twin Peaks is a dramatic step upward in maturity. There are dozens of variations of the refrain you mention....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s the second of these which Pump Up the Volume assails head on. Let’s assume for a moment that the film’s oft-repeated sentiment that the world is a stagnating cesspool is true. The question, of course, becomes what do we do about it? The film’s answer–frenetic action in whatever direction, as long as it screws things up–is dangerous if, for no other reason, than the fact that no matter how much the cesspool stinks, it can always get a hell of a lot worse and the road there is paved with wrong, unthoughtful action....
GHOSTBUSTERS II With Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, and Rick Moranis. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, some of the appeal is little more than the reassurance of brand names. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is only the most extreme example, the screen fairly bursting with highly marketable signs, insignia, and symbols. In fact, the Star Trek series is an elementary semiological wonderland whose crudity is only compensated for by its fecundity, an everlasting rondelet of reflexive remarks....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second, contrary to the story, my staff did consult environmental groups and recyclers throughout the nation while drafting the ordinance. The contact may not have been as extensive as the groups would have liked, but I haven’t heard many complaints that my proposals aren’t tough enough. Therefore, I must ask what the point is. Third, environmental groups and recyclers claim that I created the Recycling Advisory Task Force as a vehicle for business to scuttle the ordinance....
Friday 24 The Chicago chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences will present its annual panel, Developing Talent in the 90s, featuring top dogs from A&M, Slash, ASCAP, Capitol, and Atlantic. The panel should provide you with plenty of inside info on how to shop a record deal. The talk starts at 1 PM at the Briar Street Theatre, 3133 N. Halsted. Admission is $15, $5 for students....
Eddie can be a real pain. Bruce Perry, a University of Chicago child and adolescent psychiatrist, first saw Eddie in 1989, when he started consulting at Saint Joe’s. “He was bouncing off the walls,” Perry says. After World War I doctors who treated combat veterans for shell shock noted that when the veterans were exposed to loud noises they frequently developed upset stomachs, rapid heart rates, breathlessness, tightness in the chest, and sometimes loss of bladder and bowel control....
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH MARY? SHAWN COYLE & DANCERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What Are We Going to Do With Mary? is centered squarely on O’Slynne. He plays Preston Carlisle, the rich boy in the tiny Texas town of Forney. (O’Slynne grew up in Forney, Texas, and much of the dance is reportedly taken directly from his boyhood.) Life in Forney has convinced Carlisle that what matters is “who is sticking what into whom, and who is enjoying it....
EVENING IN CAIRO TONI BARK AND FRIENDS So it’s more than coincidence that in one week there were two performances featuring Middle Eastern dance in more theatrical venues: belly dancers are looking for receptive sponsors who will treat them like professional dancers–artists, not artistes. Ruth St. Denis went through the same tribulations trying to take Indian dance out of the disreputable “dance halls” and onto the concert stage. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
I think that there might be a cranky person inside all of us. Duck’s Breath, now based in San Francisco, has created some memorable characters: Dr. Science, based on the didactic Mr. Science and featured on the Fox Broadcasting Network; Randee of the Redwoods, the consummate hippie, seen on MTV; and the hard-boiled Ian Shoales, who was inspired by New Journalism and tough guys like Philip Marlowe. “There was a Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan that was just crammed full of esoteric information,” Kessler explains....
To the editors: These individuals and thousands of other Hispanics, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, gay-lesbian activists and lakefront progressives did not “leave” the Washington coalition. Rather, they simply declined to accept Tim Evans as the self-proclaimed heir apparent. They have chosen to support Rich Daley who, in many ways, is more progressive than Evans and has a record to back up his claims. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Daley has run a campaign devoid of racial appeals and name-calling, Evans–perhaps in desperation–has his allies fan the racial flames, while he personally attacks Daley based on the fact that the State’s Attorney does not actually try cases and that he failed the bar exam twice before passing it....
If there were justice in the world, Jimmy Rogers would be as famous as Muddy Waters. They were compatriots in those thrilling days of the early 1950s, when the primal sounds of Delta blues became transformed into a modern urban folk music in the clubs and on the street corners of Chicago’s south and west sides. Rogers’s work from that period ranks as a standard by which contemporary blues expression is judged; several of his own recordings–“Sloppy Drunk,” “That’s All Right,” “Walking by Myself”–are classics of the genre....
