How would you react to a suggestion that we grow alewives in hatcheries and release them into Lake Michigan? Doubtless you know about alewives, the silvery little fish from the Atlantic Ocean that invaded our lake a few decades back. In the late 60s, it seemed like alewives were put on earth to die and wash ashore in great stinking heaps. This spring they worked a variation on that morbid task by dying and floating into the quiet corners of our harbors....
Into the Buzz Bin With Veruca Salt Nina Gordon first heard Louise Post sing and play guitar over the phone, from one Chicago New Year’s Eve party to another. Post was playing for guests at her house; a friend of Gordon’s called her and held the phone out to let Gordon hear. When the pair finally got together in person, “I felt like I’d met my mirror,” says Post. “We both immediately thought that we wanted to take this very seriously right then....
The second of two articles That’s a question we should be asking when we look at the strange case of Proposition 64, a California political campaign that epitomizes the style and substance of the web of organizations headed by America’s most interesting and potentially most dangerous right-wing extremist, Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. The campaign was marked by frequent controversy. At one point California’s secretary of state threatened immediate legal action if petition circulators did not stop harassing potential signers and misrepresenting the contents of the measure....
Lead Story John and Donna Slagg filed a lawsuit in Janesville, Wisconsin, in May against their son Keith, 24, for failure to repay the $13,000 (including 15 percent interest) they loaned him for insurance, car payments, and college tuition. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dana Jurist won $79.50 in a court in Downington, Pennsylvania, from Shawn Norbeck, who failed to keep their date for the junior prom in May....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why did you send Dennis Polkow to review Carousel at Chicago Opera Theater [June 15]? You have several good theater critics, and he knows even less about theater and musical comedy than he does about singing and opera. Why do you send someone who is legally blind to review any staged production? Why do you send someone who doesn’t know anything about singing to review opera?...
THE POPE’S TOE As you might expect from its title, The Pope’s Toe capers irreverently around its sacred subject. But anyone who knows the dance-theater work of Xsight! Performance Group would expect nothing less. All You Can Eat and Other Human Weaknesses, the group’s premiere performance last spring, ranged brilliantly and abrasively over some far-flung territories. The Pope’s Toe has a more confined subject and a more coherent shape–and a more sober attitude....
We’re all familiar with the official refusal of the American military to permit gays and lesbians to serve in its ranks. Two decades of agitation and litigation have caused legal and social barriers to crumble in many areas, but the armed forces’ bulwarks against gay men and women, although often breached in practice, remain firmly in place officially. Prospects for the future don’t seem much better, given that the Supreme Court recently refused to hear two cases challenging the ban....
Original Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s, 600 N. Clark: Sally and Dave, two middle-aged artists who hang out together when they don’t feel like going home to the people they live with, were sitting in Dave’s van talking about the 1970s when a person could get a Quaalude and have fun, unlike now when there are no good drugs and a night out consists of drifting in full consciousness from one boring spot to another....
An ideally symmetrical Japanese family–dad, mom, junior, and sis–moves into a new suburban home, where rising middle-class expectations (and gramps barging in for an open-ended stay) cause everything to deconstruct explosively. Sogo Ishii’s lunatic black comedy seems less concerned with actual family dynamics than with turning its sitcom household into an open arena of competing pop-culture images and energies. Ishii has a keen eye for cultural detritus–the samurai films and superhero cartoon shows and pornographic comic strips that have bored their way into modern Japanese consciousness (in much the same manner as crazy dad’s termites)–and his film at times displays the antinarrative logic of a TV wrestling marathon: it redundantly accumulates rather than develops, with outrage piling upon outrage in baroque profusion (kitchenware samurai mom faces off against Tojo warrior gramps while martial nymphet sis plots against spacehead junior, etc)....
Jose Alvaro Morais’s first feature, O bobo, winner of first prize at the Locarno film festival, is set during the onset of the right-wing backlash against the Portuguese revolution in 1978. A group of friends are staging a play adapted from Alexandre Herculano’s novel The Jester–a mythic romance built around scenes from Portuguese history–in the abandoned film studio Lisboa Filmes. The film alternates between scenes from the play and the intrigues among the friends who are putting it on–including the murder of the instigator of the project, whose body is discovered in the studio during the rehearsal of the final scene....
The group takes its name from a large-scale piece that was recorded a few years ago; it draws its power from the rock-solid execution of a simple concept. For the last 30 years, the tenor/bass/drums trio has proved a perfect launchpad for flights of pure energy; the exclusion of piano not only opens up the sound but also cuts the music loose from strictly denoted harmonic moorings, and the result is often music that has weight but still soars....
How do astronauts answer nature’s call in space? I’ve seen mentions of “collection systems,” but that’s about it. Also, do you pay a reward for good questions? It would stimulate my thinking. –Anxiously Awaiting Book 3, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The following may occasion a few wrinkled noses among Cecil’s more genteel readers, but hey, we’re talking about one of the basic life processes here, so let’s get a grip on our delicate feelings....
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the festive opening scene of Shakespeare Repertory’s production of The Taming of the Shrew a peasant couple dressed in rags yells and fights its way onstage, followed by a band of merrymakers adorned in a rainbow of shredded fabrics and bursting with song. So director Barbara Gaines succinctly establishes the romantic comedy’s circuslike energy....
John Sheridan is a union buster. At least that’s how union organizers see him. He prefers to see himself as a management consultant in “proactive employee relations.” For the past 33 years, when employers have wanted to thwart union organizing drives, win contract concessions, get rid of unions, or take preemptive action to head off even the potential of a union, they’ve called on Jack Sheridan. Sheridan, now 58, also says he’s ashamed of many of his fellow antiunion organizers, who engage in illegal and unethical tactics to bust unions....
EDMOND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Edmond’s first stop, of course, is a bar. Here, a man who raves on about how “niggers have it easy” (whatever that means) advises Edmond to get laid. And off Edmond goes, first to one of those Times Square masturbatoriums that house naked women in Plexiglas cages, then to a more upscale “health club,” and finally to a street pimp....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The controversiality of Andy Warhol is, by no means, an indication that his works are important, or that he is an artist [“Andy Warhol: A Long, Close Look,” June 2]. What is disturbing is not the banality of Warhol’s work. Modern art forms, even if they only deserve to be called “expression,” have few traces of originality....
It was a standard barroom argument. But it happened in the bar of the Heartland Cafe, the Rogers Park watering hole for refugees from an earlier, earthier era. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Hey, duh Bulls are playin’!” the owner grumped, and made a move toward the channel changer. A big guy who probably used to be an athlete, with an ostrich egg of a bald spot nestled in a shaggy nest of blondish hair, he moved in quick spurts, a little like Dick Butkus making his way to the refrigerator for some cocktail weenies....
BUCKETS O’ BECKETT So last week at Splinter Group’s two-evening “mini-fest” of Beckett plays, all of which are directed (by Matt O’Brien and Craig Bradshaw) with rare intelligence and a pitch- perfect understanding of Beckett’s worldview, I kept wondering how much of what I was watching sprang from Beckett’s attempts to leave actors and directors less and less room for “error”–i.e., individual interpretation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Play, the work being rehearsed at the time Beckett voiced his desire for an actorless theater, he did everything in his power to stifle his actors’ more actorly impulses....
Friday 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JFK–The 22 Bullet Theory is a combination video show and performance at Chicago Filmmakers tonight. The 23-minute video Eternal Frame is a collaboration of two performance groups, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, who in 1975 filmed both a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination and people’s reactions to the reenactment. Bruce Connor’s reputedly powerful mid-60s video Report uses radio reports and newsreel footage to cover the assassination....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McGrath characterizes the 1988 graffiti crackdowns as police “harassment.” DeBat and his friends apparently feel no remorse for their harassment of the property owners whose buildings they’ve damaged, yet McGrath implies that DeBat is a misunderstood victim of “cop” injustice. Enforcement of the laws which are designed to protect citizens against acts of vandalism and property damage is hardly harassment....
