To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I realize that your readership is mostly pro-choice, but the article on abortion 1990 [September 15], made me wonder who the women could be that would blindly follow men like Joseph Scheidler. It is these women I wish to address. Women of the anti-choice movement take notice, listen, read this. I speak to you in this tone because it is one to which you have become accustomed....
TURCARET THE FINANCIER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This time, however, the results are considerably more pleasing. Where the cartoonish elements of Infusoria often seemed like desperate last-minute attempts to save a sinking show, every comic turn in Turcaret is clearly part of Bullard’s original concept. That includes the witty set and the broad acting style, as well as Sraa Davidson’s bizarre costumes and Tina Haglund-Spitza’s marvelously surreal wigs decorated with emblems of each character’s obsessions....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, I agree with Wyman’s stance regarding the media’s backlash against Sinead O’Connor. But if O’Connor really wanted to make people think she picked a dumb way to do it. Because, of course, she didn’t say anything; she did something–she performed a deliberately “shocking” act meant to provoke the knee-jerk responses which Wyman decries. Sticking your middle finger in someone’s face isn’t a good way to initiate a conversation, regardless of the subject....
After 45 years in the business, the Juilliard String Quartet is still without question the greatest quartet. Despite its longevity–a record that bests the Budapest’s and the Guarneri’s–the Juilliard sounds just as fresh, intense, and intellectually invigorating as ever. Much of the credit, of course, goes to Robert Mann, its first violinist and artistic guardian. Mann, the only founding member left, has an uncanny knack for finding novel ways to blend four distinctive personalities in interpretations that always come across convincingly and incisively....
Gene Urbaszewski is prepared to move heaven and earth to save his church. Whether he can move the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago is another matter. “The carpet has been pulled out from under us as a living, viable parish–large enough to pay our bills. Our people were never involved in the discussion,” says Urbaszewski, brandishing a thick sheaf of photocopied clippings on the church being named a “Marian shrine” last year, on the order of priests that runs the place, on the archdiocese, on the cardinal, on what makes for a good parish life, on good church decor....
Louisiana harp player Leslie “Lazy Lester” Johnson has long been something of a cult legend among devotees of the “swamp blues” sound he helped create on Jay Miller’s Excello label in the 1950s, but his popularity has rested mainly on covers by white rock bands. In recent years, Lester has begun touring with greater frequency; he has lost none of his unique ability to convey with his distinctive harmonica style profound blues feeling through a sparse, economical use of melodic improvisation, and his laconic vocals recall the classic country blues relaxation immortalized by Slim Harpo, for whom Lester often played percussion....
JOSEPH LITZENBERGER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In general, these ten pieces are composed of either found household materials, like couch stuffing and crayons, or more institutional materials, like chrome-plated steel. Because these pieces are straightforwardly constructed and use a limited number of contrasting elements, placement of the component parts becomes a crucial formal and conceptual issue. This is perhaps most evident in Chatter, a group of six small chrome chair shapes arranged in a circle around a central chair, also of chrome....
Shhh! Al Green is talking. “I can’t see peace of mind,” he says. “I can’t hold joy in my hands. I can’t grab everlasting life and hold it like that.” He’s sitting on a Chicago TV stage clad in what looks like a jeans jumpsuit and a stunning fur coat. His face flashes with extremes, a shit-eating grin alternating with that patented beatific smile. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
The end of August marks another significant, if less widely noted, anniversary than that of the Democratic convention riots. On August 30, black activist Fred Hampton would have turned 40 years old—if he had not been shot to death in his bed, probably while sleeping, by policemen attached to the office of state’s attorney Edward V. Hanrahan. The making of The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a follow-up to the 1969 film American Revolution 2, which is also being shown at Filmmakers next Wednesday....
THE ‘BURBS With Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman, Wendy Schaal, Henry Gibson, Brother Theodore, and Courtney Gains. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A knowledgeable connoisseur of the American cartoon, Dante makes movies that take place in the kind of manic world where anything can happen. This sensibility bore particular fruit in his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (set in a universe ruled by the mind of a vindictive little boy who loved cartoons) and the climactic sequence of his Explorers (a nightmarish Mixmaster version of American TV strained through the sensibility, body, and technology of an extraterrestrial mimic); both of these segments anticipated the subversive universe that other filmmakers developed on Pee-wee’s Playhouse....
ASHLEY BICKERTON In the central space are two wall sculptures and a floor piece. At first glance the wall pieces, with their stacked-shelf arrangement of oddly assorted materials–organic, industrial, and “affluent” materials associated with leisure–are rather confounding. Wetlandscape #2 is composed of three tiered shelves supported by wire and pulley rigging. The bottom shelf is actually a length of red canvas whose edges are lashed to a black metal frame by white rope....
Would that be frozen, canned, or on the cob? From a recent theatrical press release: “The production has all the ingredients, including a breathtaking juggling act, fan-dancing, tap-dancing and ample corn…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lake Calumet’s “degraded landscape,” as viewed by consulting engineer Donald Hey in the Chicago Community Trust’s Trust Quarterly (Summer 1989): “Derelict industrial facilities cut off access to the waterways, and a number of solid-waste landfills mar the landscape....
MIDNIGHT RUN With Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, Yaphet Kotto, John Ashton, and Dennis Farina. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If it were merely a matter of script, direction, and technical credits, this formula cross-country-chase comedy wouldn’t be worth a minute of one’s time, much less the price of a movie ticket. Martin Brest, who launched his career a little over a decade ago by leaping from a forgettable $33,000 independent feature called Hot Tomorrows to a $5 million heist comedy called Going in Style, followed by Beverly Hills Cop, comes on like a competent if faceless TV director, scoring with all the desired effects of his mechanical mise en scene, but leaving no discernible memory traces behind him....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Admittedly the article was short and not a long analytical piece enabling Miner to explore the subject more deeply, but such practicalities do not excuse allotting over four full paragraphs to the views of Ms. Marlen Vilas Roth, spokesperson for the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation, while giving Maria Torres, who represents a more moderate view, only one line and not bothering at all to search out views of the many other Cubans who support the City’s decision to invite Aragon....
AWAKE AND SING! Fifty-seven years after the play’s first production, Odets remains an angry young man. Given today’s hard times, his intense love for his characters feels right and timely, while the struggles of the Bergers, a poor Jewish family in the Bronx, remain elemental: you see them echoed in Steinbeck’s Joads, Wilder’s Antrobuses, Williams’s Wingfields, Miller’s Lomans, and Simon’s Jeromes. And in real people today. Some conflicts don’t date....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As foreboding as the preemie world may be to an experienced health care professional such as Shepard think how much more so it is for anxious unprepared parents who have no medical experience, think of how frightening it must be for the preemies themselves with no experience of any kind thrust into a world of pain, struggling to breathe and to stay alive....
Friday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Why does Weimar seem so familiar?” is the theme of Nights of Smoke and Noise: Weimar Cabaret Revisited, a series of three programs at Club Lower Links starting tonight. In post-World War I Berlin, Max Reinhardt’s Schall und Rauch (“Noise and Smoke”) cabaret was a stage and meeting place for the likes of Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Karl Valentin; the program tonight features a number of artists and performers–the inimitable Matthew Owens among them–drawing what they hope will be uncomfortable parallels between then and now....
Her hands, arms, and clothing splattered with five different colors of paint, Nancy Cohn leaves her brush in the mixing pot to answer the phone. As she heads into her office, she punches off the Roches playing on the boom box. After she picks up the phone, the other fabric painters in the studio smile and listen to her end of a familiar conversation. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On February 1, 1990, fine arts radio station WFMT abandoned its policy prohibiting prerecorded advertisements [Hot Type, February 2]. Until the day before the new policy was announced, station officials tried to pacify concerned listeners–who had heard rumors of plans to gradually destroy the format which had made WFMT a nationally renowned cultural institution–with denials that any such policy change was going to be implemented in the immediate future....
DANCES FOR A CENTURY: HISTORIC AND CONTEMPORARY DANCES 1906-1990 The transitory nature of dance always magnifies the problems of reconstructing past works. Even the advent of film did not necessarily make the recording process more reliable: stored cans of film sometimes exploded suddenly and at random. Later film documentation and video are also inadequate: a close-up of a dancer’s face, for instance, obscures what the rest of the body is doing....
