To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is obvious that Mr. Valeo has no idea of who Lorca was and sadly enough will never appreciate the great inspiration this man is to us, the Spaniards. Maybe Mr. Valeo will never understand and be inspired by Lorca but we find it unjust that other young students like ourselves will miss the chance of being touched by this great poet....
You want to hear a real Yellowstone disaster story? One that has nothing to do with fires? This one is about you and me and the U.S. Forest Service. Every year, you and I and the rest of the taxpayers in the U.S. of A. kick in about $25 million to subsidize logging operations in the Yellowstone ecosystem. These operations clear-cut about 20 square miles a year, and if they continue according to plan, they will require something between 5,000 and 10,000 miles of additional roads over the next 50 years....
Now that Spy and even the New Republic have declared this time of ours the Age of Irony, you can be assured it’s over. Best evidence: two new Chicago magazines, twentysomething owned, edited, written, and directed. One’s flashy, heavily art-directed, and glossy, the other black and white, more serene, more serious. Both, however, carry the forgotten banner of sincerity. Hitsville thinks the common Generation X analysis–kids who don’t give a fuck–is slightly off; the generation’s defined more by the frustration of those who want to give a fuck but can’t or don’t find anything to give a fuck about....
Judging from the outcry, the little envelopes mailed last month from the Cook County assessor to many north- and northwest-side residents may spark a revolution. They contained the results of the quadrennial reassessment, which show that the sales values of north- and northwest-side properties have soared by as much as 1,000 percent since 1984. That means property owners can expect a healthy rise in the amount of property tax they’ll have to pay when the bills are mailed next summer....
If you’ve been feeling depressed because you can’t get your anxieties prioritized–if you don’t know whether to worry first about the erosion of Chicago’s shoreline, Gorbachev’s domestic problems, or homelessness–cheer up. Global warming has come of age. It’s a kind of United Fund for angst: worry about it, and you don’t need to bother worrying about anything else. After you regain consciousness, the question that instantly arises is: Do these guys know what they’re talking about?...
Half Moon Saloon, 3925 N. Lincoln: Pony busted through the door, took one look around the place, and got hopping mad. She glared at her ranch hands, Goldberg and Lippy. They looked scared. “I want to see the proprietors,” Pony told the bartender, setting herself down on a cowhide-cotton bar stool. The bartender put a glass shaped like a boot in front of her and filled it with Sierra Nevada. “I’ll tell ’em you’re here,” he said....
SLY FOX The premise–“there’s no bottom to greed”–is sitcom simple. That’s appropriate since Gelbart was yukmaster for MAS*H and City of Angels. The dazzling script is decorated with puns, wisecracks, and vaudeville one-liners and two-liners (“I want to prefer charges!” “Which charges do you prefer?”). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bowen Park Theatre Company, a professional troupe from Waukegan, makes a welcome, rambunctious Chicago debut....
“The gray bat is being done in by cave visitors,” reports the Nature Conservancy in its annual “Fortunate 500” briefing on rare and endangered species and ecosystems protected, at least in part, during the past year. Since the bats huddle together to conserve warmth over the winter, “a single human disturbance during winter hibernation can cost a bat up to 30 days’ worth of energy and threaten it with starvation.” The conservancy has acquired 185 acres along the Lower Cache River in far southern Illinois to help protect the species from dropping below the necessary numbers to survive....
Animal wrongs. In a series of experiments lengthy and costly enough to make the pages of Successful Farming (March 1991), researchers at the DNX animal biology research center in Athens, Ohio, have injected DNA into 14,252 fertilized swine eggs in the last six years, seeking to produce a “better” market hog. “Out of these, only 86 (less than one percent) produced transgenic offspring, and of these 86, only 37 were functional,” according to a Successful Farming press release....
Please don’t slam-dunk my eyeball. According to UIC’s Eye Facts (September/October 1990), basketball and baseball resulted in nearly one-third of the 31,000 sports-related eye injuries in the U.S. during 1988. It’s not clear, however, whether these two sports cause more eye injuries because they are actually more dangerous, or simply because more people play them more often. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In 25 years, if you look back at the Reagan administration and try to figure out what is the worst thing that it did–was it the near tripling of the national debt, the collapse of the savings and loan industry, huge deployment of resources in the star wars?...
“Brunch With the Mayor” said the leaflet slipped under my door. “You are cordially invited to have lunch with Mayor Richard M. Daley and Mike Quigley, Aldermanic Candidate, 3600 N. Lake Shore Drive, Sunday, March 24, Noon in the lobby.” Right down the street. The area, he says, is at a crossroads. “It could go one of two directions. It could go in a direction where people will be proud of it, where we’ll have more policemen dealing with crime, we’ll have better health care, safer streets, increased property values, that I think is of a concern to all of us....
AVALANCH RANCH But perhaps because Magnus wrote the script in collaboration with Shu Shubat, his usual excesses are absent. The story’s weird, but the use of bodily organs is kept to a minimum. Shubat, a musician and movement artist, brings with her a sense of logic and dynamics. The combination of their two artistic forces–Shubat also directs–makes for an intriguing and challenging evening of performance. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Friday 23 In an exclusive interview with Ted Koppel, Nelson Mandela put political stuff aside and talked about his favorite movie stars (Carmen Miranda and Tyrone Power), and about how Tyson will win the championship back. You can lighten up too and celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela tonight with the Chicago Committee in Solidarity With Southern Africa. The party begins at 7:30 at Malcolm X College, 1900 W. Van Buren....
One thing that cannot be denied, categorically or otherwise, is that this Columbus Day weekend was a landmark for sex in America. Some commentators claimed that Chris himself screwed a continent. Anita Hill’s testimony is well-known by now–many of the details will be referred to for years to come. Here in Chicago, during a half-hour recess after her testimony, Channel Two played Love Connection. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
On his 1987 Owl album, Homage to John Coltrane, Dave Liebman cites the dedicatee as “the decisive influence on my artistic life,” and nothing could be more obvious. Liebman’s busy, vital, and complex improvising stems not just from Coltrane’s technique (as is the case with so many saxophonists of the past 25 years); it also taps into the maelstrom of emotional intensity from which Coltrane’s epic improvisations sprang. Like Trane, Liebman has gone from the tenor sax to the soprano; in fact, he now relies exclusively on the straight horn, and he is widely considered one of the three or four best soprano players in jazz....
NEGATIVES Stage Left Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The plot concerns a disagreement between two brothers, Jimmy and Rob, over whether Jimmy’s autobiographical play should be produced. The baby of the family, Jimmy was mistreated as a child by an unbalanced and abusive stepmother following the death of his mother and the departure from home of his grown-up brother and sister. Now Jimmy has dramatized the experience; Rob, for secret reasons beyond the obvious ones, is upset at the idea of this painful history being put onstage before an audience....
FLAG SMOKING PERMITTED IN LOBBY ONLY, OR CENSORAMA Second City But the satire is too tentative to hit hard. Indeed, little in this self-censorama will trigger whiplash shocks of recognition. In a year with enough political obscenities to offer abundant chances for swift spoofs, you’ll find nothing about the HUD scandal, attacks on the NEA, McDome, the rape of Comiskey Park, the bureaucracy on Pershing Road, the Hubble telescope fiasco, this state’s imminent return to capital punishment, or a single local election campaign....
Hanah Jon Taylor is having a party, and he wants you to come. The occasion is a concert recording session for his debut album, and Taylor has assembled a top-notch group of musicians: drummer Thurman Barker, Malachi Favors Maghostut, the excellent young pianist Calvin Brunson, and the much-traveled Hamid Drake on percussion. (Together they represent most of the virtues that distinguish Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.) Taylor himself–who is also known as an outspoken and controversial student of music–started out as a flutist and has become an impressive soprano saxist in recent years: he combines an earnest romanticism with the kind of boisterous expressionism that marks Chicago’s avant-garde, throwing in just enough street-smart jive to spice the mix....
“Go ahead, animals,” Alderman George Hagopian shouted to the audience. It was the tumultuous City Council session in which aldermen were to vote on Chicago’s controversial Human Rights Ordinance. Hagopian was addressing himself to the mostly gay and lesbian audience on the east side of the room, but in his homophobic fervor he failed to notice that the snickers and laughter were coming mostly from his council colleagues. Hiram Crawford, the raccoon-eyed west-side minister who has become notorious for his opposition to lesbian and gay civil rights, nodded in accordance....
It’s nice to know there’s still room for low-key, tasteful presentations like this one in today’s frenetic blues environment. The Ice Cream Men, featuring WBEZ blues deejay Steve Cushing on drums, are an earnest group of young aficionados dedicated to preserving traditional Chicago blues and showcasing the living representatives of that legacy. Smokey Smothers, an unreconstructed 50s-style guitarist, maintains the music’s Delta roots with his moody finger picking and loping rhythms but adds a touch of big-city anarchy when he pulls out his slide and coaxes his leads into a trembling upper-register wail....
