George Woodruff spent 1871 like a true old-time river rat. He traveled up and down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers that year, hunting deer, gathering nuts, trapping muskrats for their fur, and cutting wood for steamboats. He camped on the riverbank whenever it was convenient, had no boss, punched no time clock. He probably never even looked at a clock. At some point in his travels that year he married....
The Women’s Bible Commentary provides a new set of answers to an old and crucial question. Throughout Christian and Jewish history, whenever the meaning of a biblical text has been disputed, behind the issue of what it “really” means lies a more fundamental question: Who gets to decide what it “really” means? That’s the Hermeneutical Issue of Power, or what I call the HIP question. Down the centuries, the answers to it have often been a matter of life and death....
Beyond her hostile-blase, I’m-so-hip image cultivated on television, Sandra Bernhard turns out to be a terrific cabaret singer, with a potent sense of drama and an ability to stay true to a song musically while reshaping it into a new and personal story. On opening night of her current Chicago engagement, comedian-singer Bernhard’s too-few musical selections included a movingly individualized reading of Joni Mitchell’s Christmas blues “River,” a poignant rendition of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” wedded to an artful monologue about New York alienation, and an edgy, bitterly energetic cover of “Do You Wanna Funk?...
When jazz tenor sax pioneer Bud Freeman resettled in his hometown, Chicago, in 1981, he formed a quintet that proved one of the very best bands of his long, long career. Since he’s spent his life playing swing and Dixieland, three of his choices were obvious: swingmasters Bobby Roberts, a guitarist with a gift for bright, gracefully flowing lyricism; John Bany, the personification of musical elegance and one of Chicago’s favorite bassists; and the busy, nervous drummer Barrett Deems, like Freeman a veteran of the big-band era....
Liposuction, rhinoplasty (nose jobs), and breast augmentation are the three most popular surgical procedures asked of cosmetic surgeons and liposuction surgeons, according to their trade associations–and November and December are their busiest months. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Honest, Ebenezer, it’s cheaper not to let them freeze to death. This holiday thought from Joe Bute and Thom Clark in ONE Reports (Fall 1988): “It costs the City of Chicago and the County of Cook about $1,500 for the burial of each homeless person who dies from exposure....
Just say no to your pharmacist. From Harper’s “Index” (December 1986): “Percentage of drug-related deaths caused by prescription drugs: 70.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An ounce of prevention . . . “In some countries, the regulatory philosophy seems more like that of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration than that of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” says the U. of I’s Clark Bullard, chair of the Central Midwest Compact Commission on Low-Level Radioactive Wastes, in CBE Environmental Review (Summer 1986)....
Alan Rudolph’s 12th film, set in Paris in 1926 among American expatriates, isn’t everything that one hopes it to be; Rudolph has been wanting to film his and the late Jon Bradshaw’s script since the mid- 70s, and it has probably been stewing in his consciousness for too long. But for the first hour, at least, it is very nearly as good as Choose Me and Remember My Name, and even when it isn’t working, it remains fascinating....
THE POSITIVE EVOLUTION OF BONGO BAKER ETA Creative Arts Foundation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Positive Evolution of Bongo Baker is about peer pressure, a perfectly valid topic for a show aimed at young people. At first playwright Runako Jahi handles this issue by showing it in action. Bongo, a struggling student at an inner-city school, wants to study hard and get good grades, but he knows his classmates will make fun of him if he does....
LIVING UP TO MY BLUE CHINA The late Richard Ellmann, whose authoritative critical biography Oscar Wilde was the inspiration for the new play Living Up to My Blue China, rightly noted: “Among the writers identified with the 1890s, Wilde is the only one whom everyone still reads.” Wilde’s paradoxical bons mots may sound affected today, as they must have in his own time, but they don’t sound antique; from the piercingly witty one-liners he concocted for his novel and plays to the painfully heartfelt outpourings of his epic rumination on love and loss, De Profundis, Wilde speaks in a remarkably modern voice....
When blues vocalist Larry “Big Twist” Nolan died of heart failure early in the morning of Wednesday, March 14, the blues world lost one of its most beloved, ebullient spirits. Locally we lost a good deal more; Twist was a uniquely homegrown product of southern Illinois, a source of regional pride for an entire generation of blues fans who either went to school or worked around the Carbondale area in the early and mid-1970s....
CHRISTIE IN LOVE Howard Brenton’s 1969 drama Christie in Love explores the absurdity of trying to explain the actions of a badly twisted mind. It goes on to imply–as much by what it conceals as by what it declares–that judgment is even more pointless than explication. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brenton offers a dark vision of the crimes of John Reginald Christie, a self-effacing serial killer who over a period of 13 years murdered and raped eight women, including his wife....
“I’m Italian and I’m Catholic, and nothing offends me more than seeing a junk heap ditched in front of a church or a synagogue, a school or a park,” says Officer Joe Pizza. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pizza, whose services are in steady demand, begins each morning by taking phone calls from 7:30 till about 8 AM. He can expect about 20 calls a day from irate Chicagoans who want quick action on immobilized autos in their neighborhoods....
Compared to other Saturday afternoons at Warshawsky’s, this probably is a slow one. Two of the four or five cashier lines are unoccupied, and the large sales space in front of the counter is wide open. At least half the customers are being helped. Others are standing around the fringes, looking bored, waiting for their numbers to be called. “I already called 43.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For more than 75 years, Warshawsky’s, at 1916 S....
It is rare that we get a chance to hear a truly outstanding conductor at Grant Park, but this season’s opening concerts this weekend are being led by George Cleve, one of the best in the business. If Cleve is not as well known as, say, Georg Solti, it’s for lack of public relations, not for lack of talent. His Chicago Symphony debut two years ago at Ravinia was by far the most memorable in recent years, but since neither CSO nor Ravinia management has leapt at the chance to have him back, he’s back at Grant Park....
Living Colour reminds me how I felt at 13 on my first exposure to Led Zep. But they don’t just make me feel young–they make all the old hard-rock moves seem young again, too. A sort of thinking person’s heavy metal band with strong jazz/funk undertones, they’ve become perhaps the first act since Hendrix that the punk, metal, and jazz crowds can all agree on, and in the process they remind us that metal isn’t necessarily intrinsically unsuitable for serious expression....
The proposition on the floor is so well intended and seems so incontrovertible that its backers can’t imagine it will engender much debate. It says that the city should “give priority to existing residents [of Kenwood-Oakland] in all phases of community development.” That’s an understatement. Clark and his two colleagues from Planning, Martin Goldsmith and Stephanie Barnes, are attempting yet another rendition of neighborhoodbased planning, but sometimes even just agreeing on goals can seem next to impossible....
Lead Story Tokyo police arrested Ryoji Akashi, 27, in January after his mother reported that he was planning a massacre at a class reunion because many former schoolmates had bullied him in junior high. The mother became suspicious on the day before the reunion when she smelled gasoline in his room and found the diary entry “I will kill them with bombs and poison.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
After 4 AM you can’t legally buy liquor anywhere. The 7-Elevens and White Hens stop selling at 2, as do most bars and taverns. But even after the four o’clock bars have closed, the old man bootlegger of Uptown, call him Sam, is still open for business. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sam doesn’t sell beer. “Beer just takes up too much space, and it’s hard to get my money with it,” says Sam....
One does not easily describe the New Jungle Orchestra–on paper, it sounds like an idea too goofy to actually work–but a place to start would be the sweet, almost tangy sound that Pierre Dorge sometimes extracts from his guitar. Played percussively, it’s close in temperament to the sound of the kora, the gourd harp used in the Mandingo region of west Africa; and everything proceeds from there. Dorge is a Danish guitarist, with a hereditary Scandinavian sense of melancholy, who’s influenced equally by Arabic and Balkan musics, the compositional ethos of Frank Zappa, and the essential spirit of Thelonious Monk....
Steve Lacy has spent his life playing jazz “wrong.” His instrument has always been the soprano sax. Thirty-odd years ago, when he was the only modern-jazz soprano player, his horn’s high, reedy sound was usually the province of snake charmers; in recent years it’s become the favorite horn of cooing fusion-music oafs. In this era of dazzling virtuosos, he deals in simple materials–the shapes of his phrases are prebebop, premodern. His innate sense of solo development leads to the most logical–surreally logical–unified structures, sometimes incorporating (in the most natural way) whistling, growling, chirping, and quacking....
