To the editors: “Authorities who step forward to suppress the uncivil works and ideas of others in the name of public dignity may indeed bask briefly in the glow of general esteem,” wrote Michael Miner in “Memories of Repression” (Hot Type, Sept. 22), a piece the reader isn’t likely to find duplicated on the 10:00 PM News. “But very soon these moralists belong to history, which remembers them as clowns, demagogues, and poltroons....
CHARLIE’S OASIS MUSEUM & BAR Locally, the creative teams of Kingsley Day and Philip LaZebnick, with The Summer Stock Murders, and June Pyskacek and Tony Zito, with last fall’s Bombay Pete, revived the old style. Now comes Charlie’s Oasis Museum & Bar, a real old-fashioned musical. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The tavern of the title is a ramshackle old watering hole on the gulf coast of Florida that’s owned and operated by Charlie’s granddaughter Marsha....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Symphony Chorus is composed of approximately 200 people with skills ranging from professional solo singers to amateurs. When such a diverse group of people undertakes a common activity, there will be those who are always disgruntled for one reason or another. Those reasons vary: being treated too much like children, being treated too much like professionals, the rehearsal room temperature, the number of bathrooms, whether women will be permitted to wear jewelry during concert performances, and so on....
Evanston’s annual marathon of J.S. Bach’s music is fast becoming a springtime tradition. As much as I appreciate the organizers’ zeal, however, I can’t quite fathom why Bach, as ubiquitous as ever, needs this sort of attention. On the other hand, this year’s festival does include a rare performance of The Art of the Fugue. Written shortly before the kapellmesiter’s death in 1749 (and in fact left unfinished), this set of 16 fugues and 4 canons represents the summation of a lifetime’s worth of thought on the sublimeness and almost mathematical beauty of contrapuntal composition....
Battle Ground, Indiana, in Tippecanoe County, is so named because it is the site of William Henry Harrison’s famous battle with the Indians at Tippecanoe. Battle Ground is far off any beaten path and Wolf Park is even farther. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Admission to the howl or to the park on weekends is $3. The howl is free to children under six, and park admission is free to anyone under 14....
Big Fuss at the Art Institute “Our splendid Art Institute is being desecrated,” said one scribe. “Matisse has examples of the nude that should be turned to the wall,” reported another. “All recognized ideals of human beauty seem to have been willfully abandoned,” a citizen wrote the Tribune. A high school art instructor denounced “these naked pictures, the products of demoralized minds.” “Question has been raised whether the Art Institute ought to exhibit work of so extreme and radical a character; whether an established art museum ought not to adhere to recognized standards and refuse to exhibit works which at best represent but a small and eccentric group....
JULY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The summer street-fair season hits its stride today with two to choose from. The neighborhoody and somewhat low-key Oz Park Festival, Lincoln at Webster, brings together the annual melange of Shakespeare, live jazz, kid stuff, arts and crafts, and the usual broad palette of foodstuffs. It’s open from noon to dusk today and tomorrow; there’s a requested donation of $3 for everyone over 10....
I’m on my way to buy the latest designer football from Charles O. Finley, baseball legend. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finley has invested $100,000 of his closely guarded cash into redesigning footballs. One features neon stripes along the seams, the better for fans and players to see the ball during night games on poorly lighted high school gridirons. The other is the Double Grip, which is supposed to be easier to catch and hold than a conventional football....
DETECTIVE STORY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Detective Story is by no stretch of the imagination a daring or experimental work. For one thing, Sidney Kingsley’s work must have seemed staid and square even in 1949, when it opened on Broadway, compared to the work of young upstarts like Arthur Miller (whose Death of a Salesman opened the same year). Kingsley’s brand of half social realism, half soap opera–described by his fans as “documentary melodrama”–was already well accepted on Broadway....
GOOD BLACK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the mid-60s, comedians like Dick Gregory and Godfrey Cambridge were succeeding still further in making blacks seem just another side of the many-faceted creature called humanity. Of course, a comedian who enjoyed great popularity among black and white audiences at the time was Bill Cosby, who told stories of his childhood–which could have been anybody’s childhood....
HOSPICE and TWELVE ANGRY MEN Alice is the divorced wife of a charismatic civil rights leader, a woman who ran out on her husband and daughter more than 20 years before. She fled to Paris, where she established a reputation as an expatriate poet and something of a bon vivant. Left behind with her father, Jenny has nurtured fantasies about her mother’s life and sees this homecoming as a way to rediscover her mother, connect with her, and perhaps experience her energy....
Jeffery Lyle Segal shows us his photo album of “before” and “after” snapshots. Almost all of his clients seem to share an obscure American malady of the 1990s: substandard eyebrows. It appears there’s an epidemic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I enter the back room of the Lincoln Park library with caution because I fear a gathering of the horribly disfigured, the hopelessly vain, and paramedics....
They’re tearing down some of the dilapidated old buildings in the working-class area out west of the Kennedy Expressway, on the near-northwest side, and putting up a bunch of spanking new town houses. For the moment, the conflict is personified in two well-acquainted adversaries: Louis Prus, owner of Easy Life Real Estate and Management Company, and the Northwest Community Organization. Prus has sold and bought real estate in Wicker Park for years–almost as long as NCO’s activists (disciples of the late Saul Alinsky) have worked the same turf, organizing poor and lower-middle-class residents....
SOUTHBOUND at the Synergy Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This could be conveyed in a three-minute video, and Ruane is hard put to stretch this tenuous dramatic question to cover all the breaks between the musical numbers. Much of the filler consists of a sitcom subplot in which Sean’s worried wife endures the boorish behavior of an abominable snowman from next door. Another bit is an abortive stickup in the subway that ultimately accomplishes nothing but the bonding of Sean and Paul, who both risk their lives in defense of the guitars....
Hurry up, willya? I’m two minutes late for my satori. Letters we never finished: “Announcing a Major Breakthrough in Brain/Mind Research: In 28 Minutes You’ll Be Meditating Like a Zen Monk!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For God or country, but not both. This advice from the Chicago Archdiocese publication Liturgy 90 (April): “National flags are meant to separate peoples and to inspire allegiance to civil authorities; they are reminders of ‘the things that are Caesar’s....
Where are the girl nerds? “On the whole, the culture that develops around computers at a college or university is unlikely to be attractive to those who have been trained to value interpersonal relations, as most young women have,” writes Eric Roberts in Tough Questions (Fall 1989). “More than any other scientific endeavor, computer science, and particularly programming, has a tendency to encourage highly focused behavior almost to the point of obsession....
In Babette Mangolte’s new film Visible Cities two women search for a house they can afford in southern California. We do not see the women on the screen; we only hear their voices on the sound track while we view images of the locales and houses they visit. The landscapes are terrifyingly well-ordered: The abrupt angles of rectangular horse corrals are heightened by a straight line of pam trees on a hilltop, disturbingly similar to another shot of a line of trees seen in a nursery....
Out of Manhattan’s Lower East Side rides the President, the most fully realized yet of Wayne Horvitz’s several musical personas. Electrically powered, drawing on a whole cabinet full of available influences, the President navigates between musical categories with the slipperiness of a politician. Describing this “smart rock” sextet has tied reviewers up in knots: one limped in saying “It’s jazz only by coincidence,” while a writer in the New York Times intoned about “surging planes of sound and viscerally involving rhythms....
School reformers call what happened last month in Springfield a victory, and they say their future looks bright. “We did fine,” says Joan Jeter Slay, interim executive director of Designs for Change, a prominent school watchdog group. “The legislators did most of what we wanted.” Since Washington, the most prominent political leader of reform has been, of all people, House Speaker Michael Madigan, a shrewd southwest-side committeeman who has never displayed even a shred of educational ideology....
Big Jack Johnson is best known as the guitarist of the Jelly Roll Kings, the rough-and-tumble little juke band that played in the movie Crossroads and has enjoyed increasing national popularity in recent years. Johnson’s music has the emotional intensity of classic Delta blues, offset by an irrepressible, lighthearted sense of fun. His guitar style is fleet and melodic, incorporating the eccentric influence of Hubert Sumlin as well as his own distinctive improvisational imagination....
