To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple of points and then I must go back to drawing my final 30 days of Popeye. My judgment of Doug Marlette’s priest character and the use of priests in a comic strip was based not on Doug’s ownership of his own strip but on the basis of its permissibility by individual newspaper editors. Regardless of any of this, I had the Sea Hag utter “There goes Roe v....
Friday 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two large collections of beautiful and varied Mexican children’s toys–from the Museo Nacional de Artes e Industrias Populares in Mexico City and the Casa de las Artesanias in Michoacan–make up the more than 1,000 toys on display at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in an exhibit opening today. El Juguete Popular Mexico (“popular toys of Mexico”) runs through June 9, with everything from string puppets to pinatas to musical instruments....
Let’s start by agreeing on one thing: whatever else may be said about it, the Harold Washington Library Center looks like a library. It may be reactionary, it may be too massive for the street, and so on. But it is an impressive thing to see. Even those who dislike it for what it represents, and there are a lot of them, will probably take a certain guilty pleasure in it....
After several seasons of uninspired programming, the Civic Orchestra, under the guidance of Michael Morgan, seems to be back on course with a judicious mix of standards and new material. What’s more, Daniel Barenboim has taken a personal interest in the apprentice orchestra’s affairs–the first CSO maestro to do so since Jean Martinon. Already this season, the Civic has played for Pierre Boulez and Barenboim. Now it’s collaborating with Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research to introduce three works by African American composers written specifically for this orchestra....
“We wanted to have a women’s show that wasn’t polite or nice, one that expressed angry attitudes.” “We want people to be upset.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Almost as soon as you enter, you’re confronted with the “fetus wall,” an area festooned with large pictures of fetuses that have been altered to exhibit spiky teeth and sinister eyes; one has a cigarette dangling from its lips, and some hold American flags....
The spacious offices of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, in the lovely old art deco building that formerly housed the Kraft Company on the near north side, have been repainted, recarpeted, and partially refurbished. Some of the executive offices even sport elegant rugs and plants. But as if to deny his role as a bureaucrat, the chairman, Clarence Wood, works at a banquet-size folding table in a nearly barren office, and the chair on which I sat to interview him had lost its arm pads....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was shocked when Studs Terkel’s remarks about the “unctuous” tone of Mr. Andres appeared in the Tribune, and find your reporter’s niggling comments about Jay and WNIB in the same vein. “Unctuous,” using the Webster definition of “smug, ingratiating, or false earnestness,” fittingly describes much of what has accompanied the music from FMT for years....
The struggle, says Denice Irwin, began soon after rain poured through her windows and ceiling, drenching the living room in her Uptown apartment. Within a few months, Irwin, a mother of three, had helped organize a tenants’ group in the 22-story federally subsidized building at 920 W. Lakeside Place. And now, after three years of court cases, protest, and threats of eviction, they stand on the verge of a major victory: a $12....
At the end of a day when more than 1,000 allied bombing missions had been carried out against Iraq and Kuwait, ABC’s Ted Koppel said, “Since that Scud missile hit Tel Aviv earlier today, it has been a quiet night in the Middle East.” A comparable obliviousness to the fate of nonwhites led to the U.S. delivery of airplanes and 2,4-D herbicide to Burma’s brutally repressive, totalitarian military regime–ostensibly to be used to wipe out opium fields....
CONTEMPORARY CHAMBER PLAYERS Eaton, who recently joined the University of Chicago’s music faculty after a long, distinguished tenure at Indiana University, is widely acknowledged as a contemporary master of vocal gesture. (He’s also a composer of electronic music, and a synthesizer built by him and Robert Moog after two decades of tinkering will be unveiled at a concert later this month.) A student of Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions, Eaton first caught the music establishment’s ear almost 30 years ago with Holy Sonnets of John Donne, a song cycle for soprano....
LUST AND PITY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Elaine and Jessica both say that all they want is someone who “appreciates” them, but what they really want is someone they can dominate. Elaine hopes to land her blue-collar prey with her wifely skills and demure virginal air. Jessica hopes to get what she wants through an ever-wet readiness and a running monologue that makes phone sex sound like Dial-a-Prayer....
Lead Story On a bus trip to California in November, a youth group from the Chicago Apostolic Assembly Church endured the following: a two-delay delay getting out of Chicago; numerous breakdowns, including a tire blowout in Missouri; a junk-food Thanksgiving dinner aboard the bus instead of the planned sumptuous meal in California; clutch failure on the bus as it climbed an Arizona mountain during a blizzard; two days in a small motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, awaiting heater and engine repairs and emergency cash (which never arrived); the stench of uncleaned lavatories; convulsions by the driver while at the wheel due to a diabetic reaction; and citations issued by New Mexico police for having an unsafe vehicle (which finally ended the trip)....
Near North alderman Burt Natarus is an angry man, which is why he drove ten miles to the far northwest side one evening last week to harangue a tiny gathering of people from other parts of town. The scene was a poorly attended public hearing on the ward remap, and Natarus’s animus was directed at the Daley administration’s mapmakers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How wrong the gadfly was!...
In Yer Xiong’s living room, Ko Vang Xiong is bent over the layers of cloth in her lap, taking tiny, even stitches with a needle a half inch long. She is making a leaf-pattern reverse applique: the outlines and veins of leaves are cut in the top layer of fabric and then the edges turned under to reveal the fabric below. The craft requires stitches that are practically invisible, and each leaf is about five inches long....
Orchestral Maneuvers: Has Henry Fogel Learned a Lesson? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until the last round of talks began, it seemed neither Fogel nor the musicians would budge from their entrenched stands on the health insurance issue. When Fogel arrived at last week’s meeting, though, he brought new proposals that no longer insisted on insurance-premium payments from the players. “That demand just suddenly disappeared,” said one mystified member of the musicians’ nine-person negotiating team....
Virtuality Simulation Center, North Pier, 435 E. Illinois: Harold’s heart was pounding. He was standing in the cyberpod waiting to experience virtual reality. He hadn’t felt like this since he was 11 and saw Shamu the killer whale at Sea World of Ohio. Harold’s father was a big Cleveland ice cream distributor and he got free passes so the whole family went, and the neighbors, including Brad Feldman. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
THE GYPSY PRINCESS Any music organization that survives its first decade, let alone the era of Reaganomics, deserves a hand. The Evanston-based Light Opera Works has done just that, and even more impressive, it’s thriving. This past season, all of its three productions played to packed houses. So, what makes LOW tick? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A fortnight ago the company kicked off its milestone anniversary with yet another rarely performed golden oldie, The Gypsy Princess by Emmerich Kalman....
Even the most accomplished blues musicians often face a great challenge: to put together a show that will remain unique and interesting through an entire evening, especially if the musician’s own body of work is small. The usual standards by Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Junior Parker, Z.Z. Hill, et al have been covered by so many imitators in so many variations on the original styles that it’s almost impossible to bring anything new to them....
Sure, I watched the World Series this year. Enjoyed it, too. What baseball fan didn’t? But was it really “the greatest that was ever played,” as Sports Illustrated’s 25-year-old Minnesota native Steve Rushin proclaimed? Was it, in fact, “the best sustained sporting event anyone has ever seen,” as noted columnist Ira Berkow declared? First Series to have four games decided on the last pitch (previous: two). Second to have a 1-0 seventh game....
TOTAL RECALL With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, Mel Johnson Jr., and Marshall Bell. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alien (1979) revitalized the claustrophobic horror-film dynamics of The Thing (1951), internalizing the monstrous and echoing David Cronenberg’s feature of 1975, They Came From Within. Blade Runner (1982), probably the most visually handsome SF effort since 2001, had the merit of making the sordid, dystopian future–unlike the present in most Hollywood pictures–seem lived in, and gave us attractive androids, objects that helped reformulate the ideology of sexuality....
