CHRISTMAS ORATORIO Basically Bach’s recent performances of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio represent the first time the work has been heard in Chicago on period instruments, although Music of the Baroque has performed the work on modern instruments twice that I recall, once about ten years ago, and then last year, when it was used as the basis for that group’s New York debut at Lincoln Center. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
After his wife died and the kids moved away, Arthur Morf decided to move out of his old apartment and settle into a new place of his own. So he bought a mobile home–12 feet wide, 46 feet long–in a trailer park on Waukegan Road in Glenview. By and large, his neighbors consisted of an assortment of widows, widowers, and down-on-their-luck divorcees, who can appreciate life in a trailer for less than $300 a month....
It’s a Saturday morning in River North. Ellen Kamerling and Joanna Pinsky are leading a group of 25 women and a few men around a gallery, and they have stopped in front of a glass object by Bertil Vallien. “Do you see this piece as whimsical?” Kamerling asks the group. At another gallery, the group looks at a huge glob of saran wrap molded by Donald Lipski. Is it supposed to be a giant Christmas tree ornament or a large breast?...
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, Helbig indicates that the playwrights barely relate the ethnicity of the play’s characters, and infers that African American artists (and I can only assume all artists of color) should only produce work that powerfully communicates our unique attitudes, fears and opinions. His presumption in telling us what African American theater needs to be–issue-oriented, down-trodden and of the “we’ve been done wrong” genre–is limiting, insulting and patronizing....
Walter Roth, president of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, says the 1924 book History of the Jews of Chicago is a story of certain “mainstreams” within the Jewish community. “It’s not the work of a professional historian. It preserves certain historical patterns.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet Roth thinks the omissions are insignificant compared to the information Meites did collect and record for all time....
AUGUST The Guatemalan military isn’t all that different from its counterpart in El Salvador really, save that it gets a little less U.S. aid and is perhaps a bit more bloodthirsty as a consequence. The Guatemalan Information Center/Casa Guatemala’s annual March for the Massacred commemorates what the groups say are the hundreds of villages and untold thousands of people eliminated in the course of the military’s countryside eradication policies. The march starts at the totem pole in Lincoln Park, just south of Irving Park Road, at 11 AM today, then wanders down the lake to the Hamilton Monument just south of Diversey....
Where is the world’s largest gum ball factory? According to the Greater North Pulaski Development Corporation, at Leaf, Inc., 1155 N. Cicero. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many University of Illinois women “dread the very thought of having to learn to use computers,” according to research involving more than 3,000 students in dormitories equipped with personal computers. Men made up 77 percent of the residence-hall computer users, women 23 percent–figures that could bode ill for the future success of women in computer-dominated workplaces....
OF MICE AND MEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the story, which Steinbeck adapted for the stage, is now receiving an impressive production by Synergy Theatre Company that exposes a deeper Steinbeck, one fully engaged in adult concerns. His primary concern is the plight of the weak and the vulnerable. The play is set primarily in the bunkhouse and barn of a ranch in the Salinas Valley of California, where Steinbeck himself worked as a bindle stiff–a low-paid hand....
AGAINST THE GRAIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the first of three monologues in this one-woman show, written and performed by Caponera, we meet Mary Ellen Baker, Charlie’s wife, in 1980. She’s clipping coupons and planning the week’s meals–Charlie likes his meat, but he won’t touch chicken. She also plans her own activities–and again, she defers to Charlie and his work schedule. Her first words are “Don’t get me wrong–I love my family,” and her conversation with us covers such topics as the hanging of new curtains and the distressingly untraditional behavior of her daughter, who she fears will get pregnant before she’s married....
For me, the major find of Barbara Scharres’s “Films From the Lunatic Fringe” series, which starts this week at the Film Center, is this highly distinctive pseudodocumentary by Eric Saks, an environmentalist based in Los Angeles. At once novelistic and poetic, this achronological collage of diary entries between the 1940s and 1990s by a fictional toxic-waste dumper named Isaac Hudak–the different stages of his life are played by three actors, including Saks–creates a haunting portrait of an alienated drifter’s existence that comprises the underside of our national heritage....
John Hammond is o ne of the handful of 60s folk blues revivalists whose music has retained its relevance over the years (others include Dave Van Ronk and Andy Cohen). Beginning in New York in the early 60s, Hammond learned early on to forge his own distinctive style while remaining true to the musical spirit of such masters as Llghtnin’ Hopkins, Big Joe Williams, and John Lee Hooker. Although some have questioned his authenticity (his father, John Hammond Sr....
Spontaneous, immediate, and urgent as a rocket taking off–Johnny Griffin’s music gives a terrific sense of the importance of right now, this very moment. Tops among the big-sounding, aggressive Chicago tenor saxophonists of the 40s, he started in Lionel Hampton’s big band, became one of the best hard boppers with Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey in the 50s, and has been leading his own groups in Europe for the last 30 years....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April I wrote a Reader profile of a man named Johnny Washington. Washington lived with his girlfriend and their two children in a west-side basement flat and survived on general assistance and pocket money obtained from doing odd jobs, notably giving haircuts to neighbors. The original piece was reprinted in the Utne Reader (no relation to the Chicago Reader), a digest of the alternative press, in its November/December issue....
Lead Story Japan Efficiency Headquarters, an “entertainment business company” in Chiba, Japan, rents trained “family members” out to senior citizens who would like to enjoy the benefits of a close-knit family from time to time. The rented family, typically a husband, wife, and child, engage in family-type activities as if everyone were related. Renting three family members for three hours costs about $1,100. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May the Missouri Court of Appeals turned down David Turner’s appeal of the automatic suspension of his driver’s license after he refused to take a blood-alcohol test....
SOMEONE ELSE FROM QUEENS IS QUEER William S. Burroughs is only one of the many characters Richard Elovich portrays in Someone Else From Queens Is Queer, though the protagonist is someone called Felix the Kat. Elovich begins the performance in the persona of Felix’s beloved, dashing Gordie Benjamin, who speaks in a nasal, twangy, almost exaggerated Queens accent. Later Elovich changes the accent, the voice, the intonation, and the bearing to impersonate different people: Felix’s mother, the bartender Giacometti, Felix’s father, and Herman Munster....
Jack T. Chick’s cartoon gospel tracts offer some of the most interesting reading you’re likely to have thrown through the open window of your parked car. The tracts aren’t generally sold in stores; they’re distributed by an all-volunteer army of born-again Christians, and throwing them through car windows is one of the recommended means of distribution. Though Jack T. Chick prefers that his followers give the tracts out by hand, he has a multitude of suggestions for those who are too shy to “witness” in person: leave tracts “in empty coat pockets at clothing stores,” “between cans on grocery shelves,” hidden in phone booths and library books, in laundromats and restrooms....
It seems appropriate that the blockbuster that broke the Hollywood blacklist in 1960–by crediting a blacklisted filmmaker (screenwriter Dalton Trumbo) and adapting a best-selling novel by leftist Howard Fast–should be the apotheosis of Kennedy liberalism, to the same degree that The Ten Commandments (1956) was the apotheosis of Eisenhower conservatism. This movie is special in other ways as well: perhaps the most literate of all the spectacles about antiquity, it is probably the first major Hollywood film with a central character who is bisexual (a fact made more evident in this restoration, which includes a scene originally cut by the censors); and it is the only movie on which Stanley Kubrick has served as a hired gun, having been brought in after Anthony Mann (who directed the first sequence) was fired....
“When someone is having a heart attack, he doesn’t want to shop around,” Dr. Quentin Young of Chicago’s Health and Medicine Policy Research Group tells Chicago Enterprise (October 1990). And that’s why the government’s attempt to control health-care costs through the marketplace hasn’t worked out so well. The heart-attack victim, Young notes, “wants to be treated and cured now and he doesn’t care what it costs.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Making you dance to a beat that’s pumping, And once on the floor, spinnin’ and trippin’, He’s flying up and down the stairs at the Cubby Bear, this skinny dude everyone knows as Vince, racing from the dressing room to the stage and back again, trying to get the damn show on the road. The first act hasn’t arrived yet. Well, it has, but the backup tracks aren’t here, and let’s face it, these days you can’t go on without a show tape....
The story began last summer in Pilsen when Mayor Daley, preparing for reelection, promised a cheering crowd city funds for new housing. New Homes was unveiled last summer to rave reviews, particularly from housing activists in Pilsen, a poor, predominantly Mexican community just southwest of the Loop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Our mission is to stabilize the community in ways that include and go beyond New Homes for Chicago,” says Raul Raymundo, president of Resurrection....
