MICHAEL BANICKI Most of these acrylics on canvas feature neat rows of color-coded dots, which fill a grid centrally placed on a larger white background. An alphabetized list, handwritten in pencil, runs down the grid’s left side. The same list of items reappears along the top of the grid. A color key near the bottom of each canvas assigns a rating to each color–Banicki usually limits himself to four or five colors per work....
The notion of a Ralph Shapey Day must strike its honoree as a bit ironic. After all, for much of his four-decade career the University of Chicago-based maverick was largely ignored by the musical establishment; and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during the Solti regime paid scarce attention to his provocative compositions. Interest in Shapey’s music rose considerably during the 80s, thanks in part to the cachet of a MacArthur “genius” grant....
Oak Parkers Furious: Chicago Magazine Spurious? “It’s a fourteen-hundred-word article,” says Dan Santow. “And a lot of the criticism, I think, implies that we shortchanged the issue. Well, it was meant to be a 1,400-word article and not a 5,000-word article.” Averbach is undoubtedly right about what the story not written demands. Alas, the 1,400-word report (a genre Hot Type knows intimately) makes demands of its own. Get it done fast, is one demand....
FOR QUEEN & COUNTRY With Denzel Washington, George Baker, and Amanda Redman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One hardly can name a mainstream American feature–apart from Stone’s Wall Street and John Carpenter’s They Live–that confronts or satirizes chic reactionary values. In Britain dissenting filmmakers, often with crucial funding from the independent Channel Four, are less inhibited and more prolific. If the Iron Lady succeeds (and she is trying) in creating a kind of “Committee on Un-British Activities,” impertinent filmmakers will be irresistible targets....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your review cited the situation whereby a farmer might milk cows all through the year at the same solar time, but have to get his milk to a train–as long as milk traveled by train–that operates on daylight saving time during the summer months. This situation did not arise because the railroads only switched to daylight saving time schedules for suburban trains during the summer months....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Valeo didn’t lie. His 11-20-87 review of Stage Left Theatre Company’s A Different Moon was by gosh unfair, just as he promised. I must admit, however, that other words came to mind as I finished reading it–words like “condescending,” “unprofessional,” and “self-indulgent.” It seems to me that a reviewer perceptive enough to know that comparing the current Stage Left production with a completely unrelated Next Theatre production of the same play five years ago would be unfair, might also have had the courtesy and self-discipline to refrain from the irrelevant, odious exercise....
The liberals had a party at the Fine Arts Theatre the other night, and almost all of them were there. “What do you get when you cross a chicken and a hawk?” someone in the balcony asked. “We got a double-play combination,” he said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The movie, Terkel explained, tells the story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox (or Black Sox), a team so underpaid and unappreciated by Charles Comiskey, the cheap and greedy bastard who owned it, that they felt compelled to “fix” the World Series....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The guiding force behind the article is Nahaz Rogers. He shows by example the way blacks should place their power as a consumer in businesses which are fundamentally controlled by blacks. The support and encouragement of black business as suggested by Mr. Nahaz Rogers would be beneficial to the black community as a whole. The implementation of businesses within a neighborhood also encourages people to take pride in their race....
Friday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Ronald Coyne was seven years old when he stuck a wire into his right eye. An abscess formed in the eye and there was no way to drain it. During surgery the eye was removed and he was fitted with a plastic eye. Sometime later . . . the sister of evangelist T.L. Osborne asked God to restore the boy’s eyesight, not knowing it was a plastic eye....
Friend of WFMT? Is Tom Geoghegan a friend of WFMT? Sure he is. He’s also a friend of jobless steelworkers and dissident Teamsters and the other uphill causes to which his law practice is devoted. He’s a classy guy who unwinds with classical music. We should all have such a friend. We asked Geoghegan for precedents that cut his way. “The Teamsters Union has sued Teamsters for a Democratic Union for using their name....
ELLIOT LOVES This didn’t disturb me. I respect the critics from the Tribune and Sun-Times. I’m even willing to praise certain aspects of them. But overall, bottom line, I feel secure in disagreeing with them. We’re all Americans here. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new play by anxiety’s own cartoonist, Jules Feiffer, Elliot Loves follows the eponymous neurotic through a long night’s wrangling with his extremely nervous lady friend, Joanna–a Memphis-born, twice-divorced real estate broker with two kids and a tic-y way of saying “Piece of cake,” as Elliot notes, “in response to remarks that do not by any stretch of the imagination call for “piece of cake....
Richard Bangs travels around the country talking about his travels around other countries. He shows slides of natives with thick, colorful paint on their faces. And he shows slides of breathtaking landscapes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So they cajoled and manipulated–and finally entrapped–an unsuspecting woman who went into her restaurant kitchen, pulled out a lemur carcass, showed it off to them, and then prepared it in a mushroom, ginger, and wine sauce....
LYLE Unfortunately, Lyle needs a lot more than extra laughs. Characters that an audience can give a damn about would be nice for starters. So would a score that contained at least one song worth remembering, or a script that did more than depend on allegedly cute kids and animals for its appeal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The meandering story, loosely based on Bernard Waber’s 1962 children’s book The House on East 88th Street, tells of Josh Primm, a boy whose family moves to New York and finds a crocodile named Lyle swimming around in the bathtub of their new home....
In the old days, Mark Lichtenfeld played in the woods along the bumpy two-lane road down the street from his parents’ home in Highland Park. “I remember we used to build forts in there,” says Lichtenfeld, now a 28-year-old lawyer. “I was not an environmentalist then–I was a kid. And I just loved the open space.” As a result of lobbying by Lichtenfeld’s group–the Highland Park Conservation Society–some of Lake County’s most fervent prodevelopment politicians have momentarily taken the preservationist line....
The race this year for Cook County state’s attorney recalls the days when the Irish Catholics ruled Chicago, when Jews, blacks, Poles, Hispanics, and Lithuanians were mere shadows on the political horizon. Voters will be asked to choose between Jack O’Malley and Pat O’Connor. One is the Republican incumbent, the other a Democratic alderman. Between now and November both candidates will be trying to teach the voters which is which....
Paul Wertico, the drummer for the Pat Metheny Group, finally gets a little R and R from that band’s grueling schedule, so what does he do? He returns to Chicago and puts together another band. Wertico is a multifaceted powerhouse. He drives Metheny’s complicated, boundary-bashing music as perhaps no other drummer could; yet left to his own devices, he has leaned toward the dadaist freedoms of his earlier band, Earwax Control....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A classical Greek word might fit here, linked as it is to the tragic dramas in which it often appears: arheton (“unspeakable”). That’s paradoxical, since it’s only through speech that the unspeakable is spoken and must be spoken. Yet, beyond even the copious persuasive detail something remains unspoken, because it is arheton. Perhaps these general thoughts have some value....
Photographers High and Low A year and a half ago Tribune photographer Phillip Greer wrote a famous letter to editor Jack Fuller. Morale in the photo department had hit rock bottom, and Greer gave voice to the general distress. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I agree with the new Tribune philosophy that we must cover the suburban area better,” Greer wrote, “but we must also cover the city, state, national, and international news with as much drive and resources as we now give to the suburbs....
SEE YOU IN THE MORNING SAY ANYTHING . . . There’s nothing really startling about either Say Anything. . . , Cameron Crowe’s first feature, or See You in the Morning, Alan J. Pakula’s 12th, except that neither one is a bore, an insult to the intelligence, or a remake of something else; and both have fairly large groups of well-defined characters and a central love story that is at once believable and positive....
A small, square, black-and-white photograph with a scalloped white edge on which the date, May 1959, is printed in small type. I am the curly-headed baby in a white party dress sitting up on Daddy’s shoulder eating a strawberry. Boyishly handsome in his crew-neck sweater and grown-out GI haircut, he smiles up at me, squinting into the sun. He is 30, I am one, we are in love. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
