Lead Story Police in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, charged Gregory Rosa, 25, with a string of vending-machine robberies in January after he fled from police who spotted him loitering around a vending machine. He later tried to post his $400 bail in coins. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Convenience-store clerk Wazir Jiwi told Houston police in January that he had foiled a robbery by a man who pulled two guns on him and demanded cash....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have very mixed feelings about suing parents for incest. I agree with the closing quote of Nina Corwin when she mentioned the percentage of women for whom ” . . . it focuses so much of their lives on the case that they don’t get around to putting their lives back in order.” In fact, my preliminary reaction to the article was, “Oh no, don’t revictimize these victims!...
THE EIGHT HOURS Every time I read something about those times, I wish I had lived in them. Things were horrible and violent and dirty, I know, but everyone seems so alive in all the accounts. There were real live villains and heroes, and people were actually trying to do something about the evil that existed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Eight Hours takes us back....
THE SHADOW BOX The Shadow Box can’t make sense of collective insanity–not even All Quiet on the Western Front could do that. But its fully felt portrayal of dying humans can restore, if temporarily, the emotional proportion between massive body counts and death’s eternal singularity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All three are interviewed documentary-style by an unseen clinician (who resembles Zach, the gentle interrogator of the “gypsies” in A Chorus Line)....
Al Voney has a deal going with the Tribune Company. Voney, a wiry, toothless, 57-year-old south-sider, has a monopoly on the shoe-shine business in the Tribune Tower. The deal is that he gets access to the building–including the security-conscious newsroom–but he works as a free-lancer. He gets no company benefits. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “No one dictates to me how I shine their shoes,” Voney explains....
TWO WOMEN’S TALES Jan Bartoszek and Amy Osgood make fine dances–musical, well crafted, and thoughtfully produced. Both choreographers choose interesting scores and create shifting, complex relationships between the images, phrases, and structures of the movement and those of the music. Both acknowledge that choreography is a craft–acknowledge the nuts and bolts of making movement phrases, revising and repeating them, splintering and reshaping them–but do not exhibit that craftsmanship as an end in itself....
So, you’re asking, do we really need another pick-o-the-week for Von Freeman? The intense, innovative, and indefatigable tenor saxist who has become almost emblematic of Chicago jazz? Well, when the occasion is a hurriedly arranged record-release party for his no-holds-barred whirlwind of a new album–then yes, a gentle reminder may be just what’s needed. Walkin’ Tuff, on Southport Records, the first album under Von’s name in 12 years, offers unadulterated Freeman extroversion, from the strutting cry of the title tune to an unaccompanied plunge on “How Deep Is the Ocean”; not coincidentally, it’s one of the strongest albums of the year, more than worthy of major celebration....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s astonishing, for instance, how many people automatically assume that if you don’t believe in God, you must believe in the Devil. Their minds can’t even conceive of the notion that it’s possible to reject the entire mythical power structure of God & Satan/Heaven & Hell–not just the good half. Worse still are those who harbor this uneasy fear that if you don’t believe in God, you can’t have much of a sense of morality or ethics....
Eighteen theater companies are presented in six different programs of two to four plays each, organized along loose thematic lines by producer Doug Bragan and associate producer Judith Easton. That’s two more companies and two more programs than last year, when Bragan first stepped in to revive this non-Equity showcase founded and then discontinued by the League of Chicago Theatres. At the Theatre Building, May 1 through June 2. (Previews through 28; regular schedule....
UBU ROI Do not say: “When I was young I used to play”–Play! and be young –a motto, printed on the cover of Let’s Sing Pessach Songs, by Adi Sulkin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And he would’ve, too–though, at four and a half, he’s just a little young for some parts. People may talk about Ubu Roi’s influence on the 20th-century avant-garde; people may go on about how Ubu Roi anticipated Dada, surrealism, and the theater of the absurd....
Souleymane Cisse’s extraordinarily beautiful and mesmerizing fantasy is set in the ancient Bambara culture of Mali (formerly French Sudan) long before it was invaded by Morocco in the 16th century. A young man (Issiaka Kane) sets out to discover the mysteries of nature (or komo, the science of the gods) with the help of his mother and uncle, but his jealous and spiteful father contrives to prevent him from deciphering the sacred rites and tries to kill him....
A must-see for Dirk Bogarde fans, and highly recommended to anyone who wants to hear an intelligent actor speak at length. This two-part British TV documentary by Paul Joyce features a fascinating discussion by Bogarde about his craft, with particularly interesting bits about Visconti’s blocking of his mise en scene to music by Mahler in Death in Venice; how Fassbinder allegedly destroyed Despair in the cutting room; the controversial early handling of a gay theme in Victim; experiences with Judy Garland and Joseph Losey; the Hollywood blacklist; and work with Bertrand Tavernier on Daddy Nostalgia, Bogarde’s farewell film....
ELVIRA AND THE LOST PRINCE Poor Elvira–fired from her $60,000-a-year job as a corporate attorney, facing disbarment, accused of embezzlement by the press, harassed by the mob, and all because she stonewalled on a plan to build a shopping center on land where slaves were buried. But little does the feisty young woman realize, slouching about her house and drowning her sorrows in cheap champagne, that her fortunes are about to change: the handsome, eloquent young man with one crippled foot who appears suddenly at her window is none other than Eshu, the priapal trickster of Yoruba folklore, who’s fallen head over phallus in love with her....
If I’d had my date book on me during those dire moments in the men’s room, I would have written it in right then and there: lunch with God. That’s how desperate I was. I sat a few yards away at the reception desk watching more and more doctors and nurses drop what they were doing to run behind her curtain. They brought in more and more machines. I recognized the respirator and the EKG....
I haven’t seen harp player Gary Primich since about 1980, when he was a fresh-faced young hustler blowing alongside the grizzled veterans on Maxwell Street every Sunday morning. Primich was still refining his style, and it was tantalizing to hear: he coaxed a lush warble from his harp reminiscent of Big Walter Horton, and he was already showing a remarkable technical facility, swooping and scurrying through rapid-fire upper-register changes like a more sedate version of Sugar Blue....
So, who’s it going to be? The three-year-old charmer with the Ghostbusters visor? The man in the Musky Tale Resort sweatshirt? The plant-eating apatosaurus? Director Jonathan Cohen and his WTTW video crew are scouting the Dino-Rama exhibit at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, today’s backdrop for the taping of a new batch of station-identification spots. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Langenber and Wells time the shot so that the prerecorded roar doesn’t drown out the soft-spoken EA and Kay, Cohen patiently tries to relax them in front of the camera....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story kind of made me angry. I felt I was reading a string of justifications. There are harsh realities of unwanted children, and it is nice to plan children in healthy stable environments, but life is messy, and the responsibility now lies on our hands as potential parents. I completely understand how she feels about her two children now, they are joys....
About ten years ago, Robert Tyrrell heard there was an Anna’s hummingbird nesting at the San Diego Zoo. He had been trying to get a good photograph of a hummingbird for almost two years, and he’d just been given some new equipment, an old-fashioned strobe with an extra-short flash. He’d had plenty of opportunities to shoot the birds at feeders, but this was his first nesting bird, and it was only a two-hour drive from his house....
ABOUT MEN . . . ABOUT WOMEN Jan Erkert makes dances for mind and eye alike. Strong, appealing dancers perform expressive movement with absolute authority and without affectation; shifting spatial patterns and dynamic configurations of dancers occupy every inch of performance space; unexpected moments of stillness jolt the viewer. Her dances probe both present and past, provocative rather than pedantic: they work on the viewer in the choreographic mode equivalent to well-wrought fiction–they show, they never tell....
“We’re out at the lake having a good time when this white dude pulls his dick out in the middle of the parking lot, starts to take a leak. So I walk up to him. Hey man, I say, could you pee in the woods? There’s women and kids here and you’re in plain sight.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wolin worked as a police photographer in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the mid-70s....
