Posts

Leeches are back, according to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where they are used to help wounds drain. Says the center, “The leeches are economical (about $6 apiece) and easy to apply (they feed for 20 to 40 minutes then drop off).” Best of all, “They leave a bite mark that looks like the Mercedes Benz logo.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “South Shore Bank doesn’t look out of the ordinary,” writes Mark Satin in the New Options newsletter (March 28)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years, syndicated columnist William Pfaff has marred any number of curious tales in telling them. His work ranks among those most heavily indoctrinated with Cold War ideology, often to the point of sheer embarrassment. To cite just one of his many ludicrous examples: Back on June 11, Pfaff’s “The power of myth: Beijing and the Paris Commune” ran in The Chicago Tribune....

Perhaps the most neglected of all the major French directors, at least in the U.S., Jean Gremillon (1901-1959) was a figure of such versatility that it’s difficult to make generalizations about his work. (One can, however, speak about its close attention to sound and rhythm–he started out as a musician–and its frequent focus on class divisions.) White Shanks (Pattes blanches), made in 1949, is not one of his very best efforts–I prefer Lumiere d’ete (1943) and Le ciel est a vous (1944)....

Who Will Take Over the Sun-Times? The Sun-Times is badly broken, said Sam McKeel, on coming to Chicago. The Sun-Times is the heart and soul of this company. My first responsibility is to fix it. Towers was ME under the Scotsman Charles Wilson and the Australian Roger Wood, Murdoch executives shipped in from London and New York, respectively, to keep the Sun-Times going, and then under Murdoch’s ultimate choice of editor, the New Zealander turned New Yorker Frank Devine....

HILLIARD ENSEMBLE at Saint Thomas the Apostle All of this makes John’s passion story far more abstract and ethereal than the other accounts. It is therefore quite fitting that the Estonian mystic composer Arvo Part would set John’s passion to his own uniquely abstract and ethereal style of composition. Part’s music went through a number of style changes typical of composers during the 60s–serialism, aleatoricism–before he finally settled in the mid-70s on his own method....

Two dozen kids piled out of the cars and into the church basement, sprung from confinement after our three-and-a-half-hour trip to Terre Haute. Within minutes, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders had covered every available surface with big green-and-white vinyl chessboards. It was 10 PM, and everyone had to be up at 6:30 the next morning for the state chess finals. But no one rested until our top seventh grader (rated 1458) had beaten all comers in an impromptu speed-chess tournament....

Prior to the opening of the Anonymous Museum, the board of directors decided to remove all of the art they had set out because they wanted visitors on opening night to visualize all the possibilities of the 8,000-square-foot loft. So last Friday the museum debuted looking unoccupied, ripe for open minds. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On opening night no one wore name tags, so no one other than their friends could tell if the directors were in attendance....

LES MAITRES FOUS *** (A must-see) Directed by Jean Rouch By rough estimate, Rouch has made well over 100 films since the late 1940s; it’s hard to be more precise because the most up-to-date Rouch filmography I can find is 11 years old. Most of these films are ethnographic shorts that have never shown in the United States, either publicly or privately. But some, including half of the eight that I’ve managed to see myself, are semifictional features that bear some relation to ethnographic work without fitting fully or comfortably into that category....

Chamber music often takes a backseat to orchestral music during the summer months, but this week there is a feast that will prepare chamber-music lovers for the dry weeks ahead: the Beaux Arts Trio playing the complete piano trios of Beethoven in three consecutive concerts. The tight ensembling and depth of interpretation that the Beaux Arts brings to its repertoire is legendary and second to none. Violinist Isidore Cohen, pianist Menahem Pressler, and newcomer cellist Peter Wiley (replacing founding member Bernard Greenhouse, who retired last year) think and play as a single musical entity, always penetrating the deepest meaning of the music they perform....

DANCING TO THE NEW MUSIC Last weekend MoMing Dance & Arts Center and New Music Chicago presented “Dancing to the New Music” to showcase local composer-choreographer collaborations. It was the first joint presentation between the music organization and the dance center; but while the evening had an aura of excited anticipation, the results were not auspicious. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first work on the program, A Room of Wishes, was choreographed by Jan Bartoszek, director of Hedwig Dances, Inc....

WHITE WINDOWS David “Honeyboy” Edwards Blue Suit 102 Conventional wisdom has been that Edwards’s music, while still interesting, has declined in recent years. The driving impetus of his rhythm work–interspersed with fiercely picked flurries at eccentric tempos that showed the influence of Big Joe Williams–has largely given way to simple walking-bass patterns only occasionally interrupted by leads that are sometimes imaginative, sometimes weak or even dissonant. But his voice retains a good measure of the dark urgency he acquired working with Patton and House, and his slide playing is still effective....

It’s hardly the Wolf Gang anymore–bassist Lafayette “Shorty” Gilbert is the only member of Howlin’ Wolf’s last working band in the group, aside from saxophonist-bandleader Eddie Shaw–but this joyous aggregation of bluesmen continues on in Wolf’s grand rowdy tradition. Shaw’s sax playing combines the fiery intensity of Wolf’s classic Delta shout with the honking funk of a Texas roadhouse screamer; it’s elemental and somewhat predictable, but there’s no denying its passionate emotional charge....

When Ira Sullivan is in the right mood, he’s one of the very best living examples of the spontaneity and freedom that, to the romantic mind, used to characterize jazz. Trumpet, flugelhorn, peck horn, flute, saxophone–he’s found a unique bop style adapted to each one’s particular construction. On trumpet and tenor sax, his best instruments, he’ll open up long lines of intricate, intense melody by inserting impulsive, flaring ideas that make your head spin and stretch the instruments to their limits....

With Jim McNeely, you have to listen a little harder than usual to catch the breadth of his playing–but once you do, he continues to impress you with his muscular technique and cinemascope conception. In fact, the more you hear him, the better he sounds. His solos seem to sprawl from one end of the keyboard to the other, but his sense of form is strong enough to prevent such flights from sounding gimmicky....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maturity normally brings with it the realization that the evils which beset the world are complicated, cannot be solved by simple nostrums or philosophical formulas, and that the best most of us can do in this life to accomplish humanitarian goals is by working on little pieces, one at a time . . . mostly by doing one’s job as well as one can....

On March 24, 1980, in San Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Amulfo Romero was assassinated while saying mass. The next day in Chicago, Mundelein College professor and playwright Nick Patricca read about it. It was the first he’d heard of Romero. And the news did something to him. Without further research, Patricca wrote a draft of a play. Later he added a chorus of gods chosen from Mayan myths and reshaped the work along the lines of Near East tomb plays and medieval mystery plays....

“Now listen, Eileen, Ohio was stifling. We just couldn’t wait to get out of the place,” Rosalind Russell said to Edie Adams in Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical Wonderful Town. In 1990 Ohio may still have that image, of being a great place to be–from. But performance artist and producer Tom Mulready wants people to know that there’s more to it than that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mulready is director of the Cleveland Public Theatre Performance Art Festival, an annual showcase of cutting-edge theater, music, dance, and other related forms that, while attracting performers from all over the world, is particularly committed to presenting Ohio artists....

Essays, Elizabeth Hardwick writes, are “just thought itself in orbit.” Writers who know how earthbound most thoughts are, who have struggled to heave, inflate, or prestidigitate an idea into self-sustaining flight, will quarrel with the word “just.” Otherwise, it is an apt description. Nor can an essay be defined by style, although several of our present contributors have the knack for the deft phrase. (William Gass on cyclists in Beijing: “Cyclists are the street as water is the river....

John Greyson’s hilarious and wonderful The Making of “Monsters” from Canada is an audacious pseudodocumentary–a short about the making of a musical about a gay-bashing incident that results in murder. If that sounds offbeat, consider that the two creative minds behind the musical are George Lukas (identified as the Marxist literary critic who directed American Graffiti and Star Wars) and Bertolt Brecht (played by a catfish in a tank). If the brilliance doesn’t quite sustain itself over half an hour, there are still some pretty far-out musical numbers....

SOFT REMEMBRANCE Soft Remembrance is placed in Depression Chicago, though there’s little of the city in the details beyond allusions to 12th and 14th streets, the Cubs and Sox, and the LaSalle Street Station. It feels older than its setting or even its immediate source, the once-great hit Abie’s Irish Rose. But that crude comedy at least acknowledged the ethnic tensions between its Irish and Jewish families; Soft Remembrance just papers them over....