Lead Story In Pensacola, Florida, in November, neighbors Gary R. Goodrich and J.B. Bloodsworth pulled guns and fired, sending each other to the hospital, in a dispute over whether one was raking leaves into the other’s yard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Lansing, Michigan, James Carter, 44, upset that Pamela Bonds, 31, did not drive fast enough out of a parking lot after Christmas shopping, honked three times....
Sci-fi nursery rhymes, gigantic slabs of guitar, radio-friendly weirdness–that’s what the Pixies traffic in these days. Bossanova, the band’s new record, is crammed with ear candy for the discriminating college set, a percolating jumble of hyped-up Bowie-isms, Jetsons-esque sound effects, and that big, real big guitar sound the band likes so much: guitar chords falling like boulders, the solos lassoing sensitive bones in your inner ear and then drawing taut. And it’s all set in an enviably clean–sparse, really–production that just reinforces the band’s angular, metallic sound....
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: THE PERFECT MOMENT Everything Mapplethorpe did–the exhaustive nude series, the celebrity portraits, even the flowers and still lifes–was informed by this early work. His work is concerned not so much with sexuality–in fact it is curiously devoid of eroticism in spite of its explicit nature–as with power and beauty in even the most unexpected subjects. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The second row in the same glass case is devoted to flowers, and the third shows images from Mapplethorpe’s series on black men....
SENNIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is something of this sort of magic in Society for New Things’ shadow play Sennin. This production, adapted from a Chinese legend, uses the shadows of set pieces, puppets, and live actors to create the mystical world of the folktale. And if director David Gutfreund’s adaptation doesn’t entirely succeed in all it seeks to accomplish, Sennin shows more inventiveness and imagination in its half-hour running time than most shows do in two hours....
The Uptown is the largest surviving movie theater in the United States, larger even than New York’s Radio City Music Hall in square footage, although its seating capacity is a little less. Designed by the renowned architects Rapp and Rapp and built in 1925 at a cost of $4 million, it opened on August 18 to throngs of people winding around the corner of Broadway and Lawrence. The crowd, which at one point grew to more than 12,000, waited to see a show including two live orchestras, newsreels, a stage show called “Under Spanish Skies,” and the silent feature The Lady Who Lied–all for a ticket price of 50 cents....
SONGS OF THE SEASON Director Joe Huber knows just when to lay off the schmaltz, puncturing it neatly with something as wickedly apt as P.D.Q. Bach’s “Throw the Yule Log On Uncle John” (the chorus hilariously uncertain about whether or not there’s a comma). When fresh-faced Alan Chambers, playing a street caroler, croons the potentially maudlin “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” he gets stiffed by customers and molested by a mugger who’s definitely unclear on the concept of Christmas....
Calling all wasps. Calling all wasps. Think twice before you squash that pesky yellow jacket, say USDA scientists: that act releases an alarm pheromone and signals nearby nesting wasps to come help. Says one scientist, “It’s sort of like a policeman on patrol calling for back up.” A synthesized version of the pheromone drew more than 300 wasps from nests as far as 15 feet away and kept them stinging for three hours....
Why recycling the stuff is not enough: Harper’s “Index” (March 1990) reminds us that five of the six leading hazardous wastes are chemicals used to make plastics. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When preschool is better than school. Gillian McNamee and Joan McLane of the Erikson Institute on West Chicago followed up on local inner-city children who had attended a preschool literacy program and found that two-thirds of them were still reading above grade level–amazingly enough, to judge from the description of their neighborhood public schools in the Spencer Foundation Newsletter (March 1990): “Few classrooms had books available for children’s independent use....
People are always moving from Chicago to New York. This is not news. But in 1991 a lot of people left New York to move here. For most of the eight years I’ve lived in Chicago, that’s been about as rare as a decent thin-crust pizza. I can’t say that it’s happening south of the Loop (since becoming a Chicagoan I haven’t left the neighborhood much), but throughout the past year I’ve met newly arrived ex-New Yorkers all over the north side–applying for work, and sometimes getting it; splitting checks at restaurants and bars; lost on the subway, and on the el; weaving around the strollers on Belmont Avenue, wearing their Mets caps and Betsey Johnson originals....
What does a cloud feel like to the touch? –B.P. Jones, Chicago The gambling gods are not happy, Cecil–you’ve blown it again in your column about systems for picking lottery numbers [November 15]. First, card counting in blackjack has nothing to do with “predicting the next card” or any such nonsense, but rather detecting when a particular subset of the deck or shoe is a favorable financial proposition in the long run....
The Tribune’s War on Unions In July 1985 nearly 800 typographers, pressmen, and mailers went on strike against the Tribune over issues that focused on lifetime job guarantees and traditional working conditions. The Tribune soon began hiring permanent replacements, and most of the strikers never worked another day at the paper. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a cold and rainy day in 1986 the hapless unionists rallied in front of the Tribune Tower to mark the 100th anniversary of the Haymarket riot....
If things go Mayor Daley’s way, there will be a new airport on the southeast side sometime early in the next century. It will stretch from 103rd Street to 150th in Calumet City, and from the Calumet Expressway to the state line. It will employ 40,000 people and generate billions in tax revenues. It will rejuvenate South Chicago and other worn-out communities. It will encourage investors to build hotels and restaurants on the former sites of toxic dumps and abandoned steel mills....
The soon-to-be art gallery is a heap of drywall. The performance space is a pile of red velour seats, their backs nipped off, from the old Granada theater. The dressing room is currently doubling as the food-storage area, supplying those long nights of manual labor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The project began as the brainchild of Seth Green, poet, performance artist, filmmaker, and sound technician....
INSIGNIFICANCE British playwright Terry Johnson’s richly wrought Insignificance, a cultural collage that both invigorates and entertains, plays brilliant variations on its own scheme of relativity. Johnson uses highly unlikely but far from random encounters to throw together four very different characters in a New York hotel room in 1954. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play’s first–and last–image prevails: the Professor staring, as if peering past the end of the universe, at a blackboard covered with equations....
Maggie Kast has been choreographing dances as striking as her long, prematurely white hair for 30 years. But after all this time she’s still remarkable for her childlike sense of wonder, and the way she transfers this quality to her movements. Her work is also intriguing in its degree of variety; she packs her whole life into her dances, and the three dances on this program couldn’t be more different.There’s the lighthearted, postmodern piece with text, Dance Without Warm-Up; Kast created this all-purpose dance to be performed anywhere at a moment’s notice: on the subway, in a neon-lit nightclub, in a dance studio, wherever....
MARIE AND BRUCE Yet somehow Shawn manages to make these awful characters compelling. Even Lemon, for all her protofascist beliefs, wins our sympathy. Nowhere is Shawn’s gift for making unlikable characters likable more apparent than in Marie and Bruce, first produced in 1979, a year before the play version of My Dinner With Andre opened. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this work Shawn presents two nasty, brutish characters, Bruce and Marie, who spend the whole play showing us, and everyone else they chance to meet, just how desperately unhappy they are with each other....
Lead Story According to a San Antonio home owner’s November court testimony, a group of men continued over several months to throw used tires into his yard until there were about 10,000 of them, to a height of eight feet. They came back night after night, and when the owner, Johnny Crawford, 57, would try to stop them, they would beat him up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Latest poor disguise: Eugene “Butch” Flenough Jr....
Now Playing at the Royal-George… Trouble appears to be brewing once again at the beleaguered Royal-George Theatre complex. Last Friday general manager Robert Bron abruptly resigned amid reports of bouncing payroll checks and problems with hundreds of gift certificates left unredeemed in the public’s hands after the theater went dark early last summer. Sources close to events say Bron could no longer tolerate the management of Robert Perkins, head of the rookie production company that recently reopened the place....
At first hearing it’s obvious that the Milwaukeeans can rock any dance floor with ease. Yet their curious hybrid style might cause one to stop and ponder: are these cats hip or are they dorks? Actually, their coolness quotient becomes easier to calculate once you realize the range of cool is not a straight line but a circle, and that the shrewd Milwaukeeans stand precisely at the point where coolness and corn meet....
MARY HATCH: NARRATIVE METAPHORS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first glance the people populating Hatch’s paintings look ordinary. They could be your next-door neighbors or your office mates. But many of the objects that surround them are quite extraordinary–or extraordinarily out of place. The uncharacteristic colors give everything the unreal quality of a dream, making anything seem possible. Foreign objects are likely to become familiar, and common objects take on uncommon import....
