At 73, painter Hughie Lee-Smith has returned to Chicago. A major retrospective–50 paintings from the last 50 years–currently on display at the Cultural Center reveals that in many ways he is still the eager, energetic young man who arrived in Chicago as a Navy recruit in 1943. Fresh out of art school, he was assigned then to paint three WPA murals at the Great Lakes Naval Station. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Art vs. Commerce: I. Nudes in the Bank Let’s go to the scoreboard. After last week’s hectic action in Chicago, the results are: Commerce 2, Art 0. They came in with slides of their work. Sippel builds little wooden houses out of two-by-fours and puts small figures inside that are made of roofing nails and have plaster skulls or heads on them. The outsides are marked in hieroglyphs of Sippel’s invention....
The eighth edition of the annual festival of black independent film continues through Thursday, August 17, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 443-3737; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, 281-4114; and at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 871-6604. Tickets are $5, $3 for Blacklight members; admission to the Music Box screenings will be $6. For more information call 509-2981. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
BARTON FINK With John Turturro, John Goodman, Judy Davis, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Tony Shalhoub, and Jon Polito. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The president of the Cannes jury was Roman Polanski, who took the job only after demanding that he be allowed to handpick his own jury members. Considering the indebtedness of Barton Fink to Polanski pictures like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant–in its black humor, treatment of confinement and loneliness, perverse evocations of everyday “normality,” creepy moods and hallucinatory disorientation, phantasmagoric handling of gore and other kinds of horror as shock effects, and even its careful use of ambiguous offscreen sounds–the group of awards should probably be viewed more as an act of self-congratulation than as an objective aesthetic judgment....
Inside Ditka’s, that bastion of beer and brotherhood, movie star Raquel Welch was nervously talking about having the right to make choices. Outside, about a dozen demonstrators picketed and proselytized through bullhorns. “You’ll be stars in hell too,” read one sign. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As in many other antiabortion demonstrations, picketers carried photographs of aborted fetuses, but these were particularly large– almost sandwich-board size–and garish....
Talk about a tough act to follow. When the Neo-Futurists got their own space not too long ago and left Live Bait Theater, taking their phenomenally successful show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind with them, they left open the late-night slot they’ve ruled with nonstop sellout houses for more than three years. Well, if anyone can give them a run for thei money, Jeff Garlin can. His one-man piece I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With has the mysterious drawing power of a blockbuster movie (I’ve seen it four times, and many of my friends are repeat viewers as well)....
JUST ONE WORLD But Just One World has many lovely moments, too. Its songs may be preachy but they’re also passionate, and that’s unusual enough in the “let’s not offend anyone” show-business marketplace to merit recommendation. The 12-person cast bursts with talent and conviction. And the core of the show is a fine, catchy jazz-rock score loaded with infectious hooks, captivating counterrhythms, and glossy, glowing instrumental textures. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
MRS. CALIFORNIA There are a few grains of truth amid the fluff that fills Mrs. California. You have to sit longer than you should through this not very original play before you find them, but they’re definitely there. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you saw Smile, the 1975 film spoof of beauty pageants, you can imagine the one-upwomanship that follows. This salute to brain-damaged domesticity is not as wholesome as it looks at first, particularly since we see it through the ever-more-open eyes of Dottie Baker, aka Mrs....
Clint Eastwood plays a “skip-tracer” cop with a taste for impersonations who is assigned to track down a woman (Bernadette Peters) on the lam with her eight-month-old baby. The wife of an ex-con (Timothy Carhart) who is linked to a group of white supremacists (a band of misfits and speed freaks that the movie has great fun ridiculing), she jumps bail after being arrested for passing counterfeit money; Eastwood follows her to Reno and then finds himself gradually shifting his loyalties....
SAMMY CAHN: WORDS AND MUSIC at the Halsted Theatre Centre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cahn’s show, nimbly staged by Paul Blake, is full of wonderful anecdotes about show business before, during, and after World War II. Though the stories are obviously shaped to suit his own self-image, he treats himself and his work as irreverently as anything else: his stories about taming temperamental composers playfully acknowledge Cahn’s own idiosyncratic personality as well....
In jazz, the rhythm section forms the heart of almost every ensemble, and the communication between rhythm section and leader largely determines the music’s success. So when the rhythm section is the leader–as with TanaReid, the two-saxophone quintet assembled by drummer Akira Tana and bassist Rufus Reid–you’ve got it made in the shade. One of the more versatile modern drummers, Tana has danced his sprightly, athletic rhythms across dozens of recordings in recent years, and Reid practically defines modern bass playing: musically, he’s a direct descendant of Ray Brown in his ability to emphasize a large tone, balletic facility, and superlative musicality in equal balance....
THE LEARNED LADIES The plot is typical of Moliere: Philaminte, her daughter Armande, and her sister-in-law Belise have become rabid culture vultures. And they believe that pursuits philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic are all embodied in an all-purpose paragon by the name of Trissotin. (A more objective witness describes him as a man who “hugs himself / Before his volumes ranged upon a shelf.”) So enamored have the ladies become of cerebral snake oil that they fire competent servants for the impudence of using bad grammar....
Time for a Change? Lafayette! With all due respect to Purdue University, does Peterson expect denizens of our world-class metropolis to look to Lafayette, Indiana, as an example? And what about Wall Street? we said next. Thanks to the one-hour difference between Chicago and New York, the Sun-Times is able to squeeze the closing stock prices into its late-afternoon edition. Lose that hour . . . An architect in Forest Park, Peterson is director of the Midwest Daylight Coalition, although when we asked him what the coalition consists of he conceded that “right now this is basically a committee to start the coalition....
UPI’s Salvation In 1982 two young Baha’i entrepreneurs whose media savvy consisted of the lessons learned in a year of running Joliet’s Channel 66 purchased storied United Press International for a price you could have handled yourself. The Scripps-Howard newspaper chain paid Doug Ruhe and Bill Geissler $5 million to take the gallant 75-year-old, perennially unprofitable wire service off its hands. The wire service’s next savior was one of the wealthiest men in Mexico, Mario Vazquez-Rana, owner of the El Sol newspaper group....
Working at a frenzied pace out of a modest Loop office, Joseph Kinney relentlessly links facts with faces. The facts document America’s preventable carnage from unsafe workplaces. The faces are reminders that behind each statistic is an individual. Out of about nine million American workers injured annually on the job, 70,000 are permanently disabled. A worker is more likely to be seriously injured on the job (losing at least a day’s work) during his or her career than a two-pack-a-day smoker is to contract cancer....
When Pat Buchanan rants about building a big fence along the Mexican border, it’s people like Astrid Hadad he wants to keep out. In her cabaret concert Heavy Nopal, which means “Heavy Cactus,” the Mexican Lebanese singer-actress offers a prickly, postmodern reworking of traditional folk ballad archetypes of women as sultry spitfires and martyred madonnas. Paying homage to the 1940s ranchera singer (and drug-OD victim) Lucha Reyes, Hadad puts her aching alto to emotionally evocative and stingingly sardonic use on such songs (performed in Spanish and interrupted with English commentary) as “Mala” (“Evil because you don’t love me…Evil like censorship…like a photo on your driver’s license…”) and “Kill, for God Forgives” (“If you see the students demonstrating for peace / You should kill quickly…God forgives those who confess”)....
Busse Woods was among the first natural areas to be set aside as an Illinois nature preserve. The 440-acre hardwood forest, which is part of the Ned Brown Forest Preserve in Elk Grove Village, was also cited in the early 60s by the federal government as a uniquely diverse remnant of the native landscape. Only one other place in Illinois–Volo Bog–has received such recognition. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
If you doubt that life is a crapshoot, consider the fates of the spot-tailed and emerald shiners in Lake Michigan. They are both minnows, members of the genus Notropis, the largest genus of freshwater fish in North America. They both feed on aquatic insects and small crustacea. The largest spot-tailed shiners are six inches long. Emerald shiners are even smaller. But then some changes occurred. First smelt and then alewives entered the lake....
This one took me completely by surprise. An epic musical about two USO entertainers (Bette Midler and James Caan) who form a nonromantic show-biz team and perform together over three wars and half a century, it has the sort of scope, pizzazz, and feeling that we used to expect from Hollywood but haven’t seen in a good while. Caan plays an entertainer very much like Bob Hope (politically he supports the status quo, and his signature tune, “I Remember You,” recalls “Thanks for the Memories”); Midler is a more rambunctious sort with a gutsy liberal conscience who specializes in Mae West-like double entendres....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hardships of newcomers to the U.S. are universal to all races. To deny this fact is absurd; all said and done, family background is no scapegoat for the inability of an educational system’s failure. Arriving from Puerto Rico (Vieques Is.) at the age of eleven was the best thing that ever happened to me....
