Posts

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June a lawyer (not named in the original news story) won a $3,000 settlement over an underwear purchase against the J.C. Penney store in Newport, Oregon. The man claimed that the first time he wore the shorts the inspection tag stuck to his penis so firmly that he could not remove it. After trying soapy water and rubbing alcohol, he went to a doctor, who removed the sticker with an adhesive dissolver, which, however, caused a rash....

OBA OBA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The publicity for Oba Oba heralds the show as “the Brazilian extravaganza,” and that’s no lie. Part 1950s movie musical, part folkloric ballet, part ethnomusicological display, and part nightclub revue, Oba Oba is an unabashed exercise in spectacle. With its bare-breasted dancing girls and bare-chested muscle men, its mountains of glitter and chiffon and spandex and Velcro, and even a collection of towering fruit hats, Oba Oba is totally unafraid to wallow in kitschy excess....

MUNTU DANCE THEATRE Muntu is a long-lived Chicago group (it was formed in 1972) that specializes in traditional and contemporary African dance. That orientation means, in part, that the accompaniment is particularly compelling–as many as five drummers, who are usually onstage. But it may also bring a few dance aficionados up short: If it’s traditional, can it be original or creative? If it’s folk art, where’s the fit with our culture?...

The most atrocious political atrocities this year were crimes against language. Consider, for example, the spectacle of George Bush last August, during the Soviet coup, railing against evil “rightwingers” and praising the “liberals.” The Committee on Decent Unbiased Campaign Tactics (CONDUCT), organized after the 1983 mayoral campaign to deal with the untoward racial rhetoric of that race, quickly became the organizational equivalent of those rusting tanks that many police departments bought in 1969 to cope with the urban riots of ’66, ’67, and ’68....

Call it blasphemy in these days of a shrieking national debate over drug policy, drug use, and the growing drug economy. Call it irresponsible at a time when community leaders publicly compare the effects of crack to the effects of slavery. Call it juvenile now that the Summer of Love, which wasn’t so love-filled, is the stuff of history books, and now that many of its graying veterans specify “no drugs” when advertising for housemates....

Bird–the film–is out, detailing the tragedy and triumph of Charlie Parker. And that means that “Chood”–the nickname of Robert Chudnick, aka Red Rodney, the young white trumpeter who came under Charlie Parker’s spell in the late 1940s–is once again in. Rodney replaced Miles Davis in Parker’s band and proved himself the most compatible of Parker’s hired hands; since then, he’s been in jail, rebuilt his embouchure, and escaped the Las Vegas stage-band scene with his soul intact (no easy feat)....

LITTLE VERA With Natalya Negoda, Andrei Sokolov, Ludmila Zaitzeva, and Yuri Nazarov. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until recently Moscow did not believe in tears or in soft-core sex scenes–or in hard-core depictions of ordinary workers’ lives in that reputedly classless society. But with glasnost in gear, director Vasily Pichul’s impertinent Little Vera opened rousingly last year; upwards of 50 million Soviet viewers gaped not only at the erotic antics on-screen but at a crucial and controversial Soviet cinematic achievement–an explicit expression of the cynicism and anguish rampant within a family that occupies sardine-can-sized living quarters in a provincial seaport town....

KEEP IT TO OURSELVES Crusty and cantankerous, Miller barked out commands to his bandsmen and interspersed his lyrics with sly, half-whispered asides and slices of worldly folk wisdom. His voice, with its warm, throaty vibrato and subtle nuances, was among the most expressive in blues, and he approached soloing with a childlike sense of fun and adventure that hinted at a tenderness submerged beneath the hard-bitten cynicism. His songs spun convoluted tales of outrageous relationships and unlikely sexual misadventures, fables he offered up as life lessons to both himself and his audience with his trademark ribald humor and occasional forays into spine-chilling poetic imagery and penetrating emotional insight....

They’re fed up and they’re not going to take it anymore. In an effort to counter crime and mayhem in their streets, four community groups in Uptown have banded together to hire a private security force to patrol their neighborhoods. After a two-month stint last fall, the security firm is back this year patrolling the streets of Uptown in their brown uniforms and brown squad cars. This year they’ve been hired to patrol three additional Uptown neighborhoods: Lakeside, Sheridan Park, and an area just south of Clarendon Park....

“May I have your attention please,” the loudspeaker said after we’d been sitting on the motionless Ravenswood train at Belmont for a number of minutes. “Because trains are not moving, there will be a Ravenswood shuttle bus making regular Ravenswood stops to the end of the line.” “There is no more Ravenswood running tonight.” He handed out transfers–punched NSM, not E for emergency, which you usually get when something breaks down–and we straggled out into the drizzly November night to wait for the Belmont bus, or whatever....

A few Sundays back, Jim Hart was canoeing down the North Branch of the Chicago River near Oakton Avenue, in the middle of the forest preserve. Trees were everywhere he looked–including, he was suddenly shocked to see, in the middle of the stream. “I said, oh my god–some guy must have bought a new chain saw and couldn’t wait to go crazy with it.” “I am damned upset,” says Frese, who has canoed on the North Branch for over 50 years....

John Cassavetes’s first crime thriller (Gloria was the second), a post-noir masterpiece, failed miserably at the box office when it was first released in 1976; two years later, he released this recut, shorter, and equally good version, which didn’t fare much better. Actually more a personal and deeply felt character study than a routine action picture, it follows the last days of Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara at his very best), the charismatic owner of an LA strip joint who recklessly gambles his way into such debt with the mob that he has to bump off a Chinese bookie to settle his accounts....

William Shakespeare’s been good to Claire Bloom–she was launched as a star at age 21 in Romeo and Juliet at London’s Old Vic in 1952–and Bloom’s been good to him too. In this one-woman dramatic reading she focuses on some of his most interesting, complex characters: her Juliet is famous for its radiance and strength, and she also delivers the goods with Othello’s Desdemona, Coriolanus’s Volumnia, Julius Caesar’s Portia, Henry VIII’s Catherine of Aragon, and Twelfth Niqht’s Viola....

A FAMILY AFFAIR Worse yet, though A Family Affair is a fine example of the reliable comedy formula of the fox outfoxed, Ostrovsky had the temerity to depict a property crime without providing a proper punishment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As if Ostrovsky were punishing Bolshov’s upwardly mobile cheating, he’s given the merchant just the family he deserves, a horror clan right out of The Little Foxes–Lipochka, a snobbish, acid-tongued, gold-digging daughter, and Agrafena, Bolshov’s prudish, hysterical wife....

Friday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year Governor Jim Thompson commuted the sentence of Leslie Brown, who had admitted she’d killed her husband. Brown’s defense had been straightforward; she’d endured her husband’s abuse for years. Brown’s lawyer, Margaret Byrne, a part-time instructor at Loyola University whose law practice focuses on battered women, presents Domestic Violence and the Courts, a free seminar at 3 at Loyola’s Crown Center, 6525 N....

More than one thousand people showed up after work at 225 W. Wacker on June 12 to see what the Italians are up to in vacuum cleaners and pharmacists’ trays these days, which says something about the dearth of entertainment options in the Loop after five. The event was a private reception held to celebrate the opening of the Italian design exhibit, Compasso d’Oro. Good design exploits materials for their qualities and not just their cost....

A fascinating and highly moving documentary by Jonathan Demme about his cousin Robert Castle, whom he hadn’t seen for 30 years when he started making this film. A 60-year-old white Episcopal minister working in Harlem with a multiracial and multidenominational congregation, Castle is a passionately committed community organizer who started out in Jersey City and forged strong links with the Black Panthers and other radical organizations of the 60s and 70s....

Desecration: City Sues Flag Artists Somewhere in the recesses of this city are hidden nine works of art that mess with the Stars and Stripes. You may never see this art. Its makers fear being tossed into jail for violating Chicago’s amazing new “Desecration of Flags” ordinance. An open call went out to Chicago artists, and in mid-September the Committee launched “Inalienable Rights, Alienable Wrongs,” two months of exhibits, debates, performances, readings, and what-have-you....

I went to see the Field Museum’s new bird fossil on Monday. They were still setting it up when I got there, so I waited around for a half an hour or so for the privilege of being one of the first to see it. Of course, they got almost everything wrong. Specimens were few in those days. In some cases, Hawkins had nothing but a skull, so he had to imagine the rest of the body....

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE With Dennis Quaid, Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, John Doe, Lisa Blount, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Trey Wilson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, this absence of innocence gives most of the movie a note of condescension that interferes with our belief in the characters–not only Jerry Lee Lewis himself, as played by Dennis Quaid, but also his 13-year-old bride Myra (Winona Ryder), his cousin Jimmy Swaggart (Alec Baldwin), and all the other principals....