Last Sunday morning, as I was out for a constitutional (suited to my kind of constitution, complete with cigar), I was met on a shady side street by the scraping, jangly noise of an aluminum baseball bat being dragged on the sidewalk behind a medium-size boy of about ten. The boy came on, shoulders slumped, bat dragging, but as we neared he quickly scooped the bat up and held it in two hands in front of him, so that he could speak without any background noise....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, in order not to dispute that the author of this article had heard this story, let’s assume that there is such a person. But then, not only should the author of this article have taken this story with a grain of salt, but almost every word of it. Moreover, in this tale there is the unrealistic element of the adults who lured this boy (or vice versa) into homosexual activities....
On Thursday, March 21, parents at the Oscar Mayer Elementary School, 2250 N. Clifton, will lead prospective parents on a tour of the facilities. They’ll show the usual sights: the art and music rooms, the computer lab, the two well-stocked libraries, and the newly renovated playground. They’ll recite statistics: higher than average reading and math test scores (at least higher than the average for Chicago’s public schools), low class sizes, and low rates of student truancy and disobedience....
“Learn about one of the greatest business opportunities ever offered to the American public,” the ad said. “Your cost is dinner at Mr. Steer.” Dalenberg said yes before the waitress even got both words out. Then she said to me, “You should try the prime rib dinner here on Friday night. It’s really good and not expensive.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Everyone’s into herbs today,” said Dalenberg....
Northeast of Kalamazoo, the fierce flat midwest begins to mellow into sandy hills. Middle-aged sugar maples and oaks arch over the county blacktop road. About 175 miles from the Loop is a gravel crossroads marked by what from a distance looks like a big white life preserver with a brown board underneath. Today, those founders might think the camp’s mission has shrunk to a kids’ summer camp and a weekend retreat for urbanites, distinguished primarily by its rustic facilities and an unusual amount of internal politicking....
She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” on the organ at a cremation. “When I’m doing some of these things, I try not to make fun of the people, even though sometimes it gets hilarious. But it’s not my job to get judgmental. I just do what they tell me,” she says. “The songs mean a lot to people–it was their relative’s favorite or had some major significance in the person’s life....
Jamaica-born, Alabama-bred Eddie Kirkland is a Detroit legend, having accompanied John Lee Hooker in the late 40s and early 50s and then gone on to make a name for himself as a flamboyant soul-and-blues shouter with such R & B greats as King Curtis and, briefly, Otis Redding. But no mere biographical sketch can do Kirkland justice: dressed in a spangled turban like some down-home Sun Ra, firing out guitar riffs that fuse the rawness of Hooker with wall-of-sound screams borrowed from Hendrix into an ecstatically explosive personal style, Kirkland cuts one of the most outrageous figures in contemporary blues....
I know, I know–when you hear the words Elvis impersonator, you reach for your revolver, too. But El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, is something special. From the splendid pun of his name to his heavily parodic stage show El Vez mixes multicultural polemics with popular culture absurdities to create a world with implications that go far beyond Elvis. This is not fun for the whole family: purists hate him and when I saw him a couple of years ago the show also featured two strange, surreal show bands–one with a tall, bald front man in a sort of Uncle Sam getup who, disgustingly, drank the fluorescent fluid out of a glow stick and spit it down his shirtfront....
Since we are going to have to suffer through the bad parts of the greenhouse effect, we might as well enjoy the good parts. Our sunny, warm, nearly snowless January may be a sign of our impending doom, but at least it will cut into the profits of Peoples Gas. Fortunately, Carolina wrens sing a very distinctive song, a bright, whistled phrase usually described as sounding very much like “teakettle, teakettle....
Both Drake and Zerang play a wealth of percussion instruments that encompass musical traditions from the southern tip of Africa to the Middle East and the subcontinent of India; in this concert, however, they’ll restrict themselves to two sets of good ol’ American trap drums as they honor the memory of Ed Blackwell. And while anyone who passionately hates drum solos should spend the night elsewhere, others will find a layered trove of rhythmic interplay and even strong infusions of melody in these duets....
HIGH SPIRITS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The audiences that saw it loved it–but not that many saw it. When it came to musical comedy, 1963-64 was also the season for big, brassy, high-stepping, all-American shows. Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, and Janis Paige in Here’s Love were the big winners, swamping quirkier attractions such as Angela Lansbury in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle, Inga Swenson in Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s 110 in the Shade, and Florence Henderson in Noel Coward’s The Girl Who Came to Supper as well as Lillie....
KING LEAR At the curtain, there was no standing ovation, no protracted applause. But, really, the worst that can be said of this production is that it’s mediocre. No one in the cast is embarrassingly bad, at least not by American standards, and when it comes to Shakespeare I rank us somewhere behind Canada. But King Lear, of all Shakespeare’s plays, seems most cruelly mocked by mediocrity. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Loitering at the intersection of New York jazz, southern blues, and cowboy philosophy, Mose Allison remains something of a cult figure. But then what would you expect from a pianist who made some of his first recordings with Stan Getz, scored one of his biggest hits singing a tune by Willie Dixon, and writes a song like the postapocalyptic “Ever Since the World Ended (I Don’t Go Out as Much)”? Allison’s bluesy baritone and unreconstructed Mississippi drawl are not society’s preferred vehicle for pungent satire and mordant wit; but, as with the work of Roy Blount Jr....
MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION Even Mrs. Warren’s less sensational but much more subversive observation that “the only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her” comes across now as standard, if somewhat premature, feminism. And again, not at all unpleasant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yet, seeing Mrs....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October 1989 prison inmate Vincent Federico, applying for a furlough in Massachusetts, thoughtlessly listed as his destination a safe house in Medford, Massachusetts, at which New England Mafia members were conducting an induction ceremony that weekend for new associates (including, allegedly, Federico). The FBI showed up too, and in April 1991 a judge decided the evidence gathered then about their illegal activities would be admissible in court against those in attendance....
Perpetuating Pogo But overall, it wasn’t fine. From the beginning Sternecky was more comfortable drawing the strip than Doyle was writing it. “We brought our own ideas of what we thought Pogo was to it,” Sternecky remembers. “We focused on different sides of the strip. What I felt was not as strong in Larry’s writing as it should be was a sense of camaraderie among the characters. It wasn’t quite loose enough for my tastes....
SUFFERING FOOLS The characters in Douglas Post’s new play Suffering Fools are suffering, in part, because they do not possess the “sociological imagination.” They can’t see beyond their own personal problems, so they wallow, self-absorbed and impotent, in private little spheres, unaware of their connections to the rest of the world. Only Katy, the bright, sensitive young wife of James, a disillusioned reporter for the Chicago Tribune, has the power to see beyond herself, and she is–wouldn’t you know it?...
Winner of the Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival, Zhang Yimou’s 1987 feature from the People’s Republic of China mixes local history and legend. It follows the adventures of a young bride who is sold by her father to an elderly and wealthy leper, then is carried off by a chair bearer posing as a highwayman, and eventually becomes the head of a sorghum-wine distillery. This is the first feature directed by the cinematographer of Yellow Earth and The Big Parade, and its main virtues are visual–handsome ‘Scope compositions of landscapes and sorghum waving in the wind, and a deft use of color filters....
I’ll call him Mr. Trinh. He’s a small but physically imposing man, sitting in the visitors’ lounge of an intensive care unit at Cook County Hospital. Although he is past 55 his hair is still jet black, and this makes him appear no more than 40. As he speaks, his demeanor is impassive, even though he is waiting for his son to die. He pulls a set of rosary beads from his pocket, clutches them in his right hand, and begins his story with an air of dignified resignation....
War for Kids Dozens of new books pour uninvited into the Reader office each week, half of them posing formulaic solutions to the quandary of how to fill an inconsequential life with wealth and meaning. One recent oddity is something else entirely, yet it touches on the theme of mattering. It’s an adolescents’ history of the Spanish Civil War; we read it and now we hope our oldest daughter will....
