Howard Medley, once among City Hall’s most influential political operators, slips through the lobby of his Hyde Park apartment building looking for a pay phone. And then–starting in 1987–Medley did something incredibly stupid: unwittingly or not, he got involved with an operator who was out to bilk the CTA of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Medley called it a legitimate business relationship. But federal prosecutors accused him of taking a bribe, and a jury agreed....
In Chicago, even-numbered years bring the odd productions from around the world to town. At least they have since 1986, when Jane Nicholl Sahlins, Bernard Sahlins, and Pam Marsden first launched this sometimes controversial, visionary biennial event. When the festival was founded, Chicago was routinely omitted from major national theater tours, whose producers gauged that the attentions of Windy City audiences were preempted by local shows. Although that has changed in the past year, the festival is still Chicago’s only affirmation that there’s more to French, British, and Canadian theater, say, than Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, and Aspects of Love....
Leonard Bernstein was an outstanding pianist who wrote some of his best music for the instrument. Before he died last year, he entrusted his recent piano writings to Michael Barrett, who apprenticed with the maestro for almost a decade. The keeper of the flame has the characteristic Bernstein versatility: he’s a recitalist, conductor, and man of the theater. Trained at San Francisco Conservatory, Barrett, still in his 30s, has already won a Grammy and is in charge of musical chores at the Lincoln Center Theater–on top of a hectic itinerary on the road....
Lead Story About 140 different home video games circulating in Austria and Germany feature Nazis as heroes. In one game the player is commandant of a death camp and wins points for gassing prisoners and selling lamp shades and gold fillings. Turks, along with Jews, are the victims. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A November Gallup poll revealed that 78 percent of Americans believe in heaven and 60 percent in hell, the highest such figures in about 40 years....
If Michael Flores, grand pooh-bah of the Psychotronic Film Society, pope of the Church of the SubGenius, and steady combatant of the forces of evil in the form of the liberal police state, good taste, and the Film Center, had a dream of all dreams, it might involve a voice in the sky asking him if he would be interested in programming a film series in an intimate downtown theater that practically nobody even knew existed....
Mayor Daley relished the year 1967. Around the country, blacks trapped and packed in steaming, stinking ghettos lashed out–in Newark, in Detroit, in more than 140 cities that summer. Not in Chicago, though. In Chicago, we had programs–“positive, constructive programs,” Daley said. In his successful bid to bring the Democratic National Convention to Chicago, he boasted of his city’s racial harmony. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The day following King’s assassination in 1968–the first day of the rioting–was Daley’s 13th anniversary as mayor, but he knew better than to spend his day celebrating....
To the editors: Actually, local growth started falling behind the nation’s job growth rate after 1929. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One can but marvel at Markusen’s ability to write such a comprehensive essay on Chicago’s job decline without once citing a number of jobs gained or lost, or a single reference to previous work done on this topic. Better yet, she is able to complain that, in the middle 1980s, while Chicago’s economy “went through the floor,” it was “hard to find how bad things really were from the city’s newspapers,” and that the local economy is “enormously understudied....
Dept. of things not likely to be mass produced. U. of C. biologist Michael Dickinson on the equipment he needs to study the physiology and aerodynamics of fly flight: “I can’t just call up Fisher Scientific and say ‘I would like to buy an automated flight simulator for tethered flies.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Here’s the real deal killer,” writes Ed Zotti, explaining why the city has trouble marketing its vacant land to businesses (Chicago Enterprise, November): “Potential liability for environmental cleanup....
For more than 21 years numerous official and unofficial investigations have attempted to answer the myriad questions surrounding the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Though a small-time escaped convict named James Earl Ray is serving a 99-year sentence for the killing, federal authorities conceded in 1979 that there probably was some kind of conspiracy. No coconspirator has ever been caught, however, and for ten years after the assassination none was even sought....
They gather in the chapel, their signal seven rings of the bell on the monastery roof. The abbot gently raps on the wooden desk that holds his Psalter. “O Lord, open our lips,” one monk quietly begins. “And our mouth shall declare your praise,” respond his religious brothers. This is matins, the first of seven daily “divine offices,” or times of prayer. During matins, the monks precisely recite 12 psalms and a set selection of scriptural readings....
Everywhere you go you hear people say, “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait ten minutes and it’ll change.” As though where they live is the only place with variable weather. But who really has the right to say this? I leave it to you to decide what constitutes variability, but I’d suggest a frequency of noticeable day-to-day changes, i.e., sunny-rainy, rainy-sunny, and significant temperature difference. –Doug Stewart, Dallas...
The 28th Chicago International Film Festival moves into its top-heavy second week, with a disproportionate number of high points scheduled for this weekend. The first four features that I cited last week as my favorites among the festival selections I’d seen so far–Actress, Angel of Fire, Hyenas, and Reservoir Dogs–will all be showing simultaneously this Friday night. Admittedly, all except Hyenas will be screened again, and two (including Hyenas) have been screened already, but a few more scheduling conflicts crop up again later, e....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rather than review Mr. Daley’s eight year record on utilities, Mr. Cassel merely criticizes the State’s Attorney for agreeing to a five-year rate freeze plan for Commonwealth Edison which was opposed by Mr. Cassel’s group Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. Furthermore, although he discusses the rate freeze plan for nine paragraphs, Mr. Cassel does not mention the fact that the recent rate increases granted to Edison by the Illinois Commerce Commission were nearly twice as high for typical residential users as the rate freeze plan which was rejected by the Commission....
HUNTER, WARRIOR, SHAMAN So it is with his newest work, Hunter, Warrior, Shaman. This piece actually consists of three pieces: two videos, Shaman and Hunter (which both employ the delightful monologuist Mark Roth), and a handmade book entitled Warrior. Taken as a whole, these three pieces seem to examine the dichotomy between nature and culture, suggesting that the standardizing norms of culture supplant nature’s spontaneity, creating the monomaniacal figures of the hunter and the warrior, who try to hunt down or suppress nature....
Chicago’s first annual American Indian film festival will take place Friday through Tuesday, January 20 through 24, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Facets is presenting the festival in collaboration with the American Indian Health Service of Chicago and the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian in New York. Tickets for each of the five programs are $5.00; series tickets are $20, and tickets to the reception for the Chicago makers of Box of Treasures at 8:30 on Friday, January 20, are $10....
While Chicago boasts a slew of excellent local jazz musicians, most of them toil away in a variety of fairly anonymous settings. So when they rearrange themselves into an unexpected configuration such as Brackets, and the spotlight shifts, the rest of us are grateful for the prod to sit up and take notice. Drummer Mike Raynor is fairly new on the city scene, but bassist Dan DeLorenzo is a busy veteran; together they provide a slightly prickly, bare-bones-jazz-cellar backdrop for the unorthodox front line of trumpet and bass trumpet....
Coming Attraction: The Amazing Red-Hot Exploding Shakespeare Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mary Pat Sullivan, director of marketing and public relations for the Chicago festival, says, “Already we’re getting calls from all over the country for Renaissance tickets.” But to get first dibs on those tickets, festivalgoers will have to purchase multishow packages. Renaissance company tickets come with three of the five packages that go on sale later this month....
EXACT CHANGE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, that wasn’t too far off the mark. Imagine “Who’s on First?” with dialogue by Harold Pinter and played by the Bowery Boys, with sight gags lifted from the Three Stooges, the Muppets, and I tre zanni, and you’ll get the flavor of the start of this play. Eddie, Ricky, and Richie, three overgrown delinquents who can’t seem to do anything right (and who also happen to be Vietnam war veterans), have just bungled their latest money-making scheme; having kidnapped the boyfriend or husband of Ricky’s ex-wife (it’s hard to tell from the play’s chaotic slapstick beginning) they quickly lost him at a tollbooth, and have repaired to a deserted warehouse in the Bronx to figure out what to do....
I’ve been thinking so much about what to say in my last column that I’m beginning to identify with Neil Armstrong. Neil had to come up with something memorable to mark his landing on the moon, and even though my audience is a bit smaller than his, I did feel a need to deliver something extraordinary to mark my departure after ten years of writing Field & Street. But so far all my ideas are about as striking as “Gee, it’s great to be here on the moon....
The prairie opening in the middle of Cap Sauers Holdings is the most beautiful place in the state of Illinois. I suppose some people will argue with an assertion that unequivocal, but those people are wrong, and I can prove it. I came in from the south end of the holdings. I left my car by the roadside and followed a footpath that has been created by the steps of volunteer workers over the past four years....
