Contrary to the rumors, there is no Axe Street manifesto of political correctness. Nor is there a board of directors, a corporate structure, a millionaire backer, a profit motive, or a bottom line. Come August, however, things will change. The collective’s four-year lease is up, the building has been sold, and its new owners are considering commercial development. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While it lasted, Axe St....
From Ben Vaughn’s rather inauspicious beginnings (the Ben Vaughn Combo originally consisted of Vaughn and a guy on snare) the pride of Camden (New Jersey) is now rock’s leading funnyman. He’s not a parodist, exactly, and he’s not really a wit, either. Mostly what he does is construct effortless pop ditties on such essential subjects as “Trashpickin’.” Often, Vaughn is simply brilliant, as on “Daddy’s Gone for Good,” in which the bad news is broken to the kids via a gorgeous Beach Boys groove, or on “Rhythm Guitar,” a long overdue tribute to every rock band’s drone (“If you listen real hard / Y’know you might hear me”)....
Friday 18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a fine state of affairs when a serious artist like Ice-T gets hounded out of record stores, yet a man guilty of aesthetic crimes far more numerous and serious–Lee Greenwood–is elevated to the status of political icon. Country star Greenwood, of course, is the author of “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a song that unites the ultraschmaltz of “(You’re) Having My Baby” with a pandering patriotic appeal suspiciously similar to the brand proffered for a dozen years now by scoundrels name of Reagan, Bush, and Quayle....
CIRCUS OF BLOOD, SMORGASBORD OF PAIN Prop Theatre at the Garage The first tale consists of little more than an extended interview with a female mortician (Ariel Brenner) who has a rather perverse relationship with her corpses. The director, Jonathan Lavan, helpfully illustrates the mortician’s perversion with a disgusting bit of mimed necrophilia in the stage area behind the interview. Watching this gratuitously voyeuristic ending, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the actress (Deborah Sale) who must fake sex with a corpse three nights a week just because some creepy director told her to....
DETERMINATIONS Although this story is spoken by an actress, it has the ring of truth, and in fact it was taken from the reminiscences of a French woman in the 1950s. Part of the scene’s effectiveness comes from the nonlinear way in which it is ordered. We first hear of a repugnant act of violence, and then of another one that occurred years earlier, and only then do we understand that one caused the other....
Here’s a rollicking night of Texas roadhouse exuberance we’re not likely to forget. Delbert McClinton is something of a cult legend among aficionados. His cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Wake Up Baby,” released on Le Cam in 1960, was the first record by a white artist to be played on KNOK in Fort Worth; when he toured England as a member of Bruce Channel’s band in the early 60s the opening act was a group of aspiring rockers called the Beatles, and he gave their guitarist John Lennon some harp pointers between shows; since then he’s built a reputation as a leather-lunged R & B shouter and a harp man capable of generating as much heat as anyone on the scene....
Next Tuesday’s Democratic primary ballot will confront voters with the usual bewildering array of judicial candidates. Among some 86 candidates for a total of 17 judgeships, voters will find the traditional assortment of also-rans, has-beens, party hacks, aspiring youngsters, ethnic opportunists, and, here and there, a few really good judges–like Dom Rizzi (line 157 on the ballot) and Charles Freeman (line 159), who unfortunately are vying for one of two state supreme court vacancies; Blanche Manning (line 164), who is running for the other supreme court vacancy; and Joseph Gordon (line 166), who is running for the appellate court....
Number of recycled plastic bottles required to make one eight-inch-square, six-foot-long plastic black “timber” for Chicago Park District play lots: 1,200. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bad news is that the good news did not apply to black people. Illinois’ statewide infant mortality rate dropped 9 percent in 1990, from 11.7 per 1,000 to 10.7–but the rate for African American babies rose slightly, from 22....
To the editors: “Never kick a man when he’s down,” and certainly Bruno Bettelheim is now down. This saying should really not apply to Bettelheim because he got a free ride from the psychoanalytic mafia in this country for over forty years, and now the worm is turning. Those of us who really knew him best, former Orthogenic School students and counselors, finally have an audience that has been created as a result of his bizarre death, and we deserve to get a few kicks in after all these years [Letters, April 6 and 20; May 4, 11, and 25; and June 8 and 15]....
THE PIANO LESSON The centerpiece of this story is a piano, which is the legacy of the Charles family. Back before the Civil War, some of the Charles family, who were slaves in Mississippi, were traded for the piano. And the father, who was kept behind, was told by his master to ornament the woodwork on the piano. So he carved the legs like a totem pole with the images of his lost family....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sheehan’s insecurity comes to the fore when he thinks he can force other faculty members out of his way who pose a threat to his comfortable nihilism which is nothing new; the Neo-Liberalism, the well worded nihilism, the shock value of his iconoclast script was the stuff Nazi-Germany was made of. All Hitler did was get a bunch of malcontents together, bridge a here and now philosophy with ancient Germanic, Teutonic animism and “presto” give a passionate rock ‘n’ roll type appeal to an emotional delivery and you’ve got a new religion....
Please end the anxiety I’ve suffered over this question. What are those white spots that appear on my fingernails and where do they come from? –Katina Uribe, Flower Mound, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But don’t sweat, you probably don’t have any of them. Mere spots are extremely common and undoubtedly harmless. The folklore about them goes back for centuries; they’ve been called “gift spots,” “fortune spots,” and for some reason “sweethearts....
This film in English by the gifted Polish writer-director Agnieszka Holland (who wrote Anna and directed A Woman Alone), receiving its exclusive U.S. premiere here, is a fiction film based on the real-life assassination of Solidarity chaplain Father Jerzy Popieluszko by secret police in 1984. While there’s a certain awkwardness inherent in making what is essentially an English-language Polish film on a Polish subject in France with English and American actors, this is a far cry from simple Solidarity agitprop....
To the editors: The Orthodoxy in Europe divided the Jews long before the Holocaust by cooperating with the Nazis by preventing the Hundreds of Thousands of young Jews in Europe, willing and able even to walk to Israel, to escape from the slaughter, well known to every young and old what the Nazis had in store. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Instead of facilitating the escape, the Orthodoxy in full control of the Jewish communal life in Europe, imposed their will upon the young Jews, to wait for the Messiah....
THE VOYAGE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe is the first installment in the Lyric’s “Toward the 21st Century” initiative. Much heralded by the critical establishment, this docket of contemporary works planned for the next decade has been causing some apprehension in the ranks of Lyric Opera subscription holders. And that subscription program is the principal reason that a relatively new and almost entirely unheard of work can claim eight sold-out performances....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story rests heavily on the notion that, to quote from an early paragraph, “If [people wishing to adopt] want an open adoption, where they and the birth mother meet and perhaps keep in touch after the birth, they must [your Italics] adopt privately.” Here and elsewhere, we’re given the message that all agencies are monolithic and inflexible....
ALL SOULS DAY It’s impossible to say how many young Catholic girls seriously considered marrying God when they grew up. I know I did, and I think my cousin did too. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Strange notion, that women can marry God and become saints. Men have often dedicated their lives to God and become saints, but the word “marry” rarely comes into play....
BAAL Sliced Bread Productions at Club Lower Links Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Brecht’s steadfast rejection of anything smacking of pathos or preaching shows that Baal was never intended to be a cautionary tale against a life-style of excess. Written in the wake of World War I, which ruptured the political and moral guidelines that had governed Europe for centuries, Baal is a mythic drama whose subject is the primal struggle between life and death in a valueless society....
BEIRUT What they call “the plague” in this drama is transmitted not only through blood and semen but also through sweat, saliva, and any other bodily fluid you could mention. The government has responded to the epidemic with mandatory blood tests, quarantined communities, and a ban on sex for the uninfected. Torch, the male lover in this melodrama, has tested positive but so far shows none of the gruesome symptoms, which he periodically describes in lurid detail....
AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE The signature of this work is restraint of a most tricky and un-American kind. The glowing chartreuse backdrop is etched with widely separated swirling black lines that are both sensuous and geometric; the simple draped costumes recall Roman togas without duplicating them, as the silvery headdresses recall laurel crowns. Nothing about this ballet intrudes, no feats force themselves on our attention–it’s about as far from busy as dance can get....
