“Of all the obstacles facing Chicago’s poor, probably the most dire and insurmountable is the lack of available basic health care,” according to In Transition (Winter), published by Travelers & Immigrants Aid of Chicago. What does “available” mean? “At the Englewood [public-health] Clinic the waiting time for an appointment (except in cases of pregnancy) is now six months.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Male bonding by proxy....
THE GIRLS OF THEIR DREAMS On top of that, director Joe Feliciano–the “dad” of the ensemble–displays more enthusiasm than experience or sound judgment. The Stronger, for example, is done as a shadow play. A gauze curtain separates the audience from the stage, and a strong light behind the actresses throws their shadows onto the scrim. That’s what the audience sees throughout this 15-minute piece–the actresses themselves are never visible. While this certainly eliminates the need for costly costumes, it also reduces the performers to mere silhouettes....
KING LEAR Jean-Luc Godard’s latest monkey wrench aimed at the Cinematic Apparatus–that multifaceted, impregnable institution that regulates the production, distribution, exhibition, promotion, consumption, and discussion of movies–goes a lot further than most of its predecessors in creatively obfuscating most of the issues it raises. Admittedly, Hail Mary caused quite a ruckus on its own, but mainly among people who never saw the film. King Lear, which I calculate to be Godard’s 34th feature to date, has the peculiar effect of making everyone connected with it in any shape or form–director, actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors, spectators, critics–look, and presumably feel, rather silly....
It’s sometimes forgotten that there’s a strong link between the blues, white folk music, and country and western. In the first half of the 20th century, different musical and cultural traditions coexisted uneasily throughout the south and intertwined in complex ways. The black plantation musician of the 1920s led a dual life. He played blues and contemporary dance numbers for black house parties and juke joints, but was also often called upon to perform at white functions....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I thought that Bob McClory’s article on Candida-associated illness [“The Yeast of Our Problems,” January 22] was interesting and well-written, but quite slanted, and I would like to offer a dissenting view. It seemed to me that Mr. McClory was wholeheartedly endorsing the validity of the concepts underlying the so-called Yeast Connection, with barely a reluctant nod to the great majority of physicians and scientists who take a very dim view of these unproven theories....
Like brothers and sisters fighting over the keys to heaven, the various Jewish sects disagree over the degree to which Jewish laws and customs must be followed, and among the family members, the Lubavitcher Hasidim fight the hardest. A Hasidic sect devoted to the strict observance of ritual laws, the Lubavitchers grudgingly admit that everyone will go to heaven–Christians, Buddhists, Muslims–but they believe that their ways are the holiest and that their mission is to persuade other Jews that theirs is the correct way through the gates....
At a Lithuanian independence day rally last week at Daley Plaza one sign read, “Lithuania–Raped by Gorbachev.” A regular at the gulf war demos brings a caricature of our commander in chief with a grotesque erection in the form of a gushing oil derrick. One sign maker at another protest urged, “Let Barbara Face Bush’s Naked Aggression.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This exhibit, their fifth, has upset its share of art lovers and dickheads alike....
“I went to do a drug deal, OK, and there were two girls on the bed–it was a small one-bedroom apartment, and they were making out,” says Timothy, his sentences tumbling fast one after the other. “And the guy came in. The guy was good-looking and young. And I’m getting the drugs out. And I turn around, and he takes a full Coke bottle and totally clobbers me, OK? And I’m like down....
BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED With Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and Michael Carmine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While some of Spielberg’s proxy directors have used the formula cleverly (Robert Zemeckis in Back to the Future) or have even subverted it (Joe Dante in Gremlins), mostly the films emerge with a cookie-cutter uniformity (Innerspace, Young Sherlock Holmes, Harry and the Hendersons). Spielberg himself is the most rigid interpreter, and ironically his recent self-conscious attempts to shake off the formula (The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun) have shown an even greater enslavement to it....
When student protests in 1988 led the faculty at Stanford University to include books by women and non-Europeans in the school’s required first-year curriculum, Secretary of Education William Bennett denounced the changes as “regressive,” and the Wall Street Journal chided Stanford for continuing to “revere” the “dreams of the 1960s.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why do modest reforms like these cause such apoplexy in the Wall Street Journal and among some professors and Reagan and Bush appointees?...
EARTH STATEMENTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ben Pranger’s piece, Elergy, located in the main gallery space, has an ethereal presence. The artist has tied fresh leaves together with nylon string and suspended numerous strips of them from the ceiling. Interspersed throughout are handbags fabricated of chicken wire, also hanging from the ceiling, that contain slabs of ice with pennies embedded in them. As the ice melts, the pennies fall off and the water drips into pans....
You may find yourself living in a beautiful house “Tell us you love it!” laughed Andy Patrick, a neighbor of Charley’s. Andy, a 30-year-old marketing consultant who lives in a large loft, met Charley a month ago while walking his dog Bodie, an Australian shepherd, along some abandoned railroad tracks; other loft-living young professionals regularly jog there. A resident of Charley’s locale since April, Andy lives near a community of homeless people living in tents, shacks, cars, and empty warehouses....
SCREAMING TO BE FREE FROM THE ICON TREE In her multimedia piece Screaming to Be Free From the Icon Tree, performance poet Kristin Amondsen seeks to throw off the shackles of modern icons and live a free and unrestrained life. These icons have been painted (by Amondsen and Shelly Aldrich) on an “icon tree,” a sort of doorway at center stage that has five window shades attached to it. The shades are pulled out when needed to reveal paintings of what Amondsen sees as oppressive icons....
To younger listeners, Marian McPartland may actually be the better known of these two–her long-running public radio program, Piano Jazz, has ensured that–but jazz history has fully lionized the man who lent Marian his good name. Jimmy McPartland, who played cornet, was a charter member of the Austin High Gang, the clique of young white musicians at Chicago’s Austin High School who in the mid-20s came up with their own version of the transplanted New Orleans sounds of Armstrong and King Oliver....
Any list of the decade’s best guitarists ought to include John Scofield, and if the heading is jazz guitarists, he’d better be near the top. Traditional jazz fans will argue this fact, and that’s a compliment to Scofield, who has showered his music with influences ranging from Wes Montgomery and John Coltrane to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. But that’s introductory stuff anyway: Scofield long ago found his own voice among that chorus and is clearly an influential stylist in his own right–one of a handful of guitarists who have changed jazz’s current approach to the instrument....
It’s 11 AM on a breezy September morning, too cool for swimming, and yet Kevin Cummings is crouched over, foraging like a raccoon in the swirling, waist-deep brown water of the Kishwaukee River. Two inches of rain fell yesterday, and the river is swollen with cold, murky water. He’s only a few feet offshore, but the river runs deep there and Cummings must struggle to stay upright in the current as he gropes along the bottom with outstretched hands....
MADEMOISELLE JULIE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact there is a lot to like about Fegan’s script, which is less an adaptation than a translation of Strindberg’s play into a Louisianan dialect. Fegan’s dialogue is fresh and believable, especially when compared with the all-too-often stilted “definitive” English translations of Strindberg’s work. In the paperback edition of Strindberg’s plays I’ve owned since high school are lines such as “I would have scratched your eyes out!...
TERMINAL BAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even if they were the last three people left alive in New York City you wouldn’t want to know any of them–and you certainly wouldn’t want to be any of them. Dwayne, a homosexual schoolboy, has returned home to find his family fled and the house in the hands of the servants, who now refuse him even his overcoat....
“He was local, wasn’t he?” a talent agent says about a second-rung stand-up comic in Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play Comedians. It’s a devastating put-down, “local”–a dismissal of an entertainer who knocked ’em dead on his home turf but couldn’t raise a chuckle off it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thus it is that a multinational, multiracial group of theater folk have been gathering in the basement of a Hyde Park church for the past few weeks to rethink Comedians for Chicago in the 90s....
AN ACTOR’S REVENGE ALONE ON THE PACIFIC Scopophilia is a Freudian term that means the love of gazing, or pleasure in seeing. A punning use of the word often comes to mind when I consider the pleasures to be found in viewing ‘Scope movies. ‘Scope is movie buffs’ jargon for the anamorphic widescreen process known as CinemaScope (introduced by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1953 with The Robe) and a number of similar wide-screen formats; they dominated commercial filmmaking across much of the globe for well over a decade....
