Art Hodes is a historian of conventional stripe: in the early 40s he began writing articles and producing radio programs about the earlier styles of jazz that had influenced him. But hearing him at the piano affords a history lesson, too: his unhurried tempi and unpretentious technique serve the music by opening you to the emotional context of his art–rather than wowing you with showy licks–and it’s hard to get too much of that....
Contemporary European composers are by and large ignored this side of the Atlantic, so it’s no surprise that Ada Gentile, Sonia Bo, and Betty Olivero–who are Italian and only in their 30s–are virtually unknown in the U.S. In fact, the chamber works by all three that make up half of this free recital arranged by the Art Institute (to draw attention to its new 20th-century wing) have never been recorded. The two I’ve heard are notable for their deliberate dissonance: Gentiles Insight (for two violins and viola) weaves cluttered textures within a narrow range of sounds, evoking only two moods, strident angst and contemplative stillness....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “At 1:35 A.M., June 30, the crew fired the Soyuz retro rockets to deorbit and twelve minutes later separated from the orbital and service modules. At this time, the orbital module was normally separated by 12 pyrotechnic devices which were supposed to fire sequentially, but they incorrectly fired simultaneously, and this caused a ball joint in the capsule’s pressure equalization valve to unseat allowing air to escape....
The lady on the phone took a moment to compose herself. When her crying had stopped, she tried to explain the situation to me. “I’m glad you called,” I reassured her. “How long has she been missing?” She agreed and asked if she could come along on the track. I told her that was a good idea, and we arranged to meet at the site later in the evening. After I hung up, I pushed aside my half-eaten breakfast....
CLARENCE DARROW at the Chicago Dramatists Workshop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rintels adapted this monologue from the novel Clarence Darrow for the Defense by Irving Stone, who specialized in writing fictionalized biographies of famous people (Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, Sigmund Freud in The Passions of the Mind). In writing these books, Stone applied his novelist’s imagination to the facts of the famous person’s life, producing narratives that paid more allegiance to drama than to history....
A fanatic, according to the legendary “Archey Road” barkeep Mr. Dooley, is someone who does what the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case. Mr. Dooley could have added that reformers are the same way: they try to accomplish what the populace would demand if only the populace paid attention. “The people are with us, whether they know it yet or not,” is the battle cry of school-choicers, reproductive-choicers, term-limiters, gun-controllers, and campaign-finance reformers....
SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, more than 200 years later, we are grateful to Goldoni for having preserved on paper a quintessential example of an ephemeral style. And in this season of theatrical openings in which results have fallen so short of expectations–in which so many productions have sunk under the weight of their own intended importance–we can say: thanks to Lifeline Theatre for a show full of exuberant fun and delightful stylishness....
The alto saxophone has recently reestablished its vital niche in modern jazz after years of playing second fiddle to the deeper, more romantic tenor saxophone. The tenor still remains the most popular jazz horn; but the alto’s singular, sexy intensity is again in fashion, and you can thank guys like Jim Snidero for making it so. He’s a bit of a throwback, really: his resume reads like it was written 35 years ago, when virtually every young altoist had paid his dues in a big band (Snidero played with Toshiko Akiyoshi’s) and/or a soul-searing organ outfit (like Jack McDuff’s, where Snidero toiled in the early 80s)....
MAREK’S MONKEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sarah Hughes can’t adjust to the fact that she is getting older and that her husband, once a highly respected doctor, is dead. Her daughter, Margot, a grown woman in her 30s, is still rebelling against her upper-class upbringing by choosing a less honorable career than medicine–she’s a modeling agent–and by becoming sexually involved with “working men” who are two or three octaves lower on the social scale than her father was....
“People am no longer ashamed of their trash,” crows Carl Youngberg, director of “epicure programs” at Neiman-Marcus. This year the store’s new plastic garbage bags are a light green (which N-M shoppers pay to be able to call “paradise jade”). If the 13-gallon size isn’t enough for you, send your servants out for the 33-gallon bag, which N-M says will suffice “for those massive cleanups, both inside and on the estate....
The 96-acre federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia, is surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The penitentiary is set in the rolling Appalachian hills and is modeled after a college campus. Inmates live in ten-person dormitories, called cottages, or in single rooms if they’ve been there a long time. Fifty-eight-year-old Jean Gump receives her husband Joe, and other visitors who make the 12-and-a-half hour drive to see her from Chicago, in a room that resembles an airport lounge, with vinyl chairs and blaring televisions....
It’s a late-winter weeknight in Lake Forest, and family burdens being what they are, people are late for the seven o’clock get-together. The guests, all of them women, trickle in gradually and take their seats in the living room of Bill and Judy Wingader. The room is tastefully decorated with a chintz sofa, wing chairs, a yellow rug, ersatz flowers in baskets, and a ceramic cat lounging on the hearth....
It was a beautiful day for a wake–and for a birthday, our friend Neil (now and forevermore 39) reminded us as we drove down to Comiskey Park last Sunday morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the pale blue sky, only a certain cool slant to the sunlight, reminiscent of college football games. On the way, along Monroe Harbor, we passed the festive balloon arches of the AIDS Walk Chicago–an occasion in keeping with the spirit of the day even if it wasn’t on our agenda....
TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL Given the murky black-and-white photography, the fascination with repulsive medical details, the loony deadpan humor, the impoverished characters and settings, and the dreamlike drift of bizarre and affectless incidents, it’s difficult not to compare Tales From the Gimli Hospital with David Lynch’s Eraserhead. It’s also being distributed mainly (although not yet in Chicago) as a midnight attraction by Ben Barenholtz, the same man who launched Eraserhead on the midnight circuits a dozen years ago....
A Chicagoan in Iowa City Anderson, who’s 54, was proud to report a 3.93 cum in the graduate courses that are leading him to an MA in writing. “They have a lot of writing programs here,” Anderson told us. “The Writers’ Workshop is totally fiction–prose and poetry. Mine is essay writing and nonfiction prose”–he’s concluded that nonfiction is what he’s best at. “The advantage of mine,” he went on, “is that you can take lots of other courses....
This being Chicago, you’d figure that developers would have closed in on the wide open spaces of the tuberculosis sanatorium known as North Park Village as soon as it closed down in 1974. The bulldozers would have followed, plowing over flowers, uprooting trees, and ravaging greenery to make way for ugly high rises, tacky convenience stores, and concrete parking lots. “The community won because they persevered,” says Ramon Muniz, the outgoing assistant deputy commissioner of the Department of General Services who pushed for the agreement despite opposition from city lawyers....
Friday 19 There’s a new place to buy third-world books in the north-Bucktown, lower-Logan Square area; El Yunque Bookstore promises to stock Puerto Rican and other Latin American titles, and material on the third world generally. It’s having a free open house today from 3 to 6, at 2665 W. Fullerton. Call 235-9901. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Citizens Utility Board was formed to represent consumer interests in the state’s regulation of Peoples Gas, Commonwealth Edison, and their ilk, the traditional state regulatory agencies having been less than enthusiastic about the chore over the years....
The Drovers aren’t an easy band to pin down. Their “Celtic rock” is a combination of rock ‘n’ roll and updated traditional music driven by both rockabilly and Irish rhythms. All six of these Chicagoans are either Irish or Irish-American, but their commitment and individual connections to traditional music are more than just an accident of birth. While Moore and O’Shea are the only Drovers who grew up in Ireland, the other members of the band have devoted much time and effort to learning the craft of Irish music....
DOUBLE EXPOSURE How poorly does Alcantar play? Well, the best skits are facile and obvious; the worst are incoherent. One was so pointless I assumed I was missing something. In the skit, Alcantar plays a disc jockey doing an all-night program at radio station WXRT. It’s 4 AM, and he’s interviewing a rock star played by Francesca Rollins, the other member of this two-person show. They’re both sleepy, but they press on, yawning violently and making small talk....
STREET SMART Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meanwhile, in the spacious office of the publisher of a slick city magazine (suspiciously like New York), a smug executive leans back in his chair, tossing off half-baked witticisms, as a writer begs for his professional life. Jonathan Fisher (Reeve), once a promising writer of features, has been demoted to the purgatory of service articles; you know the type: the best ice cream, where to find gourmet-cooking gear, etc....
