ENDGAME Hamm: Mine was always that–Endgame Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For his waiting game, Clov receives a biscuit a day. He wheels Hamm aimlessly around (though the blind man insists on exact placement) and fetches for him the crudely stuffed dog Clov has fashioned. Clov also lugs around and misplaces a stepladder, from which he peers through a broken telescope to report what little he sees....
The rough-legged hawk is one of the best birds on my backyard list. To qualify for the list, the bird doesn’t need to actually enter the yard, but it does have to be visible from the yard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We see rough-legged hawks in the Chicago area only in winter. They nest in the higher latitudes, hunting mostly lemmings on the tundra from the Northwest Territories of Canada to Siberia....
When Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his colleagues were designing posters back in the late 1800s, they didn’t expect them to end up framed on gallery walls. Lautrec, Jules Cheret, Alphonse Mucha, and dozens of other Parisian artists–who had been hired by candy companies, hatmakers, tire manufacturers, theaters, music halls, and so on–were just designing ads. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today those posters, large and small, are still collector’s items....
If you’re going to the galleries next Friday, you’ll walk through darkened rooms and see blank walls. If you’re meeting someone at the Art Institute, the lions may be draped with black cloth. And if you happen to be in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, you won’t see Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. In its place will be a small placard announcing that across the nation that day is “A Day Without Art....
Best known as the wild-acting “Clown Prince of the Blues,” Lefty Dizz plays one-handed guitar, fires off thunderous blasts of distortion, and gyrates and mugs his way through novelties and blues classics with equal flamboyance. What’s easy to overlook is the accomplishment beneath the flash. Dizz is in full command of a wide variety of blues styles, from 50s-era picking to contemporary rock and funk. His comic routines demand superior technical proficiency: dexterous and inventive, he utilizes the entire fretboard to achieve his effects; impeccable timing facilitates athletic stage routines; and a witty sense of ribald irony informs his lyrics and stage patter....
I can’t tell you what she was doing there, in fact I can’t even tell you what I was doing there. All I really can say is that I was there, and so was she. But then what difference did that make? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s how I first noticed her. Those lamps only stay on for like fifteen seconds and then you have to hit that rubber button to get them going again....
GUILTY BY SUSPICION There are plenty of bones one can pick with Guilty by Suspicion, the first Hollywood feature devoted in its entirety to the film-industry blacklist (The Front dealt with TV). Of course there are plenty of bones one can pick with just about any movie, if one is so inclined. But critics, at least, seem more inclined to be so inclined with movies that deal with political subjects. This is not to say that most critics reprove such movies on political grounds; on the contrary, they usually harp on other aspects....
NEW FORMS/CHANCE DANCE FESTIVAL When a dancer hits middle age, everything begins to harden. The joints begin to calcify, setting permanent limits on their, and the dancer’s, movement. The once-exhilarating activity of making and performing dances starts to seem routine, and threatens to become rote repetition. In response many creative dancers throw themselves into technique–perfecting their particular way of moving. The victories are often hard for audiences to see except as a kind of glow the performance gives off....
Something truly astounding happened in 1993: Bob Greene managed to double his output of columns about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, a feat akin to multiplying infinity. The question now, of course, is how Greene will handle Jordan’s retirement. He is surely the hardest-hit Chicagoan–Jerry Reinsdorf having cagily sold his season tickets just before Jordan’s announcement. Will Greene let his obsession with Jordan die a natural death, or will he push it into an unholy, vampirish afterlife with a spate of retirement columns?...
It was the Newsweek article on bankrupt farmers that made me want to meet Larry Spatz. So I dug my best summer trousers out of the closet, found a clean shirt, put on some shoes and socks, and tromped downtown to the Tijuana Yacht Club, Spatz’s new restaurant at the corner of Grand and Clark streets. I raised my eyebrows. Yes. A lot of our help are would-be actors, actresses, and comedians....
Early-music superstar Christopher Hogwood views with particular disdain the frequent American custom of do-it-yourself Messiahs. “The whole purpose of having a chorus in Messiah is that it represents the public,” he says. “It sings for you. You don’t join in and spoil it. You might as well have a dance-along Nutcracker. The whole notion is immensely uncultured and a mark of sociability rather than musicality. You could just as easily have a huge Christmas party and people would be just as happy....
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered. –Anton Chekhov, “The Student” For my two brothers and me, fidgeting or bored in the backseat of the Ford wagon, a change of plans indicated adventure–would we break our pattern?...
Lead Story The federal government recently downgraded its estimate that “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential” are stamped on 10 million documents a year, claiming that only 6.8 million were so stamped in the last fiscal year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April, California officials declined to spray malathion over a five-square-mile area of Riverside County to kill the Mediterranean fruit flies because an endangered species of rat living there might have been affected....
How far do a community’s legitimate interests extend when it comes to private property? Most people who live in urban areas accept the concept of zoning; but how far should that concept be taken? An ordinance has been proposed in Oak Park that would grant the Historic Preservation Commission of Oak Park the right to “binding review” over all exterior changes visible from the street in buildings in its two historic districts....
In 1983 a black reformer who had never held citywide office, and who was opposed by the white-dominated media, ran a shoestring campaign against two white candidates for mayor. Harold Washington got about 425,000 votes, or 37 percent–enough to win. In fact, Evans’s 428,000 votes were 4,000 more than Washington got in February 1983 (and 40,000 more than Eugene Sawyer received in this year’s primary). Best of Chicago voting is live now....
The whipping boy of American cinema misbehaves again. It’s hard to make much sense out of Brian De Palma’s discombobulated thriller, about a demented child psychologist (John Lithgow) who snatches up kiddies for home study and communes with his evil twin (Lithgow again) and maybe-less-than dad (Lithgow in Bruno Bettelheim drag) as his domestic life comes apart (his wife is having an affair). But then basic sense–or motivational subtlety, or narrative coherence–has never been De Palma’s forte....
The Shostakovich String Quartet was formed in 1967 but only assumed its present name in 1979–four years after the death of its namesake, the great Soviet composer and artistic conscience Dmitry Shostakovich. Shifting politics may have played a role in the name change; in any case, Shostakovich, for whom the string quartet was a fertile genre, deserved every bit of the belated tribute. In its local debut, the much-recorded Moscow-based quartet will offer a Russian sampler....
The killer building at 311 S. Wacker. “Every day in September and October [1990] we found dead birds concentrated on the north side of the building”–the 65-story skyscraper topped by giant glowing cylinders across from the Sears Tower–“obviously southbound migrants that had struck the building at night,” writes Chicago Birder coeditor Allan Welby. “Hermit thrushes, Lincoln sparrows, ovenbirds, ruby-crowned kinglets, brown thrashers–a total of 19 species found dead on the sidewalks....
Wonders of bureaucracy. Would-be prison guards, says the state Department of Corrections, “should bring with them a copy of their birth certificate or other proof of birth.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Du Page County “is one of the most meticulously planned places in the country,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Chicago Enterprise (January 1989), but “the lesser attractions of life in DuPage County today–the traffic jams, the flooding, the vanishing green space, the growing visual blight–may result from too much planning....
Only a true-blue, work-shirt-clad folksinger could pull off what U.Utah Phillips does: for recreation he periodically takes to the rails and lives the life of a hobo. Once he even managed to get paid for it, landing a grant to study and document the life-style. Though Phillips lives out west–where men are men and guns are God–he’s a card-carrying Wobbly, consistently preaching socialism, pacifism, and anarchy. He’s got the usual bag full of earnest proletarian anthems, cowboy lullabies, and prairie ballads, but in a honky-tonk setting he can come up with a set of world-weary country weepies that would depress Leonard Cohen....
