I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But as they say, that was then and this is now. Given Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Henry Kravis, Harry looks like a pretty puny shark in a big cesspool. And even if you manage to forget all the chiselers who have fleeced folks over the last quarter century, Harry even 26 years ago couldn’t have been much....
The hardy Music of the Baroque is now embarking on its 20th season. Among the ingredients of its success are a top-notch, well-prepared chorus, an ensemble of brilliant instrumentalists, and a knowledgeable conductor who likes his music–anything up to Beethoven–fast and furious. Thomas Wikman’s penchant for brisk tempi and bright orchestral color has its detractors, but it’s the most sensible approach for Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass, the centerpiece of these concerts....
Lead Story In February Canadian sculptor Helen Chadwick, 38, offered her “Piss Flowers” creations–bronze casts of streams of urine–for around $2,000 each. The artist described the making of her work to England’s Guardian: “I would build a mound of snow with a good density and then urinate in the middle of it. Then I would get a man to encircle my urine with a stream of his own. The shapes would be like petals with a series of droplets....
Lead Story Japan Efficiency Headquarters, an “entertainment business company” in Chiba, Japan, rents trained “family members” out to senior citizens who would like to enjoy the benefits of a close-knit family from time to time. The rented family, typically a husband, wife, and child, engage in family-type activities as if everyone were related. Renting three family members for three hours costs about $1,100. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May the Missouri Court of Appeals turned down David Turner’s appeal of the automatic suspension of his driver’s license after he refused to take a blood-alcohol test....
Since it is now commonplace for the Philip Glass Ensemble to perform elaborate theater works without Glass himself taking part, Glass recently found a unique way to compensate for the void: give solo piano recitals. On the surface this seems absurd, since the very signature of the ensemble’s sound is synthesizers (although usually mixed with voices and woodwinds), and the majority of Glass’s works are electronic. Yet Glass makes it all work through the very personal approach he takes, along with some very clever transcriptions from stage works such as Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha....
LIZART 5 Unlike flat objects hung on a wall or sculptures placed in a room, environmental installations must be inhabited to be appreciated. The components in an installation shape and define the space they consume, leading the viewer to a set of perceptions that is (or should be) unique. In short, the piece creates an environment. To experience it fully one should not only scrutinize the elements themselves but also be aware of how it feels to move through the work....
TALLEY’S FOLLY The fundamental lie is the script itself, which won playwright Lanford Wilson a Pulitzer in 1980. Basically it’s a cornball love story featuring only two characters, Matt Friedman and Sally Talley. The time is July 4, 1944, and the scene is the boat house on the Talley homestead in Lebanon, Missouri. Although Matt and Sally have only spent a week together–and that week was the summer before–Matt has driven down from Saint Louis to propose....
Not keeping up I. “One main eye problem that is not treated in pets is refractive error (near- and farsightedness and astigmatism),” according to Eye Facts (November/ December), published by the UIC College of Medicine. “Most dogs are farsighted and astigmatic; however, since they don’t read the newspaper, they seldom complain.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If you were going to go to a new world would you pack a picture of a moose?...
Where do “dust bunnies” (or, depending on size, “dust rhinos”) come from? You know, those tumbleweed sort of things that you accidentally pull out from under your bed when you’re looking for dirty socks. Why do they form? Is it seasonally related? Any relationship to the presence of pets or small children? Can they be prevented? –Mystified in Madison, Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Proud though Cecil is of his contributions to science, he recognizes that he stands on the shoulders of giants....
The chimurenga music of Zimbabwean singer-composer-bandleader Thomas Mapfumo came to fruition in the 1970s as an integral part of the struggle against minority white rule in what was then Rhodesia. This would seem to make listening to him an apt thing to do if you’re interested in being “politically correct.” But there are other reasons to open your ears to the curiously intoxicating melancholy of Mapfumo’s singing: he draws his syllables out long and low over a stream of lazily skipping melodic triplets that flow forth like the tinkling of a thumb piano....
It’s early on a sunny December afternoon, and sunlight streams through the windows of the Edward Hartigan School gymnasium on South State Street. Along one wall two young boys are watching a television monitor and toying with the camera that is aimed at a large map. Mr. World has been setting up the apparatus for the last few minutes. The boys stroll to the map and the older of the two, about ten, looks vaguely at the vicinity of North Africa....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tony! Tony! Tony! You surprise me [Letters, March 3]. While I understand you backing Tom Boeker (in much the same manner I understand Ron Brown backing Rich Daley or Cat Stevens backing Khomeini), I don’t understand your mean-spirited name calling. I can only conclude that this is something which you and Mr. Boeker learned in critic school or that it’s a virus spreading through the offices of the Reader....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (2) Just what is there in the public records of either Evans or Sawyer to support the notion that one was a reformer and the other wasn’t? Before 1983 they were both machine aldermen. From 1983 through 1987 they were both followers of Harold Washington (Sawyer actually hopped on the Washington bandwagon before Evans). Since 1987, Evans has backed Sawyer on almost every city council vote....
NEW DANCES ’88 Hatchlings resemble their parents, and most of the works premiered in the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble’s choreographic incubator New Dances, now in its sixth year, share the ensemble’s virtues and vices: its careful attention to production values, its strong sense of theater, its attractive and athletic dancing, its certain nostalgic cheeriness, and its unfortunate tendency toward the melodramatic and the banal. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
How do you keep deer from eating rare plants? Gary Horn, a volunteer steward at Salt Creek Prairie in western Cook County and an employee of Brookfield Zoo, tried scattering human hair around the plants, then lion hair, and finally succeeded with his “ultimate weapon,” reports Natural Area Notes (February 1988)–leopard droppings. “According to Gary, leopard dung has a smell beyond imagining. He reports that his rare plants flowered and set seed with little disturbance from hungry deer....
More than 30 years ago, Mayor Richard J. Daley proposed that Lake Shore Drive be widened and turned into a real expressway, running south through Jackson Park, behind the Museum of Science and Industry, and down Stony Island Avenue to the then-smooth Chicago Skyway. Daley eventually lost that battle–after Hyde Parkers risked arrest by tying themselves to trees along the route–but the war isn’t over yet. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Johnny Shines went deer hunting in Alabama one day, and it got him thinking about the blues. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not too many years ago, Shines’s own career was in danger of being forgotten like an abandoned baby. In the mid-50s, after having recorded some of Chicago blues’ most magnificent sides for the J.O.B. label, he found himself broke and disgusted with the sordid intricacies of the music industry....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In another part of our city is a calm oasis of classical music broadcasting, WNIB, which lives in peace and harmony, both with its listeners and with the real world. From modest beginnings, the station has grown, without fanfare or pretension, and now carries some of the finest classical music programming available on radio anywhere: the most prestigious musical programming from Europe–the cradle of our musical civilization–along with generous offerings of recorded music on new CDs and from WNIB’s vast record library....
THE MAIDS Two sisters, locked in a vise of mutual love and hatred, spend their hours alone in a bizarre, ultimately deadly game of make-believe, alternating between the dominant and submissive roles of mistress and servant, lapsing in and out of rhetorical flights of melodramatic fantasy. Is it a stage version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or some exercise in gothic horror inspired by that Bette Davis-Joan Crawford cult classic?...
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I get really tired of gay people who keep whining that they are “not political” as though this somehow insulates them from the world around them. The “Dignettes” seem to think their lack of being political (or politically aware) means they can support institutions which oppress their brothers and sisters. They seem to think that the ‘political gays” (there are too few of them) can fight out their battles for them in the secular arena....
