Chicago has always been known as a place where everything has its price, where a wink and a nod (and a little cash) can work wonders securing box seats at the ballgame or negotiating with tow-truck drivers. A few weekends ago, my best friend Demetrius and I, armed only with my brand-new American Express gold card and the leftovers of our Pell Grant checks, attempted to test that hypothesis. Specifically, we asked ourselves, what would it...
JUST BETWEEN YOU AND ME . . . AND EVERYONE ELSE AND THEIR UNCLE BOB Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe it’s the mellowing that comes with middle age, but the David Letterman style of humor–“I’m hip, they’re not, are you with me or against me?”–is beginning to bore me. Likewise the “men are all assholes” gags that were supposed to redress past wrongs but didn’t....
Good, corny fun develops when Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini (Cher) falls in love with her fiance’s brother Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage). Director Norman Jewison and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley milk the New York settings, accents, and folkways for all they’re worth–although those familiar with certain Manhattan locations may be dismayed to find them transplanted in Brooklyn–and the broad Italian family humor gets so thick at times that you could cut it with a bread knife....
HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY With its hotshot lighting and explosive score, Ezralow’s Read My Hips (1990) is a good opener–it’s like walking into a party and having real fireworks go off. But the dance doesn’t hold up well after a couple of viewings: its sections are utterly distinct emotionally and, as far as I can tell, thematically–they’re stitched together with sight gags, joke entrances and exits, and crazy sound and lighting effects....
Neither the Illinois River nor the Sangamon is usually mentioned in the same breath with the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Colorado, or the Ohio. The Illinois meanders across the state–for some 420 miles–from the confluence of the Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers near Joliet to its rendezvous with the Mississippi near Alton. The Sangamon is one of the Illinois’ more significant tributaries, entering it from the east. It drains the once-grand prairie on which Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington, Decatur, and Springfield now stand....
Pop Beloved is the Reivers’ fourth album and the title is a close approximation of what you might call the, um, zeitgeist (Zeitgeist was their former name) of the band: slightly awkward, but created out of a wistful, human craving for warmth and unity. Songwriter John Croslin digs the rural world in the same way lots of other bands do, but he has the ability to translate it with a grace and subtlety that the John Cougar Mellencamps of the world will never attain....
SHADOW OF A MAN Latino Chicago Theater Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cherrie Moraga’s melodramatic play Shadow of a Man, being staged at the Latino Chicago Theater Company, isn’t about the collapse itself but about the wreckage such a collapse causes in one family. Manuel Rodriguez is so wrapped up in his memories of his compadre Conrado that he can’t appreciate the family he has attained as a sort of trade-off....
The State of the Arsenal David Evans does not think war is inevitable in the Persian Gulf. But if it comes, he can imagine the United States losing, or winning at such a high cost that the victory will be remembered as a catastrophe. He believes–and has been writing–that much of the high-tech equipment that is supposed to make our army of Arabia invincible is junk. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
There Goes Another Gallery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Goldman-Kraft closing was particularly unsettling because it involved a lawsuit filed by German dealer Michael Werner, who owns a gallery in Cologne as well as a recently opened space in New York City. Goldman-Kraft owner Jeffrey Kraft would not discuss the suit, but sources familiar with the legal proceedings said that Werner sought to obtain full payment for two paintings Goldman-Kraft had sold on consignment from him, and that Goldman-Kraft was forced into bankruptcy when ordered to produce the money it owed, about $9,000....
Weighing in at the Tribune Pay Scale There was a bit of an uprising inside the Tribune recently. Some good came out of it. The president of the company learned a lesson in the psychology of newspaper people. After all, they’re his savages–he should know how they tick. “We were being marinated,” says the reporter. As far as anyone could make it out, the Tribune had decided to turn itself into a little civil service, with everyone’s work tidied into grades, job descriptions, and salary ranges....
To the editors: We would like to place on record our response to the article “Racial Discrimination at Amnesty International?” by Ben Joravsky (November 5), which referred to the lawsuit entered into by Toni Moore against Amnesty International USA. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Moore made charges that the Board and staff of AIUSA took very seriously, and which we made every effort to resolve....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this case, two men sat on death row in Illinois for four years. During their trial, a lack of evidence strongly suggested that the men are innocent and, at the very least, failed to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, another man confessed to the crime. Like the Illinois case, these facts strongly suggest that Monroe is innocent, and at the very least show that he has not been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, as required by law....
When Barbara Cook was in Chicago earlier this year, she was anticipating a return to Broadway in a new musical. Well, Carrie has come and gone–Cook starred as the telekinetic teenager’s Bible-thumping mama in the ill-fated show’s English premiere, but dropped out before it opened in New York (where it became the costliest failure in Broadway history). So, her reputation intact, the onetime ingenue star of such 1950s musicals as Candide, The Music Man, and Plain and Fancy returns to Chicago in her role as a concert artist....
Nino Pezzella’s new untitled 15-minute film consists of a short, enigmatic string of images repeated in the same order 44 times. That the images appear in the same order and for the same length of time in each cycle is not apparent at first, because their appearances vary with each repetition. They are seen negative or positive, darker or brighter, in varying tints. An image that at first seems totally black reveals specks of light over repeated viewings and eventually becomes a night view of boats in a harbor....
It was 7 PM and I was heading east on 63rd Street when I saw the cop’s lights in my rearview mirror. The squad was about three-quarters of a mile behind me, ablaze with those blinding rooftop strobe lights. And he was flying. I watched his headlights jump the centerline and weave through traffic. I was on my way to the 7-Eleven to pick up a magazine for my brother-in-law’s birthday, probably a Playboy....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Intradermal cosmetics are pigments implanted in the skin, much like conventional tattooing. But there are some very important differences. Only FDA approved, chemically inert, nonallergenic cosmetic pigments should be used for permanent cosmetics. Regular tattooists may use India ink, vegetable colors that cause allergic reactions, or oxides of certain metals that make beautiful colors but cause dermatological problems over time....
REARRANGING THE DARK HOUSE The work explores the arrival of a new baby in a faker-than-fake American nuclear family. It begins with a monologue delivered by Mother (Daryl Heller) expounding on her fear of surrendering her life in the interest of raising her child. “Good-bye thoughts longer than five minutes,” she laments. “Good-bye uninterrupted conversation.” Baby (Dan Prindle) comes on next, dressed in yellow Reeboks, yellow Dr. Dentons, and a black swallowtail coat; he has a huge white plaster head....
Mad Clipper Comes Back “The S&L scandal, which George Will calls ‘the costliest debacle in the history of America,’ and the media’s shameful reporting of it, have reinforced our negative opinions about the Democrats, Republicans, Reagan and the media, all of whom have betrayed the America of our Founding Fathers. Damn the traitors!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The press didn’t miss the story,” he writes, “and we have boxes full of S&L stories, from 1980 on, to prove it....
AMERICAN BUFFALO It can be devastating. Set in a resale shop under the el and populated with a trio of small-time scroungers, American Buffalo is capable of tearing your poor theatergoer’s heart out even as it’s plying you with absurdities. When Donny the shop owner lectures his addled junkie sidekick, Bobby, on the importance of a healthy breakfast–or again, later, when Donny and Teach confer knowingly about rare coins and safecracking, even though they haven’t the foggiest notion about either–you can laugh, as they say, till it hurts....
Otis Rush burst onto the Chicago blues recording scene in 1956 with one of the most powerful, agonized sounds ever captured on vinyl. With a saxophone groaning in the background and his splintered chording and jagged leads skittering beneath his tormented vocals, he created a music that was at once more sophisticated and more primal than anything else being done in Chicago at the time. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
