MARAT/SADE Representing incompatible extremes on this matter are the radical politico Marat and the Marquis de Sade, the perverse apostle of subjectivity and sex. Marat, denouncer of corruption and avowed enemy of all enemies of the people, represents an inflexible idealism, a rigid ideology that takes no prisoners but has a certain existential elegance: “In the vast indifference I invent a meaning.” His meaning is revolution. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Stefan Golab had his last breakfast–a glass of warm boiled milk–in the darkness before dawn, Thursday, February 10, 1983. Then he rode to work with his friend Roman Gusowski, from Wicker Park, out to a factory in Elk Grove Village. Golab had been working there since just after Christmas, reclaiming silver from used photographic film at Film Recovery Systems. Instead, Golab stumbled into the lunchroom and collapsed on a chair. Soon he began to tremble and foam at the mouth, and by the time other workers had carried him out to the parking lot and paramedics had arrived, his pulse was gone for good....
Lead Story The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced in June that nearly one million Americans reported to emergency rooms in 1990 because of stair-related injuries and that 33,000 people were injured in accidents involving shopping carts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In July officials in Taiwan answered the question of whether a woman who has a sex change operation is then obligated to enter the males-only military draft: yes....
NO EXIT Sartre’s three protagonists are damned for not having lived authentically. They never exercised their freedom of choice and gave in to the meaninglessness of contemporary life. Sartre’s poetically just hell is where these newly dead must explore ad nauseam the same dead ends (or “false positions”) that they stumbled into while alive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Garcin, Inez, and Estelle–a pacifist journalist, post-office clerk, and snobbish coquette–are led by a sardonic Valet into a room furnished in a hideous Second Empire style....
For today’s moviegoers, a film must attain the status of a special event to command attention; there’s not much of a regular moviegoing public anymore. Audiences of the 1930s and ’40s, lacking the alternative of television, were less demanding. They went to films for routine entertainment, and could be satisfied by cheaply made westerns and horror films that remained within the conventions of their genres. Such films were provided by a group of smaller Hollywood studios that specialized in turning out low-budget fare and that became known collectively as “poverty row....
It’s been 42 years since Arnie Kamen left high school. Since then he’s made his mark at the Merc, helped sell millions of dollars in Israeli bonds, and raised a family. But in some ways he never got away from high school. Few of them stay in touch with the tenacity and enthusiasm Kamen shows, however. He made a few phone calls to old classmates and raised in excess of $4,000, which has helped buy new backboards for the gym and uniforms for the boys’ basketball team....
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS With Johnny Depp, Dianne Wiest, Winona Ryder, Alan Arkin, Kathy Baker, Vincent Price, and Anthony Michael Hall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title of his first feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, pretty much speaks for itself. Beetlejuice, meanwhile, posited a parallel world of juvenile outsiders, most obviously the title poltergeist and Winona Ryder’s almost terminally depressed girl, but also the two ghosts played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin....
SO MUCH GLORY IN GOD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reverend Adams has done well by his church, Noah’s Christian Habitat and Church of God, whose programs to aid the poor and address the problems of drug and alcohol abuse are so successful that they have attracted media attention and Adams has been appointed by the mayor to implement a citywide program. All is not orderly in Adams’s own house, however....
THE AMERICAN Originally a yearlong serialization in the Atlantic Monthly, James’s third novel, The American (1877), is unmistakably Jamesian. Written in Paris by the 34-year-old expatriate–who was living a hand-to-mouth existence and trying to gain entree into the beau monde–the novel reflects James’s frustration. It contrasts a robustly self-made and curiously innocent Californian with various corrupt and snobbish aristos. Yet from among them, Christopher Newman, our American in Paris, hopes to choose a wife....
THE CASTLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The very qualities that make The Castle a masterpiece of modern fiction–its deceptively simple prose, which conceals more than it reveals, the biting satire that only hints at what is being satirized, Kafka’s paranoiac eye for hidden messages and shades of meaning–are certain to trip up anyone hoping to translate the novel to the stage. How can the would-be adapter hope to capture all the contradictions in Kafka’s work–his despair and his humor, his alienation and his wit, his realist’s eye for detail and his mystic’s taste for allegory?...
Never be surprised again. The latest “smart” Panasonic stereo receiver knows the frequency, location, and format of 9,400 radio stations across the U.S. It can be programmed so that “new stations–with the same format–are chosen automatically as you drive from one city to the next.” Yeah, but can it find a WXRT format in Sioux City? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In a number of ways the stretch of Kennedy Expressway visible from the East River Road bridge can be seen as a quite literal re-creation of a traditional downtown,” writes Robert Bruegmann in Inland Architect (November/December 1990)....
The first thing the Lakeview neighbors hear is the boom boxes in the cars lined up and down Broadway. Then a noisy line forms outside the front door, and the party begins. From the nightclub come the sounds of shooting guns, shattering glass, and young men fighting. At four in the morning, the partygoers stumble home drunk. Still, the dispute has incited residents to make the first test of a new state law that gives them the upper hand in the age-old struggle with noisy taverns....
RENTED MOVIES What can be more uncomfortable than sitting in a darkened theater, captive to the pathetic ramblings of a fourth-rate stand-up comic? Lawrence Steger, in his one-man performance piece, Rented Movies, intentionally places his audience in such a situation. But where Steger’s rent-a-comic bombs, the piece succeeds. This is a tender and powerfully sad look at a gay man’s attempt to find humor and affection in a world as indifferent and passionless as a cheap porno magazine....
Fritz Lang’s first real blockbuster was this 1924 two-part silent epic, based on the 13th-century German legend that also inspired Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. Part one, Siegfried, describes the adventures of the son of a Norse king (Paul Richter) who seeks (and eventually gains) the hand of the beautiful maiden Kriemhild (Margarethe Schon) and who bears a magic sword, which he uses against a fire-breathing dragon in the forest....
As you follow the curve of Lake Michigan east from Chicago, past the smokestacks of Indiana, toward the border of Michigan, the shoreline changes. The midwestern plain gives way to sensuous sweeps of sand. These are the dunes, a fragile world held fast by grass and scrub against the winds that beat from the west. Just south of town, in governmentally distinct New Buffalo Township, you might come across 65 acres of pristine duneland that used to be one of Harbor Country’s best-kept secrets–Forest Beach Camp and Conference Center....
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW Theater Oobleck Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forsythe’s notion of imposing a commedia scheme on the script isn’t a bad one. Commedia relies on comic and grotesque masks to distinguish its various stock characters, and masks can be a good way to distract an audience from actors’ inadequacies; the masks (and costumes) Michael Biddle has designed here are fun to look at....
A BLACK MAN NAMED JOE Part of the problem lies in the structure of the script. The first act takes place on the night Joe is killed. Scenes alternate between the family’s reactions and Joe’s story, which he tells himself from a vantage point in the Great Beyond. From his family we learn that he was deeply loved and that his life was finally getting back on track. From Joe we learn his philosophy of life, peppered with anecdotes....
A child sits at the helm of a CTA bus, furiously spinning the steering wheel, following his own inclinations. Public transportation is unreliable anyway; you may decide to foot it. Turn left and find all of Chicago spread out before you — in a cramped basement. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The exhibit is largely the brainchild of noted architect Stanley Tigerman, who designed it pro bono....
“That Car Wash movie was just a lot of romance,” says Mario Xavier, the smooth-dressing young manager of the K&K Hand Car Wash on North Clybourn. “All we do is work around here. The business has lost its personality and isn’t very entertaining anymore.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What’s happening in this neighborhood is all an illusion,” Xavier says, glaring, arms folded, at the new 1800 N....
FROZEN ASSETS and Barrie Keeffe’s work was commissioned in 1978 by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Given Keeffe’s economical writing and wide range of characters, that company got a big return on its investment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The main–and most moving–character is 17-year-old Buddy Clark. The play, ironically set at Christmastime, traces one furious day when Buddy, who’s been thrown into Borstal (boys’ prison) for stealing a car on orders from a larcenous relative, accidentally kills a prison guard, panics, and scales the wall....
