When Doug Wade was organizing the first Northern Illinois Prairie Workshop one of his biggest problems was figuring out how much food to prepare. The year was 1975. Outside of a few prescient spirits like Doug, hardly anybody in Illinois knew what a tallgrass prairie was. It was impossible to predict how many guests would show up for a daylong meeting on the subject of prairies. The subject matter of all these presentations shows other changes since the early days....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not only does Chicago Sun-Times political editor Steve Neal embody the seven virtues catalogued by Michael Miner in his “Park Polemics: Why Is This Man Ranting?” (Hot Type, Sept. 1). Sure, Neal’s a troubadour of “inanity,” “sentimentality,” and “sarcasm.” Sure, Neal’s standard of journalistic professionalism includes such staples as his “carefree research,” an “eye for detail,” and a “contribution to class warfare....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Colombian garbage collector Oscar Hernandez claimed in March that he had been kidnapped by security guards during Carnival in Barranquilla and taken to a lab at the Free University there, where a syndicate planned to kill him for his body parts. In the widely reported police investigation that followed, officials turned up 11 bodies, parts of 22 others, and a report that body bounty hunters received $200 per person....
P.S. 122 FIELD TRIPS I can understand doing it; what I can’t understand is why certain artists behave as if it’s never been done before. Artists worth their salt, particularly in this century, push boundaries; that’s just a given. But the act of testing formal boundaries does not in itself make an artist good. It’s rarely radical form that offends or excites–it’s radical content. The artists of Field Trips attempt a radical content of sorts, by creating onstage personas that are solipsistic, ironic, and vaguely infantile....
PHANTOM RATS Bieganski bills himself as a comedian, juggler, and dancer. Well, if he’s a comedian, it remains to be proven. Only one of his five character sketches (a hyperactive rat) seems in any way comic. The other characters include a feeble old man who lives alone with a cat, a shell-shocked carnival performer called the Human Firecracker, and a rather stark carnival sharpie who runs a concession where people try to win goldfish....
Resurrecting Pogo Doyle, who is 29 and writes, and Sternecky, who is 27 and draws, are not complete unknowns. They will be remembered by anyone who attended the University of Illinois in the early 80s and followed their strip in the Daily Illini, “Escaped From the Zoo,” which, Sternecky describes as about “a fraternity of male animals that blackmail their way into staying in the basement of a sorority house.”...
ROADS OF DESTINY: THE O. HENRY STORIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Roads of Destiny: The O. Henry Stories, Transient Theatre offers three short stories by turn-of-the-century author William Sydney Porter–better known by his pen name, O. Henry–along with a sentimental portrait of the man himself. Making the best of a cramped situation, set designer Brian Shipinski has transformed the small studio space into a Pullman berth through the simple use of a platform bed and some curtains....
Currently the ne plus ultra bass of the Western world, Samuel Ramey is best known to Chicago audiences for his many Lyric Opera portrayals; what recital singing he has done has been mostly at big-bucks Lyric Opera parties. Now the true diversity and musicianship of this extraordinary artist can be heard in a single afternoon as Ramey appears in a recital at the annual Rosary College Trustee Benefit–his only appearance scheduled here for some time: he is not on the Lyric roster for next year (Lyric tends to alternate superstars every year or so)....
SHAKESPEARE’S GREATEST HITS II Gaines is dead wrong about reading Shakespeare; he’s as rewarding to the literate as he is to the merely hearing. But if Gaines’s colossal misreading of Shakespeare’s powers is what allows her to pump up the volume so high that new and younger audiences are sold on Shakespeare, if it inspires her to produce a Cymbeline like her 1989 stunner or Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits II, which is sure to engage young and youthful audiences–well, let the lie be....
SAMSON ET DALILA Lyric’s general director, Ardis Krainik, is fond of saying that opera is the culmination of all the art forms, combining singing, theater, symphony, dance, even painting, sculpture, and architecture. Opera does combine all of these, but more often than not in a rather ineffectual way. At its best, however, opera has the potential to rise above the other art forms when it gives each of these elements equal attention....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is interesting to see how repetition can turn fiction into fact. In Lewis Lazare’s “Culture Club” column regarding the strike at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra [September 20], one of our musicians was quoted as saying that the Orchestra management had insufficient money to give the musicians an appropriate contract, but was willing to spend $200,000 of extra cost to take John Corigliano’s symphony to Europe next spring....
ADAM BROOKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many of Brooks’s works, through single words etched or stenciled onto sheets of glass or mirrors, demonstrate the fragility and ultimate failure of language as a communicative device. The shared precariousness of glass and communication–both are easily shattered–is so literal and direct that the metaphor risks slipping into cliche. But Brooks transcends the danger by adding, with appealing formal elegance, references to the human body....
12/10/90 The head of a Dallas advertising agency introduces Saddam Hussein voodoo dolls. The dolls retail at $10 and come with a label that reads “Stick it to Saddam. Stick him in the head and puncture his plans. . . . Puncture his stomach–but beware, it’s full of poison gas. . . . Jab Saddam in the legs and bring him to his knees. . . . Don’t waste time stabbing Saddam’s heart, he has none....
Did Neil Armstrong muff his historic line or didn’t he? When I along with half a billion others witnessed the first human step on the moon on July 20, 1969, I swear I heard Armstrong say, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” What he meant to say, of course, was “one small step for a man.” In leaving out the “a,” he destroyed the sense of the statement and in essence said, “One small step for humans, one giant leap for humans....
Theater People Wonder: Where Have All the Profits Gone? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pepe Vargas, the attorney who founded the Chicago Latino Film Festival, will open his sixth annual gathering tonight with a reception and showing of Last Images of the Shipwreck by Argentine writer-director Eliseo Subiela at the First Chicago Center Theater. Vargas has watched his dream grow larger and more successful each year....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d like to express our appreciation for your coverage of the status of the Commonwealth Edison/City electric franchise negotiations, which appeared in Harold Henderson’s article of October 12, 1990 [“Com Ed Watch: Keeping Us in the Dark”]. Henderson did an excellent job of outlining the complexities of the issue and the political ramifications of the extension debate....
Nineteen eighty-eight was devoid of any overarching theme, trend, or happening, rockwise; the vacuum itself has to be seen as the year’s big news. We did have a sales winner: George Michael, whose solo debut, Faith, and its five singles gave him the biggest blanket on the Billboard year-end charts to be seen in nearly 20 years. But who cares? Other acts that have raked in similar bucks earned our attention as well in additional ways–by creating a compelling image (Michael Jackson), or at least by riding the crest of a cultural wave (the Bee Gees and the Saturday Night Fever dance revival)....
As the Park District Turns “It’s certainly no secret Nancy Kaszak would have an intensely personal motive to do this,” Colette Holt was saying. “The whole thing is frankly too transparent for words–Nancy sending her lawyers in to rifle through my office a few days before the election.” She told us, “It’s just a very ugly time at the Park District.” Two years ago the Kellogg Foundation awarded nearly a million dollars to the Chicago Park District to establish a “model for citizen participation through the effective operation of Local Advisory Councils for the District’s parks and play lots....
WILD AT HEART The progressive coarsening of David Lynch’s talent over the 13 years since Eraserhead, combined with his equally steady rise in popularity, says a lot about the relationship of certain artists with their audiences. A painter-turned-filmmaker, Lynch started out with a highly developed sense of mood, texture, rhythm, and composition; a dark and rather private sense of humor; and a curious combination of awe, fear, fascination, and disgust in relation to sex, violence, industrial decay, and urban entrapment....
AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE In ABT’s repertory, George Balanchine’s Symphonie Concertante and Ballet Imperial represent the extreme of classicism. Both works are about dancing–rich and varied movement is repeated in ever-changing combinations by different dancers arranged about the stage in shifting patterns. Balanchine often referred to music as “the floor we dance on,” insisting his dancers achieve a special musicality, a visible harmony between score and movement. Unfortunately, that harmony often goes awry....
