BEST OF DANCE FOR $1.98 Likewise, no one goes to see “Dance for $1.98,” or even “Best of Dance for $1.98,” expecting polished performances. What we look for is work with potential, with an unusual texture or sensibility. And in MoMing’s recent “Best” performances (the sixth annual showcase of work by little-known choreographers culled from last summer’s program, with new dances added), what stood out were the interesting failures and the unexpected successes....
“This year was the worst I can remember, except when I was five years old, pushed open the front door, got lost in the snow.” An unnamed band member wrote those words as liner notes on the last Husker Du album; soon after, the group was history, a victim of the centrifugal spin of underground superstardom. Guitarist Bob Mould, pained by the split (drug-related, it was said) with ten-year partner Grant Hart, has resurfaced with a searing solo album, Workbook....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Physicians in Chicago were surprised and disappointed by the title and illustration of the recent article “Why Are Doctors Such Jerks?” that appeared in the Friday, July 10, issue of the Reader. The excessive emphasis on negativism and sensationalism that was displayed in both is not reflective of balanced journalism or of the true state of affairs in Medicine....
Having now experienced two years’ worth of the Chicago International Film Festival, I’m not the least bit surprised to learn that the 25th-anniversary version, the largest to date, is starting on Thursday, October 12, three days before “opening night.” We’ll have plenty to say about this event when it gets fully under way next week; for the moment, here are reviews of the four films to be shown on Thursday, written by Gerald Peary, Ronnie Scheib, Barbara Scharres, and John Stevenson; films preceded by an asterisk (*) are recommended....
Four films by an Illinois-based film and video maker whose experimental and political interests pointedly inform and reinforce one another. Dream Documentary (1981), which is especially impressive, uses found footage, inventive editing, and an effectively selective sound track to comment on the ways that we look at the third world. Hiding Out for Heaven (1982), which l haven’t seen yet, is a two-film projection piece about grading student writers. House of Un-American Activities (1983) is a documentary that mixes personal and public history as it describes the 1956 persecution of Marx’s father–a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in 1939 and joined the Communist Party in 1945....
A 1990 collection of six fictional shorts, made in diverse corners of the globe and addressing the international rights of children, here having its U.S. premiere. It’s an uneven package, but the filmmakers include the team of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville, the late Lino Brocka, and Euzhan Palcy (A Dry White Season). The jewel of the bunch is Boy, an odd, moving fable about racism, without dialogue, written and directed by Jerry Lewis and scored by Georges Delerue....
If you look at the lineup, you figure you know the band; after all, the combo of saxophone, electric bass, percussion, and one of those ubiquitous multipurpose keyboards–which has come to spell “fusion”–can be found in high-tech nightclubs all across this great land. What sets Mark Colby and Frank Caruso apart from the pack is a mixture of craft and commitment. The music has heft; powered by Colby’s horn work, which itself was honed during stints with Maynard Ferguson, Jaco Pastorius, and Bob James, it displays subtlety and restraint in addition to the more common virtuosity and swagger....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Item: Masson asserts his disdain for theory, but what really comes through in the interview is an ignorance of key ideas in psychoanalysis. A theory of the unconscious is at the heart of psychoanalysis; this theory is based on the idea that all people (N.B., black and white, as well as Jew and German) have an unconscious that “contains” residues of repressed infantile sexual longings....
It’s possible that the only true survivors–emotionally, musically, and politically–of the great initial blast of British punk are the Mekons. The music of their convincing early onslaught has evolved over the last six or so years into an unassailable melange of modern British postpunk and Hank Williams-era C & W, and the result is an extravagantly intellectual brand of something I can only describe as pan-Atlantic electric folk. Yet the Mekons’ fearful song-dreams have a disturbingly up-to-the-minute punch, incorporating everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to (on their recent album Curse of the Mekons) the political abysses of drugs, collaboration, and, oh yes, playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band....
Made the year after Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1965), Basilio Martin Patino’s touching first feature, set mainly in the university town of Salamanca, Spain, echoes and parallels that film in many respects, although here the loss of religious faith plays the role of a betrayed Marxism. Cast in the form of nine letters written to a young woman met by the hero (Emilio Gutierrez Caba) during his only trip abroad, the film has a loose, episodic structure built around various chapter headings (“The Family Rosary,” “One Sunday Afternoon,” “A World of Happiness,” etc), and like many of the other youthful and sensitive European movies of this period, the impact of the French New Wave is salutary in the fresh use of film language: fast editing, slurred motion, and a freezing and unfreezing of certain images that makes them reverberate like pictures pasted into a scrapbook....
What is the proper way to display a cross in the 90s? Sandor’s seven-year-old phscologram laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology is called (Art)n. Sandor, the founder and director of the lab, has an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute; associate director Meyers (who hooked up with Sandor about 1987) has a bachelor’s in mathematics and is working on his MFA in electronic visualization at the University of Illinois at Chicago....
“She’s Heaven,” the first song on the long-awaited White Soul album by the Chicago group Green, is a striking beginning. Lyrically, it’s a trademark tale from leader Jeff Lescher, a mix of obsessive desire and rampant self-loathing: “I know she’s an angel / And I know I’m a fool,” he sings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And it’s only the intro for White Soul, recorded more than a year ago and released last year overseas on the Dutch label Megadisc....
LYNDA MARTHA DANCE COMPANY Company director Martha’s Elements, choreograghed in 1979 and restaged this year, represents the banal, pretty stuff that used to be the company’s hallmark. The dancers enter rolling and stretching; they huddle, reach, and plie. They lie scattered about the space, come to life one by one, collapse one by one, rise again one by one. Though such repetition can be soothing or meditative, in the first section of Elements it is numbing and predictable....
It’s nothing to brag about–there was little, if anything, that concerned the Bears worth bragging about this season–but this column predicted last September that the Bears would win 11 games, and that’s how many they won. Of course, I predicted the Bears would go 10-6 in the regular season and win one playoff game, while the Bears went 11-5 and then lost their first playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys. The point is raised, again, not for bragging rights but as a way of asking the question, “Just whom did the Bears impress this season?...
THE TEEMING MILLIONS SPEAK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Technically you’re correct. However, the use of sex toys and rough sex in general undoubtedly increase the risk of AIDS transmission considerably. In the one case of female-to-female AIDS transmission on record (Annals of Internal Medicine, December 1986), “both women had vaginal bleeding as a result of traumatic sexual activities.” Admittedly they had other dangerous habits as well....
THE MYSTERIES AND WHAT’S SO FUNNY? Because The Mysteries is so fast, it covers a lot of ground. Looking back over it you seem to see a broad plain crammed with events and people and about a million jokes. Yet it’s only 90 minutes and has a cast of just 13, though some of them play multiple roles. Writer and director Gordon has managed to create a work both wide ranging and focused, more or less splitting The Mysteries between two worlds: the sophisticated, dispassionate, and supremely intelligent world of Marcel Duchamp and the chaotic, angry, severely limited world of Sam and Rose–a married couple, the children of Jewish immigrants, who are stand-ins for Gordon’s own parents....
What kind of guy paints purple-gray veins on light bulbs? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Orth was born in Cleveland and grew up in Akron, Ohio. “I’ve never had any training whatsoever in art, not even a class,” he says. “That’s important. I went to college in Columbus and lived there for eight years. Then I went to Southeast Asia [he visited Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore], which is where I started doing the type of art that I’m doing now....
Edgar Lee Masters once traipsed from his downstate village to the Masonic Temple at State and Randolph, then the tallest building in the world, because he had heard it said that a man could see all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa, from its 21st floor. Traveling more than 200 miles to see Iowa from the top of a building, when the same trip in another direction would have let you see it close up, suggests something of the mystique that Chicago’s tall buildings have always had for the rest of the world....
Conservatives are beating up on the Endangered Species Act again. Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr., who is responsible for enforcing it, launched a bad-cop assault on the act a few weeks ago, charging, in effect, that the law’s rigidity prevented him from having the freedom to decide which species deserved to survive and which ones should be sacrificed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The supposed lack of flexibility is one of the two major lines of attack the Right has developed in its, so far, fruitless assault on the Endangered Species Act....
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. . . . The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch....
