These days so much reaches us through television, magazines, and newspapers that it is easy to forget that the photographs we see–and often take as an objective interpretation of reality–are only one way of looking at the world. Yet the fact that a person needs to aim a camera, to frame a scene, before taking a picture makes for an inherent bias. John Pfahl’s photography deliberately reminds us of that bias....
Of the making of Italian restaurants there seems to be no end. For the past few years in Chicago the trend among new establishments has been upscale–haute cuisine at prices that challenge, if not menace, the bank balance. The mom-and-pop eatery on whose lasagna, ravioli, and spaghetti with meatballs many of us cut our culinary teeth has, it would almost seem, become something of an endangered species. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
The typical Reader review of any current Second City show starts out talking about the great old shows of legend—the ones nobody ever actually saw, where Mike Nichols and Gilda Radner did patient/therapist routines while Severn Darden and John Belushi ran drills for the U. of C. football team. The review then explains why the current show is a complete, pathetic betrayal of everything those old shows stood for. This review is different....
Terrance Simien sometimes sounds as if he’s trying to do for zydeco what the Nevilles have done for New Orleans R & B: create a universal music from an indigenous–albeit heavily commercialized–African American art form. Simien’s wheezing, melodic accordion provides his most consistent acknowledgment of roots, and his rhythms often retain zydeco’s hiccupy backwoods danceability. But his sound is a rich gumbo of funky references to everything from urban contemporary to reggae to hi-life to hip-hop....
You should have had those tonsils out two years ago. According to the Illinois Health Care Cost Containment Council, the biggest recent increase in outpatient procedure costs was in “tonsillectomy with adenoidectomy,” up from $1,437 in 1989 to $1,806 in 1990, a 26 percent increase. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “While men tend to hold most of the top jobs on the staffs of the Illinois Congressional delegation and the staffs of Illinois’ two Senators, women are clearly dominant in lower paying positions,” according to congressional payroll records investigated by Victor M....
Ever since he moved to the West, filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky has been an invaluable presence not only for his considerable talent but also for his capacity to translate Russian dramatic forms into American entertainments. Returning to Russia to film (in English) the story, partly based on fact, of Joseph Stalin’s personal projectionist, he broaches a disturbing and important reality about Russian history that our own culture has tended to ignore: an overwhelming majority of simple, ordinary Russians not only kowtowed to Stalin but genuinely loved and revered him....
THE LITTLE PRINCE The most touching moment in this touching account comes when Saint-Exupery discovers in the sand the tracks of a desert fox. He follows the trail, and though he never actually sees the animal, he imagines it: licking dew from rocks, meeting a companion, plucking snails from a dry twig. “I’m done for,” he says at last at the fox’s den, “but somehow that doesn’t prevent me from taking an interest in your mood....
It was one of those rare games in which the entire season appears to rest in the balance. That it was the Cubs who were involved dictated that “the entire season” at stake did not mean the world championship or even just remaining alive, but instead meant simple respectability over the next six months and the very slightest possibility of contending for first place. Those are the terms we speak in when we refer to the Cubs’ fortunes....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First they pointed out that they come from Canada’s Hudson Bay in the central Arctic, not from the American Pacific Northwest. In addition, they wanted the public to know that not a hemlock, artificial bush, tree nor rock is to be found in their environment–not even piped-in bird and cricket sounds. Neither are there gates that open and shut and separate them visually from their companions....
Visiting professor Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann flew home to Germany last Monday, a few days earlier than she originally intended to. She’s not sure she wants to come back to Chicago. A frequent guest at the University of Chicago since 1978, she had never spent a quarter quite like this last one–which was largely devoted to defending herself against charges that half a century ago she colluded with the Nazis and practiced anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany....
This festival, now in its eleventh year, highlights film and video shorts as well as features by women, including documentary, animated, narrative, and experimental works. Tickets for individual programs are $6, $5 for Women in the Director’s Chair members, students, and senior citizens with a valid ID; festival passes are also available. Screenings will be held at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, and the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson....
ALMOST LIKE BEING HERE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Almost Like Being Here opens with the two lovers, Sandy and Ansil, learning of their shared sweetheart’s death and attempting to fathom the reasons. Since both are artists currently mired in boring and compromising jobs, with all the dogged egocentricity required to exist in such a state, each assumes that her suicide was sparked by some unperceived transgression on his part....
Center Theater’s droll, zesty, and imaginatively performed revival of this ahead-of-its-time 1957 Broadway flop has proven a holiday hit with family audiences looking for something both kids and parents can dig. Based on the newspaper columns of satirist Don Marquis, this jazz musical by Joe Darion, Mel Brooks, and George Kleinsinger (originally called Shinbone Alley) started out as a concert vehicle for Carol Channing, then became a stage showcase for Eartha Kitt; it’s the story of a free-loving alley cat, the cockroach philosopher who pines for her, and the lessons in life that their semifunctional friendship illuminates....
Like Karlheinz Stockhausen and other European avant-gardists, the noted Italian composer Luciano Berio has extended the postmodernist search for new sounds by experimenting with the seating arrangement for an orchestra. His latest effort in this direction is Continuo, which was commissioned in 1989 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for its centennial but is only now receiving its belated premiere due to last season’s musicians’ strike. For this half-hour piece the instruments are grouped unconventionally yet sensibly: several clarinets and a contrabassoon are placed next to the conductor and circled by the strings....
Nine features and a program of shorts from the Philippines, most of them receiving their Chicago premieres, will be shown at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday through Thursday, January 5 through 11. This festival is being presented by Facets Multimedia in cooperation with the AMAUAN Filipino-American MultiArts Center in New York. Admission to each program is $5, $3 for Facets members. For further information call 281-9075. TURUMBA Kidlat Tahimik’s film of 1981 has been described as “an ironic, comic comment on the corrupting touch of Western mass marketing techniques as well as on the virtues of small-town self-reliance....
GRACELAND A few weeks ago I happened to watch on TV a little of Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback tour. There he was, surrounded by adoring fans, not yet fat, his eyelids drooping only slightly with the foreshadowing of drug abuse, still looking gorgeous in black leather. He was great. He was funny. He was the King. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Quando Productions’ Graceland and Asleep on the Wind, two one-acts by Ellen Byron, brought that concert immediately to mind: they capture that same wistful quality even as they pay tribute to Elvis’s memory....
HAPGOOD at Chicago Dramatists Workshop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The plot concerns the discovery of a mole within the agency who has apparently passed on information to the other side. Could it be Ridley, the cocky agent with the damn-it-to-hell attitude? Could it be the incorrigibly British Blair, the tea-sipping snob no one would ever suspect? Could it be Kerner, the brilliant Soviet scientist who fathered Hapgood’s son?...
“O Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion; that they who do lean only upon the hope of thy heavenly grace may evermore be defended by thy mighty power; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” –Collect for the Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany, 1928 Book of Common Prayer But with its antiquated style, the Book of Common Prayer did need to be updated....
LAUGH, INC. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The group’s format is stolen directly from Second City. The show begins by setting up the ambience of Chicago–which is ironic, because Laugh, Inc. is performing at the Apple Tree Theatre in Lake Forest. One of the troupe plays a Mayor Daley aide giving a speech about city business, and the rest of the cast is scattered throughout the audience dressed as quaint, amusing Chicago characters....
36 FILLETTE With Delphine Zentout, Etienne Chicot, and Jean-Pierre Leaud. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among coming-of-age films this acrid little gem is an ideal antidote for Porky’s-style teenage sex fantasies, and director Catherine Breillat’s 14-year-old protagonist Lili (Delphine Zentout), bubbling over with bile and braininess, makes John Hughes’s teenage heroines look about as complex as Annette Funicello in her Beach Blanket Bingo phase–no, make that her Mickey Mouse Club days....
