PERFECT DUET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a bare stage decorated with only a few platforms and stools, the six Black Ensemble Theatre members construct a survey of events, beginning in the mid-50s with the integration of the public schools and Rosa Parks’s bus ride through Montgomery. This is accomplished through songs of the era: Sam Cooke’s “Change Is Gonna Come”; Ben E....
“I’ve been at the zoo for 6 years. Crazy things have happened. People are interesting. In the early part of my work at the zoo, we had experiences right outside the gate, and even on the grounds, where people–cultists–would sacrifice goats, roosters, chickens. These are not poor people doing this, because poor people would eat the animal. Then we had two mute swans in the zoo rookery, and they were pinioned, which means they couldn’t fly at all....
Ouch! That’s my cornea, you fool! From DJ Times (March 1989): “It has that same…sound that skyrocketed Cynthia into the public’s eye.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The Family Preservation Act is, for the most part, ignored when cases are filed in the Juvenile Court of Cook County,” reports a special committee of the Chicago Bar Association. “Although there may be forms filled out by DCFS [the state Department of Children and Family Services] investigators that imply services were offered,…the fact is that little inquiry is made regarding reasonable efforts [to keep the family together] before cases are filed and children are removed from their parents…....
THE ELEPHANT MAN Here’s Merrick the master builder, erecting a scale model of a great church-the symbol of human ugliness creating the symbol of divine beauty. Here’s Merrick in his race against death, growing better educated and more socially graceful even as his physical state declines–he was ultimately killed by the sheer weight of his own head. Here, for that matter, is the head: oversized, Merrick half-playfully suggests, because it’s “so full of dreams....
Why do geese always fly in a V? And how do they figure out which goose will be the one in front? –Khia Willis, Baltimore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Other people have different ideas. One school of thought holds that geese fly in a V for aerodynamic reasons–each bird flies in the slipstream of the one in front of it, like race car drivers, in order to conserve energy....
This morning when I ordered hot tea from the restaurant next door, I got a styrofoam cup of steaming hot water and a tea bag. Soaking the bag in the water, I noticed the usual brownish white foam floating up to the top of the cup. What is this foamy stuff–preservative from the bag, or is it just happy to see me? Also, after pouring the foamy stuff out, I noticed the cup had pits and craters in it....
I’m sitting in my office one afternoon when a young man I’ve never seen there pokes his head in the doorway. He’s wearing Bermuda shorts, a black-and-white T-shirt promoting somebody’s band, has long brown hair tied behind his neck in a single tightly wound braid. The look is at once clean-cut and 90s-hip. He’s carrying a large, flat cardboard box, big enough to hold six extra-large pizzas. “She said I should see you....
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 This Slavic Romeo and Juliet story shows the complexity of the inter-ethnic hatreds long extant in Yugoslavia. In the Vojvodina territory on the Yugoslav-Hungarian border, the period between 1945 and 1948 saw a shifting of nationalities and allegiances as the government brought in Serbian “freedom fighters” to claim the property of repatriated minorities. When the Topics, a family of Bosnian Serbs, move into a primarily Croatian village, a forbidden romance grows between the oldest son and his beautiful but war-scarred neighbor....
Twenty-five years ago John McDermott and Robert Lucas were allies in the movement for open housing and civil rights in Chicago. Now they’re on opposite sides of a heated battle over an abandoned 33-unit apartment building at 4910 S. Blackstone. The four-story apartment building (once known as the Hotel Riviera) is across the street from Hyde Park’s public library. It became a flophouse years ago and was finally boarded up in the late 1970s....
A LIFE IN THE THEATRE But the actors. What can they show for the show? Soon-dated production photos, press clippings that describe the effects of a performance but leave one to guess at the causes, awards that say the magic is over? Perhaps there’s a videotape–but it only freezes in time and two dimensions a dynamic that changed from night to night. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1977 David Mamet wrote a vivid play that plays on this inequity....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course your Janus impression doesn’t surprise me. The whole reason we are a straight, white, male dominated culture is that swm’s are masters at making double standards and double binds sound and seem completely rational–when if the swm worldview were taken altogether, the rest of us would realize how completely irrational Western Civilization is. For instance, gay men are blamed for bringing the disease of AIDS on themselves....
“What’s that?” asked the woman pointing to the silo. There are real villas too, and impressive they are. Schroeder Murchie Laya Associates added 3,000 square feet, including an art gallery and conservatory with pool, to an 1880s Hawthorne Place mansion. Decker and Kemp did a house in Lake Forest set amid 65 acres of orchards, swimming ponds, and stables, next to what the exhibit catalog describes as a “small forest”–a sort of Versailles as imagined by Gomer Pyle....
The Cineplex Odeon Corporation and Local 110 of the Motion Picture Projectionists and Video Technicians Union have faced off in a battle that could radically change the way Chicago movie theaters operate while testing the resolve of one of the city’s most entrenched and best-paid unions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lockout came as Cineplex Odeon and union executives were discussing a new three-year contract meant to replace a five-year contract that expired on September 1....
Friday 24 The 13th annual benefit for the Poetry Center at the School of the Art Institute features a reading by Charles Simic at 8 tonight, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $6 and will be available at the door: 871-6175 or 443-3711. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You won’t exactly expand your list of pen pals, but you can do a good deed on a global scale by participating in an Amnesty International Write-a-thon from noon to 4:30 this afternoon at Northwestern’s Parkes Hall, 1870 Sheridan in Evanston....
Friday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve created an all-comic-strip newspaper, where else to distribute it but at local nightclubs? The debut issue of Wunderkind, brainchild of comic maven Steve Lundin, gets feted tonight at Shelter, 564 W. Fulton. Things get under way at 9; there’s an open bar till 10. Admission is ten bucks. Call 226-2555 for more information. Apparently words like pastiche and amalgamation aren’t enough to do Stumpy’s Gang ....
Chuck Berry is usually content to just go through the motions these days–even his potentially explosive reunion with Matt “Guitar” Murphy and pianist Lafayette Leake at the Chicago Blues Festival a few years ago went flat, redeemed only when Keith Richards showed up and proceeded to blow Berry completely off the stage. But if anything can galvanize him it’s a gig like this one with pianist Johnnie Johnson. Johnson played as big as role as anyone in defining rock and roll piano....
Today. Five minutes ago. We received a complaint from Morse, Bell & Marconi, attorneys-at-law, reporting the theft of documents. They were involved in drafting a new bill for the state legislature. It would have cut the tariff for corporate users of high-speed communications equipment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A lot of people were against the bill. I could see why. It would have been just another fax break for the wealthy....
Milly May Smithy is Chicago’s premiere impresario and greatest talent scout; for three years she’s scoured clubs, back alleys, and garages for acts you’ve never seen and might never want to see–from a gay rap group (the Biggest Sissies in the World) who do only one song to a strange woman (Consuelo Allen) who recites Shakespeare with a spoon hanging from her nose; from an adolescent band of synchronized lariat artists (the Rodeo Gals) to a group of three male Cher impersonators (the Chers)....
Though very polite and British, this feature-length documentary about German filmmaker Wim Wenders offers the most penetrating insights and the best overall critique of his work that I have encountered anywhere. Paul Joyce, who directed it, has also made documentaries about Nicolas Roeg, David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, and Dennis Hopper, and he knows the conventional format well enough to get the most out of it. There are good clips and interesting commentaries from the interviewed subjects, who include Wenders himself, cinematographer Robby Muller, filmmaker Sam Fuller, novelist Patricia Highsmith, musician Ry Cooder, actors Harry Dean Stanton, Peter Falk, and Hanns Zischler, and critic Kraft Wetzel, who is especially provocative....
Much ink’s been spilled in past months over the controversial political opinions of Public Enemy–particularly the regrettable anti-Semitic comments uttered by a group member who’s since departed–but it would be myopic to view this group as agitprop speechifiers alone. One of the two or three most musically audacious and distinctive rap acts in America, they have a sound that can only be described as futuristic–and while they may or may not have the answers, they certainly are raising questions, and that’s saying something....
