If ever there was a governmental body in need of a healthy dose of glasnost, it is the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Under the careful eye of board president George Dunne–who is also chair of the Cook County Democratic Party–county government has been a closed shop for the past 20 years, serving primarily as a patronage instrument for party loyalists. A few liberal organizations have endorsed Phelan, but several others are staying neutral....
A near-definitive account of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 60s, including the campus protests that preceded and followed it during the decade. Mark Kitchell, the young filmmaker who put this together over six years, combines a vivid oral history recounted by many of the participants (including, among many others, Susan Griffin, Todd Gitlin, Bobby Seale, John Searle, and Chicagoan Jack Weinberg) with fascinating archival footage and still photographs (which feature, among others, Joan Baez, Martin Luther King Jr....
Trumpeter Paul Smoker, Iowa’s resident new-jazz genius, has made several trips to Chicago in recent years, and if you’ve never heard him, you’ve been missing one of the most coherent improvisers in music today. (And that’s not even mentioning his technique–I can think of no modern trumpeter who could beat this guy in a cutting contest). But without slighting Smoker, I must shout even louder about Borah Bergman, the virtually unknown pianist making his Chicago debut this weekend....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Note that the only variables are the amount produced and the level of retirees’ consumption. If retired boomers live off their Social Security, their private pension plans, their savings, their children, they still consume what others are producing. We can’t bake the bread now, put it in a freezer, and eat it in 2030. Fake solution....
ELEEMOSYNARY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this time of big-budget holiday blockbusters, overladen with special effects and elaborate sets, Interplay’s production of Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary dazzles with its simplicity and grace–one of those rare shows that make acting, directing, and writing look incredibly easy. The performers work so seamlessly with the script that we’re amazed to realize by the end that in about 90 minutes the show has covered almost 80 years in the lives of three characters....
The first of Orson Welles’s two essay films to be completed and released (the lesser-known 1979 Filming “Othello” was the second), this breezy, low-budget 1973 montage–put together from discarded documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach as well as new material filmed by Welles–forms a kind of dialectic with Welles’s never-completed It’s All True; as Welles himself implied, an equally accurate title for this playful cat-and-mouse game might have been It’s All Lies....
“I remember everything,” says Steve Starr. “Visuals I remember very well. I distinctly remember them putting up the wallpaper in the hallway, the gold squares.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The metallic gold-square wallpaper stretched the length of a 40-foot hallway connected to the four bedrooms. Paper on the foyer walls featured metallic gold clouds floating against a chocolate brown background punctuated by tiny white stars and coral unicorns....
This group should have been called “Sons of Stockhausen,” including as it does in its lineup two sons of the famous (some would say infamous) avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. As it is, the name is not only a polemic against the popular Kronos Quartet but an indication of the way that the group approaches time in its improvisations. There is no set form or structure to the music, simply intuitive momentum....
LAURI MACKLIN Macklin’s a born soloist–her dancing has a cleanness, a precision, and at the same time an idiosyncratic rhythm that other dancers may find difficult to reproduce. In her recent concert at MoMing, I found Macklin’s solo–Labyrinth, a premiere–the most successful of the three dances on the program, not only because she’s the ideal interpreter of her own choreography, but because in this dance she seemed most herself. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE COMPANY The Holmes company seems to be “black” in a different and more elusive way. For starters, JHCDC is generally not afraid of emotion: the highs are higher, the lows are lower. Take Love Not Me, for instance, a recent (1989) piece of Duncan choreography: A woman (Winifred Haun) writhes on a chunky, angular, medieval-looking chair in a shaft of light so pure and blindingly white it seems to have come straight from hell....
I was perversely flipping through the Parade section of my Sunday newspaper when I stumbled upon Marilyn vos Savant’s “Ask Marilyn” column. Even more perversely, I read it. It wasn’t a total loss, though, because it appears she made another mistake, even worse than the one you pointed out in a very entertaining column a few months ago. Here’s the question: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ANSWER: Yes; you should switch....
TWO ORIGINAL ONE-ACTS: “THE SPIDER” AND “CUE LINE” at Sheffield’s School Street Cafe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cue Line, by actor John Farrimond, at first recalls a Second City improv exercise: whenever a new actor entered a scene the setting was switched and the story enlarged, creating a progressively more populous sketch. But unfortunately Cue Line doesn’t get bigger–this one-joke sketch just pursues the same path Pirandello charted seven decades ago, though he had much more to say, in Six Characters in Search of an Author....
In November the Chicago Park District released its 1993 budget, and the city yawned. Apparently the media had more important things to think about, like the City Hall squabble over Mayor Daley’s proposed $48 million property-tax hike. The Park District’s proposed budget received little coverage in the dailies and barely a mention on TV. “It’s as though the Park District wasn’t there,” says Erma Tranter, executive director of the Friends of the Parks, a watchdog group....
XSIGHT! PERFORMANCE GROUP The leaders in the movement toward more theatrical dance have been German practitioners of Tanztheater (dance-theater). Started by Pina Bausch of the Wuppertal Dance Theater in West Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, Tanztheater creates a theater based on dancers. Although the dancers sometimes speak, their talk is not the polished prose of playwrights but daily speech distorted and re-formed. Its language does not follow conventional conversational patterns but repeats and overlaps like steps in a dance....
Although there are times when one feels that the filmmakers have bitten off a little more than they can chew, this is a bold, watchable adaptation (by director James Foley and coproducer Robert Redlin) of a noirish thriller by Jim Thompson that comes surprisingly close to capturing the grisly, hard-boiled, and unstable world of that author–thanks in part to a sharp feeling for sensual detail that includes everything from wet, squishy kisses to a scummy unused swimming pool....
Friday 21 Gertrude Stein’s male subjectivity, androgyny in Navaho culture, Jean Genet’s interaction with the Black Panther Party, and gay telephone party lines will be some of the topics at today’s Gender (does not equal) Sexuality: A Symposium on Other Sexualities and the Arts at Northwestern University. Sponsored by Northwestern’s Committee for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, the symposium will feature lectures, video and slide shows, and live performances by academic theorists and performance artists....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Miller was definitely right in saying that “Everybody has a story.” I’ve been working in close contact with doctors for a numbers of years, mostly in hospitals (I’m not a nurse). I have come to judge doctors on their personal demeanor which includes how they interact with peers, staff, and their patients. The two doctors mentioned in the article, “Dr....
“The deep voice was heard in the deeper night,” wrote Yannis Ritsos in his poem “Toward Saturday.” “Then the tanks went by.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since 1934–the same year his first volume of poetry was published and he joined the Greek communist party–Ritsos had been recognized as that rare breed of artist who upheld high formal quality while remaining accessible to the general public....
The Gin Blossoms’ first major-label release–a five-song EP on A&M called Up and Crumbling–is pleasurable if not hugely promising. The band is a quintet from Tempe, Arizona, a slightly dirtier, more laconic BoDeans, with a disheveled tenor in front, some nice harmonies in back, and the sweetened-up guitar grinding that defines Amer-rock as we know and love it. Based on Up and Crumbling (I don’t know their original indie release), I’m not sure they have anything all that important to say, or if they did whether any of the band’s several songwriters would be able to put it into words....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the arrival of the new professional Executive Director of the YWCA, Helen Wronski, this past spring there were additional changes in job structures and in new positions. In response to the crisis line volunteers’ need to have a staff person available on a regular basis, a Crisis Line Supervisor was hired. In response to the need of the Shelter Director and staff to provide an orderly environment for the residents, a House Coordinator was hired to solely be in charge of supervising cooking and cleaning, ordering supplies and generally seeing that the physical plant was running smoothly....
