Elektra In The Greek Myths Robert Graves paints this legend as one of a number of tales of sacred kingship: in a matriarchal system devoted to the worship of a triple goddess the king typically served for seven years and then was ritually murdered, and Graves found all the stigmata of that pattern in the tale of the House of Atreus. Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, found a different subtext in this, the first opera in their great collaboration....
Historically, Chicago has been unable to sustain even one major ballet company, and now here’s a third. But this one is the charmer, the young upstart. Started two years ago by the husband-wife team of Mario de la Nuez and Meridith Benson and premiering last February with Giselle, it’s professional, ambitious, multicultural (with a large Latino contingent), and savvy. De la Nuez says he loves the classics and plans to make golden oldies a third of the rep, but the other two-thirds will be neoclassical and contemporary ballet....
The Snarkout Boys & the Avocado of Death Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the Clark’s clientele was Daniel Pinkwater, the children’s novelist and radio humorist whose 1982 book The Snarkout Boys & the Avocado of Death draws its inspiration from the author’s boyhood in 50s Chicago. Pinkwater’s “Snark” isn’t the mythical creature of Lewis Carroll’s verse; it’s a compression of the words “sneak” and “Clark”–and sneaking off to the Snark after curfew is how the story’s protagonists embark on their goofy adventures....
Like current media darling Jacky Terrasson, pianist Cyrus Chestnut has spent time in singer Betty Carter’s group, his distinctive trio relies on interaction with a standout drummer–Clarence Penn to Terrasson’s Leon Parker–and he enjoys reworking classic material. But over the course of two superb albums the 33-year-old Chestnut has proven that he has no need for novel stylistic tricks like the ones Terrasson tends toward on his recent Blue Note debut....
Out of New York’s downtown pomo subculture emerges the amalgamation known as Dadadah, led by vocalist and flautist Kitty Brazelton. On their recently released debut, Rise Up! (Accurate/Distortion), numerous musical elements and attitudes collide: noisy improvised texture music, prog-rock jamming and art-rock posturing, west-coast chamber jazz, pop power chords, Asian and Polynesian classical music, Mexican jarocho harp tunes, and music to unmade movies from countless genres. The compositions often drift from style to style with a dreamlike fluidity, recalling a surrealist approach to juxtaposition as much as a more affronting dadaist one....
Executing Justice James Free, an army mechanic, was sentenced to death by a Du Page County jury in 1979 for the 1978 murder of a woman he attacked in a data processing center, the attempted murder of another, and the attempted rape of both. Free’s lawyer argued that he had no history of violent criminal behavior, that his army record was unblemished, and that at the time of his crimes he was under the influence of beer, PCP, and marijuana....
The extraordinary becomes commonplace during the fall migration. Casual birders often miss this because they tend to prefer May over November. In May the weather is better, and it improves through the month instead of getting worse. And the birds are all bright colors and bold patterns, feathered for the breeding season and easy to identify. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Egyptian goose that showed up at Wampum Lake in southern Cook County a couple of weeks ago is off the charts as far as wanderers are concerned....
The spring smelt run in Lake Michigan brings fish lovers of various biological orders to the lakefront. Around Montrose Harbor the breakwaters and step-stone revetments are covered with people bearing nets, coolers, and grills ready to catch, cook, and eat as much smelt as they can. The double-crested cormorant is one of 6 species of Phalacrocoracidae in North America, one of 30 species worldwide. It is the only North American species regularly found away from saltwater....
Michael Hill’s Blues Mob Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Hill exploded onto the blues scene about two years ago with a sound as furious and tormented as his politicized lyrics. On his new CD, Have Mercy!, Hill evokes some standard blues themes–recalcitrant lovers, fleshy pleasures–and his sound is closer to contemporary beer-and-boogie than the searing metallic onslaught of his debut disc, Bloodlines. But he’s hardly been tamed: “Bluestime in America,” which musically echos Gil Scott-Heron’s “New York City” and “Must Be Something,” grieves for a nation where dreams are dashed and futures are bleak; “Grandmother’s Blues” is a realist, almost Stalinist tale of police brutality set to a modified dub beat; “Stagolee/Perspective” warns young African-American men to forsake the outlaw hero’s self-destructive violence....
Every now and then a change in the cityscape, like a good dream, packs an unexpected psychic punch. But now the harsh sentence has been lifted. State Street has been “restored,” not to any precise moment in its past, and certainly not to 1978, but at least to a street, with normal sidewalks and traffic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But they are, after all, more like clothes than they want us to believe....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just as he applauded National Public Radio for encouraging us to “think our way to . . . carefully considered” conclusions, New Dimensions offers us interviews with the likes of the Dalai Lama, Joseph Campbell, Matthew Fox, Dr. McDougall, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joanna Macy, and Robert Bly–people on the cutting edge of spirituality, art, and science–and then leaves it to us to explore, experiment, and decide for ourselves....
PARTS OF ME FUNCTION LIKE A DREAM Spin 1/2 at the Neo-Futurarium, through April 23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Especially today, when more is expected of performance artists by audiences and critics because we’ve seen more performance art. Renaissance types like Laurie Anderson and Karen Finley not only use a variety of media well but write texts that can hold their own on the page....
The hassle of deciding what kind of food everyone’s in the mood for may be over. According to a recent New York Times article, “a growing number of restaurants around the country are serving the best-loved tastes from as many as a dozen countries.” What’s the reason for this trend? Economics. With half of all new restaurants going bankrupt within three years, competition is fierce. The result is a kind of global cuisine that drives purists crazy but gives average diners more choices....
The effort to revitalize 35-year-old Second City took a big step forward with last week’s opening of the improv company’s 80th revue, Pinata Full of Bees (reviewed by Jack Helbig in Section One). For this newest production Second City’s trademark skit-blackout-skit formula was dumped in favor of a format in which segments flow more smoothly. The new format also includes characters and plot points that recur throughout the evening, a tactic that Second City producers hope will keep audiences more involved....
JOAN JETT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “One, two, three, four!” she cried out in hoary rock parlance as she hit the stage with the blistering “Spinster” at Metro last week. The last 20 years didn’t seem to matter. To Joan Jett, straightforwardly devoted to every 70s rock shtick in the book, all life is on the stage. Everything else is just waiting in the wings....
Ed loves me. Totally. Ceaselessly. Abjectly. His love, I know, causes him pain. Because I cannot always be by his side. Because I also love another. Because I am careless in my attention to his litter box. Healthy and happy, Ed was free to pursue the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed: frequent trips to his handmade bowl (broad, low, properly weighted) to enjoy low-fat, low-magnesium meals; frequent trips to the frequently cleaned litter box; and 14 to 16 hours of quality snoozing....
It’s because the editor is an Aries, right? According to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, quoted in the Saint Louis Journalism Review and then in the Chicago Journalist (March), “The Tribune is the largest daily in the country that runs a horoscope without a disclaimer.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The public is uninformed about some basic tax facts,” writes Northern Illinois University’s Ellen Dran in Illinois Tax Facts (February)....
In the film In the Line of Fire, John Malkovich plays an ex-CIA-operative-turned-psychopathic-assassin who manufactures a gun made out of polymer or some kind of plastic compound. He’s able to smuggle the disassembled gun into a fund-raising dinner for the president because the gun doesn’t set off the metal detectors. (The bullets he conceals inside a rabbit’s-foot key ring.) It’s a terrific movie, but I did wonder whether the Secret Service’s satisfaction in seeing a film in which they are portrayed heroically (in the person of Clint Eastwood) was offset by a horror of the training-film-for-assassins details featured....
Ask anyone working in Chicago theater and you’ll hear the same despairing moan: the audiences have disappeared. Across the city actors are playing to empty seats. So if you’re one of those people who’s only planning on seeing one or two shows this season, make sure Jenny Magnus’s The Willies is on your list. This hour-long one-woman show deftly weaves seven seemingly unrelated monologues into a rich tapestry of beguiling anxiety....
On Monday the brave men who play The Women return to the Park West to again assault the barriers of good taste , re-creating their unrepentantly revisionist take on Clare Booth Luce’s play: a nasty, brazen, bitchy slice of wit if there ever was one. Luce’s spitefest depicts a coven of female “friends,” jaded New York socialites, who scheme, backstab, slander, and sometimes support each other. George Cukor made a notorious film version in 1939 (featuring a deliciously repellent Joan Crawford seeking to steal the husband of invincibly virtuous Norma Shearer), and Cloud 42’s gender-bending travesty oddly celebrates not only the play’s spitfire story but the film’s over-the-top acting....
