There’s been a mistake. Flank Treat is playing tonight at the Pixlar with that other band, Drove OverBill. Somehow my name is not on the list. The longhair in the box office pretends to have never heard of me. He must be new. In town. Someone will hear about this later, but in the meantime I’m having him phone up to Joe for an answer, namely in the form of an all-access pass....
Inclusion. Clearly inclusion carries a lot of baggage, much like other high-sounding expressions–racial integration, affirmative action–that have become battlegrounds. A friendly man with a short brown beard, Cohen sits in shirtsleeves in his 22nd-floor office on West Washington explaining the intricacies of inclusion law with the patience of a Talmudic scholar instructing the uninitiated. This is no easy task. Not only are the concepts multifaceted, but the very language of special education has undergone radical change in the past 20 years....
Rights of the Accessed The penguin story, as you never would have guessed, is an analogy. The real issue here isn’t predatory nature magazines. It’s magazines and newspapers licensing their contents to electronic databases. It’s writers flat on their backs on the centerline of the nation’s information superhighway. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’ve been doing research on this issue the last three years,” says Judith Cooper, an NWU vice president who lives in Chicago....
Letters editor; Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With regards to Bill Wyman’s article [Hitsville] on March 11, I feel compelled to ask one simple question that seems to be haunting Bill of late: Why be so bad at saying nothing? Besides misspelling the name of Stephen Malkmus two different ways in a rather short article, he goes on to make another mistake concerning the meaning of some veiled (?...
Two years ago Dexter Bullard turned down a job many would have killed for. The artistic director of the Next Theatre, Harriet Spizziri, was retiring, and the first person she thought of to replace her was Bullard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “And frankly,” continues Bullard, who’s now just shy of 30, “the audience at Next was almost twice as old as me. I am trying to make theater for my generation....
Chicago sports fans don’t mind a loser; that much we already know. What we can’t tolerate is a boring team, one that whether seriously awful or merely mediocre has no personality. One quarter of the way through the National Football League season, it seems the Bears are just such a team. We’re not ready to write Dave Wannstedt off as a coach; he appears to be an upright, churchgoing man, and he still knows his football....
I am aware of two British intelligence agencies: MI5, the counterintelligence service, and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), which I understand is England’s answer to the CIA. What I want to know is, whatever happened to MIs 1, 2, 3, and 4? –Len Cleavelin, Saint Louis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good question, lame answer–but what do you want, entertainment or the truth? At the turn of the century the British War Office had various “military operations” departments, each designated MO-something....
When you forget to dial “1” before an area code, a recorded message informs you that you “must first dial a ‘1’ before dialing this number.” If the little man in the phone can tell that the number requires a “1” in front of it, why do you first need to dial a “1”? –Reuben Gbogba, Berkeley, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The teachers in grade school must have hated you, Reuben....
Doorika, Chicago’s true champions of the avant-garde, have consistently thrown conventional theatrical logic to the wind in their highly inventive and suggestive theater pieces. In their 1990 masterpiece and Chicago debut, North of the Lake on the Seventh Day, performed in Tthe then-gutted World Tattoo Gallery, several scenes were staged 100 feet behind the audience. In their 1992 Satellite Babushka, an homage to Chekhov, the ten-minute opening scene was performed entirely in Russian....
Like Clint Eastwood and Jackie Chan, Hong Kong star Chow Yun-fatt is a shrewd molder of his screen persona. Starting out in his early 20s as a soap opera heartthrob, Chow quickly took on leading roles in a string of romantic comedies. Then in the mid-1980s, while a box-office champ in east Asia, he changed his image, becoming the stoic moral anchor in John Woo’s male-dominated, nihilistic universe. The risky move paid off, broadening Chow’s appeal, especially in the West....
Are your ancestors from Europe? Have you always thought of yourself as white if the subject came up? On an employment form? Or a census questionnaire? Listen. You don’t have to be white. Even if your skin color is light, if your eyes are blue, if your hair is blond, it doesn’t matter. These things don’t make you white. They tell you a little about where your parents, and their parents, came from....
In a million years Dale Boiling never figured the city would approve plans to build 280 condominium units and 20 houses on the banks of the Chicago River. The project, proposed for a 17-acre site near the intersection of Foster and Pulaski, would make traffic even more congested, cause flooding, and pave over a forest–one of the last in Chicago. “I don’t think the city would want to let this land be destroyed,” says Boiling, who lives nearby....
AUGUST Saturday 26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Organizers of the Singer’s Conference have lined up a bevy of voice coaches, performers, local and national industry weasels, lawyers, and agents for two days of panels, workshops, and performances at the northwest side’s Abbey Pub. For the whole shebang it’s $175 in advance, $195 (cash only) at the door. Single-day passes are also available, and for only $7 you can hear the Bad Examples headline a Saturday-night singer’s showcase that starts at 7....
I can’t vouch for the first 22 editions of the Chicago International Film Festival, but the 30th threatens to be the best since I moved to this town in 1987. Much of the usual fat and filler has been trimmed away, and the selections this year are unusually thoughtful and judicious (thanks in large measure to the efforts of coprogrammer Marc Evans, who knew where to look). Happily, there’s more attention given to older films, and the overall spread of films promises a veritable bounty to anyone ready to take the plunge....
Endlessly ingenious musical staging by Susan Stroman, a hilarious, smart-alecky script by Ken (Lend Me a Tenor) Ludwig, evocative 30s-style sets by Robin Wagner, and above all a collection of great George and Ira Gershwin songs make for perfect escapist entertainment in this 1992 Broadway hit. And though this touring cast isn’t quite as top-notch as the road company that played the same theater in 1993, the show’s inherent strengths more than compensate for any weaknesses....
End of Enterprise Chicago Enterprise will publish one more issue and disappear. It’s useful, but it’s expensive, and the sense of purpose of its founders has trickled away into the sands. But fervor ebbs. Committed CEOs such as Motorola’s George Fisher and United’s Stephen Wolf were giving way to less interested successors, and executive director Lawrence Howe looked twice at the magazine’s $300,000 budget. “You can’t go on forever with a major budget commitment without something tangible in the way of results,” Howe told us....
GHOSTFACE KILLAH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the members of the Wu-Tang Clan continue to showcase their individual talents–Method Man, GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Raekwon have all released solo albums in the two years since the release of the epochal Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)–the notorious Long Island hip-hop collective has only gotten stronger. Regardless of who’s nominally running the show, the whole crew is on hand to contribute....
It’s one of nature’s confounding ironies that the last stronghold of the black-crowned night heron in Illinois lies in the few undeveloped parcels that remain between the landfill mountains and the rusting industrial sheds of Chicago’s Tenth Ward. Every year these birds return to the Calumet wetlands from points as far away as Belize, Guatemala, and Cuba. They come, as their ancestors have since the retreat of the glaciers thousands of years ago, to the remnants of what was once 50,000 acres of wetland and prairie....
Mike LeDonne’s piano lines breathe the clean open air of simpler times–the 1950s to be exact, when bebop relaxed a little and piano giants like Wynton Kelly and Tommy Flanagan were modifying the rarefied message sent down by Bud Powell. LeDonne doesn’t ape this piano heritage so much as he extends it; and the comfort he takes in the style’s funkier edges helps explain why he fits so well with an artist like Milt Jackson, with whom he often appears....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A New York Times report on the first day’s rescue operations for TWA Flight 800 in July mentioned a man in an army uniform who showed up at the crash site command center and helped direct helicopter traffic. The man was there for about 12 hours before authorities realized they had no idea who he was. Though officials agreed that the man had done a fine job, he was escorted from the area....
