I think I found something in your book More of the Straight Dope that could be described as a mistake, although I wouldn’t use so vulgar a term. You said the reason worms crawl out on the sidewalk when it rains is to avoid drowning when their holes fill with water. A few months ago, after the author of an article in Discover magazine made a similar claim, a scientist who studied worms wrote in to say worms can live underwater as well as in the dirt....
URSULA OPPENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Groomed as a traditional concert pianist, the Harvard-educated Ursula Oppens rebelled, deciding instead to champion a wide range of contemporary music, and it was only in the late 80s that she returned in earnest to the standard classical repertoire and venues. Her experience in both arenas has made her an eloquent interpreter who can make hoary classics sound new and give weight to brand-new compositions....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Miner’s reporting on the upheaval at WBEZ radio [Hot Type, November 26 and December 10] helped me to understand how one of my favorite deejays, Stuart Rosenberg, got fired, but the best commentary on the situation is Jennifer Berman’s wonderfully caustic cartoon “WBEZZZZZ: Bumper Stickers for the New Regime” (December 24). (Her NAFTA cartoon [December 17] was great, too....
He’s up and wagging, frisky for an old dog. Smart too, knows what I’m talking about–a walk in the forest preserve. Who says dogs can’t understand English? But there’s no one around today. Must be some kind of Latin American holiday. So now what do I do? Our poor old alley looks like the set from some socially conscious movie–garbage, graffiti, broken pavement, bleak brick walls. It’s the kind of place photography students used to seek out when they wanted to do something artistic....
In a small office in Melrose Park the phone rings constantly with questions about the upcoming Erot-o-Con and Bondage Fest-a-Rama. Can I bring my wife? Will there be girls? Do you need dancers? How much is the cover? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Just think of it as Taste of Chicago for the sex industry,” says J.P. Strauss, who fields the calls with his partner Donna....
David Grubbs, who got his start with influential Louisville postpunk kids Squirrelbait, created Gastr del Sol out of the dissolution of his other former band, Bastro. On 1993’s The Serpentine Similar (Teen Beat), which offered an intriguing study of static rock structures and near-drones, the band consisted of Grubbs and former Bastro bassist Bundy K. Brown, augmented by a handful of guests. Since then, Brown has left and Grubbs has been joined by the prolific experimental guitarist and composer Jim O’Rourke–and the music of Gastr del Sol has gone from interesting to uncategorizable....
“No party hats inside,” a police officer’s radio crackles. State troopers in brown uniforms are frisking and questioning four Guardian Angels standing near a wooden snow fence with their hands behind their heads. One of them’s wearing a pink cardboard cone decorated with little clowns holding presents and a birthday cake. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’re waiting in a fenced-in area far from the prison, surrounded by unsmiling troopers and hundreds of revelers....
Lexis Praxis VI: Chicago Writers Taken to Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In contrast most of our local writers are all but invisible to top-flight Chicago theater companies. When was the last time Steppenwolf produced an original work by a Chicago playwright who isn’t Frank Galati? Of course, a lot of our local playwrights aren’t very good. But the same holds for the sacred cows that keep lumbering over to our trough from NYC....
This marathon performing-arts showcase–sponsored by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and The Arts Matter Foundation with lots of corporate backing–is a aimed at (though certainly not restricted to) families with children aged 3 to 13. Producer Cheryl Sloane and her colleagues have booked an impressive collection of local and international talent; there’s a heavy emphasis on storytelling and improvisation, and many attractions (including a slew of workshops) prioritize audience participation....
Performance artist Diane Torr didn’t have time to change for the opening of the 1989 Whitney Biennial. Wearing a fake mustache and men’s clothes, she had posed as a man for a magazine photo spread that afternoon. Torr had cross-dressed a few times onstage but not on the street. “I thought I would go as this guy and give all my friends a laugh,” she says. But what happened next wasn’t funny....
Julie Heffernan By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Heffernan writes that her paintings are in part “a reaction to the dryness and strategizing of art-making in the 70s. I wanted to paint my own raving, inappropriate world, the micro-narrative side of women’s experience.” Historically, she believes, the still life was “the humblest” form of painting: “Most of it,” she told me, “just didn’t have the stamp of male puissance....
On a recent afternoon around the lunch counter, my colleagues and I were discussing the attributes of the chicken egg when someone asked, “Which end of the egg comes out first, the round end or the pointed end?” Of course we all took a position, and while wagering of serious money did not take place, our reputations are on the line. I naturally thought of you to answer this question. –Mark Olson, Las Vegas, Nevada...
The War of Rosa’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rosa’s well-publicized troubles began back in May 1993 when a part-time bartender, Vera Smith, was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover cop. The timing of the bust couldn’t have been worse: the city’s free blues festival, “the three most important days of the year for a blues club,” according to Mangiullo, was less than two weeks away....
By the time Dolphinback Theatre’s KellyAnn Corcoran arrived in Chicago, she’d already acted in a few shows and did a little directing. A graduate of Webster University in Saint Louis, she moved here in 1992 after her marriage to her high school sweetheart broke up. She was hoping to act in a few commercials before moving on to New York to break into soap operas. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
I Am Cuba With Luz Maria Collazo, Jose Gallardo, Sergio Corrieri, Maria Gonzalez Broche, Raul Garcia, and Jean Bouise. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Auteurism is as much of a problem here as star ratings; it’s not clear that Kalatozov is the individual most responsible for the film’s distinctiveness. Judging from its unique, shimmering black-and-white look and the recent testimony of its cowriter, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the film belongs mainly to its cinematographer, the extraordinary Sergei Urusevsky (1908-1974), but I have no way of confirming this impression....
We were out of work, Lewie and me. Lewie is a housepainter and it was his slow season. I’m a househusband, slinging diapers daily. Lewie, my wife’s brother, usually lives with his girlfriend on the south side, but he was staying with us until he finished painting our bedroom. He’d been at our place for a week–staying up late, getting up late, bored in the daytime and wired all night. A little like a baby....
I would like to congratulate Chuck Shepherd for his efforts on behalf of the present Republican majority in Congress and all other enemies of the National Endowment for the Humanities and higher education in general. His September 15th report of the NEH grant to the American Association of Community Colleges [News of the Weird] managed to misrepresent and trivialize this source for academic stipends and badly needed scholarships in a manner that is worthy of the misleading zealotry of Senator Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” awards....
WHO GOES THERE? OR THE THINGS FROM ANOTHER WORLD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the surface, the Barker and Campbell stories are similar: both concern fateful (and fatal) encounters between rationally skeptical human beings and otherworldly monsters with a talent for metamorphosis and mental telepathy. In the Flesh tells of a half-human demon in a British jail; Campbell’s Thing is an alien intruder trapped in Antarctic ice for 20 million years, until a team of American scientists on a polar expedition revive it....
ANY PLACE BUT HERE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No, things are not happy in the depressed blue-collar universe of Caridad Svich’s Any Place but Here. What makes the plight of these people all the more cruel is that, beneath the bickering and passive-aggressive control games, they seem to actually care for one another. Lydia scolds Chucky for allowing leftover food to go stale in the refrigerator, angrily insisting that he eat it; his response is to tease her, stuffing handfuls of cold pasta into his mouth–whereupon she pleads with him to stop before he makes himself sick....
William Butler Yeats defined the first half of this century when he wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” It was a time when “balkanize” became a word and even the atom was split apart. Yet in 1939, in the midst of the era of disintegration, the Hyde Park Art Center was founded by a group of community-oriented artists and educators. And the center has held for 55 years....
