Lead Story The Winston-Salem Journal reported in February that evangelist Steven Jones of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, describes himself as one of the few in his profession who specialize in saving people with tooth trouble. He said he has had the God-given power since 1993 to straighten teeth, end toothaches, and replace lead and mercury fillings with gold, silver, and pearl. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Compelling Explanations...
Ruedi Hausermann Just the One Over the last decade more improvisers have put out overdubbed records, sometimes with great success. British saxophonists Evan Parker and John Butcher both recorded one-man multitrack CDs in 1991. And Chicago’s own sorely missed jazzketeer Hal Russell made a full-length record of single-handed multitrack pieces, Hal’s Bells (ECM), in 1992, just a year before he died. On it he played tenor and soprano saxes, trumpet, musette, drums, vibes, marimba, congas, and bells....
Cactus Brothers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a time, through sheer numbers, the dancers dominate the floor. Dressed primarily in cowboy hats and Kix Brooks’s flamethrower western shirts, the dancers scoot and turn as one. But eventually it’s the Cactus Brothers who prevail in this hopelessly uneven range war. Through sheer volume and freaky eclecticism, the Nashville sextet quickly clear out most of the dancers....
It was a damn good year for alternative music–and for a certain four-letter word that still makes your mom blush. Rarely heard on the radio before 1994, that word showed up in at least six songs that got extensive airplay on any of three major local FM stations (Q101, WXRT, and B96). It was censored each time, but with varying degrees of precision–in some songs the record label silenced the whole word, but in others just a sound or two was cut, giving the singer a weird case of hiccups....
Films by Marguerite Duras Duras’ narcissism–she often speaks her own texts during the films–has been held against her, yet it seems to be every bit as germane to her art as the purely physical narcissism of John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Toshiro Mifune. This narcissism is evident whenever one hears her reciting her own prose, which happens in at least four of the Duras-directed features showing at Facets. (It’s been too long since I’ve seen Les enfants for me to recall if she speaks in that film, but her voice can be clearly heard at the other end of a telephone in Nathalie Granger, offscreen in India Song and Agatha, and triumphantly on-screen and off in Le camion....
Take It to the Limit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the top price on the closest seats was brought down significantly, little noticed is the fact that many thousands of tickets actually increased in price. Now the top ticket price at the World is $118; the rest of the pavilion seats are $88, and the lawn’s $38. At Alpine, there’s one $120 price in the pavilion and about 32,500 $40 lawn seats....
HOLOCAUST PROJECT: FROM DARKNESS INTO LIGHT Or consider Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s great nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust film. We see the testimony of survivors, we see the mass-murder sites today, but he uses no footage or photos from the actual period. Nor does Lanzmann cast himself as perfect: his hatred of old SS men is apparent, but he also reveals the lies he himself told to get one of them to recall his “glorious” years at Treblinka....
As he did last season in his captivating staging of The Misanthrope, director Charles Newell delivers a production both hilarious and disturbing. Court Theatre’s season closer is a mostly superb mounting of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ 1775 comedy about a wily barber who helps an aristocrat win a woman’s love against the “futile precaution” of her elderly guardian, who wants her for himself. The quirky new adaptation by Chicagoans Gilbert Pestureau and Anne Wakefield feels contemporary–only occasionally resorting to deliberate anachronism....
Equity Library Theatre Chicago, at Chicago Dramatists Workshop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Equity Library Theatre hope to pull off an elaborate practical joke by mounting what purports to be William Shakespeare’s lost Robin Hood, they ought to get their story straight. They’ve placed an authentic antique volume entitled Shakespeare’s Comedies in their lobby and opened it to the title page of a play called Robin Hood....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s right–you just might be the next Ryan Idol. As a matter of fact, you probably already are, because gay men have been simulating the synthetic reality of gay jerk-off magazine models and porn-movie actors for quite some time. Whether it be through body image, fashion, or sexual activity, it’s clear that the eroticized fantasy world of porn has cleverly made itself at home among the real-life experiences of gay men....
Zebra Crossing Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’ve heard the idea dozens of times: If artists were better adjusted and got laid more often, would their happiness deprive us of artistic beauty? Playwright Lisa Loomer addresses the same question in Accelerando, a sort of hybrid of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl, and many a Matt Groening “Love Is Hell” cartoon....
By Cara Jepsen SATURDAY 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The local chapter of the Jane Austen Society has some 300 members who get together several times a year to discuss Austen’s life and novels; they also donate money to high schools to help them purchase Austen novels and videotapes. Whether they’ll include money for Clueless, which is based on Emma, has yet to be determined....
Captured at newsgroup rec.travel.asia While I know you can hire a motorcycle for trips out from Hanoi or Saigon and back again, can anyone advise me on if it is pos-sible to rent a motorcycle in Saigon and drop it off in Hanoi or vice versa? Would you want to do this journey by motorbike or is the road and traffic so bad that you’d be crazy to attempt it?...
At their best, programming gimmicks have a way of drawing felicitous connections and presenting them in one neat package. Take this concert by the Chicago Pro Musica, which kicks off the third season of joint events by the Art Institute and the CSO. The occasion is the museum’s ambitious exhibit of highlights from its hundred-year residency on Michigan Avenue. The program features works written both during the time of the Columbian Exposition and a century later; serving as a bridge of sorts is Uncharted Waters, commissioned by the Pro Musica from local composer Rami Levin to mark both the exposition’s centennial and the quincentennial of Columbus’s expedition....
Raymond Hudd has no customers in his north-side hat shop, and he’s not expecting a rush anytime soon. “No one dresses up anymore,” he says, shrugging. “It’s not like it used to be.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You look beautiful,” Hudd gushes at a young brunette who’s decked out in a business outfit. She sets a sleek, fuchsia Hudd original on her head....
In the late 1960s four pianists began to emerge as the dominant influences for the next 20 years of keyboard jazz: McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett. All of them have helped reinterpret the traditional jazz repertoire, but each has also struck off in a different and unique direction, and none more so than Jarrett. Jarrett has embraced iconoclastic elements of the classical piano literature; what’s more, he has regularly presented wholly improvised solo-piano works of symphonic length, which have made him the object of both sincere adulation and intense scrutiny....
There were two holocausts. The one that is acknowledged and commemorated and the one that has long been hidden: the Ethiopian holocaust. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Ethiopian holocaust resulted from Benito Mussolini’s attempt to expand his African empire beyond Somaliland and Eritrea. Other European countries had carved up most of Africa and he was scrambling for a larger share. In 1934, Mussolini initiated his move against Ethiopia in a minor border incident, prompting emperor Haile Selassie to appeal to the League of Nations for mediation....
For years vocalist Little Al Thomas has drawn a tightly knit and enthusiastic band of admirers to clubs like Lee’s Unleaded Blues Lounge on South Chicago, but to most north-siders his supple vocals and wide-ranging repertoire will be a welcome surprise. Born near the Maxwell Street neighborhood in 1930, Thomas came of age during the time when Chicago blues was evolving from its prewar incarnation as a slick, jazz-tinged popular entertainment to the more aggressively rootsy style that took hold in the late 40s and early 50s....
Patty Carroll: Photographs and Messages Carroll’s work gains its power not from its conception, then, but from its execution. These large Ektacolor prints, 23 inches square, place the figure against a totally black background. The woman, a model Carroll uses as a stand-in for herself, has light skin whose smoothness is accentuated by diffuse lighting. A variety of objects have been placed in front of her face in different positions: strips of bacon come down like hair; sausages are arrayed in rows across her forehead and down her face; pink patterned trim is draped over most of her face like a kitchen valance....
NRG Ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the founder and leader of NRG Ensemble, Hal Russell, died in 1992, the band stood at a crossroads. Having just completed its second record for the major jazz label ECM, NRG had to ask: should it continue in the vein of its work with Russell, performing as a repertoire band in the hope of playing out its budding success for all it’s worth?...
