IBM has a new ad out (as seen in the February 26 and March 4 New Yorker) with a remarkable claim. It says an IBM scientist and his colleagues have discovered a way to make an object disintegrate in one place and reappear intact in another. Beam me up, Scotty! Is this a publicity stunt? Is it true? They say there’s a teleport exhibit on their Web page at http://www.ibm.com/news/ls960202.html and give a phone number as well....
Construction workers doing double time building the Skyline Stage on Navy Pier don’t even bother with a double take when a woman wearing a ratty white wig and pouf of a miniskirt over her faded jeans strides through the site. She walks past roofers completing the concession stands, electricians wiring on the catwalk, and climbs on the stage. There she opens the door of a makeshift cabinet on wheels. She climbs inside, squats, and wiggles her hips....
Two’s company and a crowd in Tour de Farce, Kingsley Day and Philip LaZebnik’s comedy spoofing both the sensationalistic excesses of the media and the lengths to which actors and playwrights will go to get a laugh. A pair of performers, one woman and one man, essay five roles each in this door-slamming bedroom farce about a goody-two-shoes marriage-manual author, a philandering family-values politician, and the women in their lives. The best jokes stem from the link between the characters’ onstage exertions and the actors’ offstage ones–super-quick costume changes, ventriloquism, frantic dashes out a stage-left door and back in from beneath a stage-right bed, and so forth....
“As far back as eight years old, I would cut pictures of furniture out of catalogs and magazines and paste them on paper,” says Rosetta Holmes. “I had a little scrapbook. It was my dream to own a home.” As chief executive at the CHA, Lane says, he became troubled by “the millions of dollars we were spending with external contractors to fix up buildings. I thought, why can’t we have the residents do that?...
Uncomfortable Spaces Back at Art 1996 Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Basically we wanted to start a guide to alternative spaces in Chicago,” says Ned Schwartz, owner of Beret International. “But the nonprofits all had boards to answer to, and it was hard to get them involved.” So Schwartz joined forces with three other gallery owners who shared his commitment to contemporary conceptual art: Joel Leib of Ten in One, Richard Kelley of Tough, and Chris Murray of MWMWM....
By Ben Joravsky Unfortunately, Bates no longer teaches creative writing and drama (though he remains at Lane as an English teacher). In the spring principal David Schlichting relieved Bates of his position as the drama teacher (Neighborhood News, June 2); this fall he gave Bates’s creative writing class to another teacher. “The man wins awards and gets fired–it’s outrageous and it breaks my heart,” says Crewdson. “The real losers are the students....
Aesop’s Fables, Raven Theatre. Aesop’s fables, passed down from the ancient Greek storyteller in various versions, are likely to remain among the stories we pass on to our children because they teach valuable lessons about human nature in entertaining ways. Raven Theatre’s current show, adapted by Bill McGough and Michael Menendian and staged by Menendian and Scott Shallenbarger, proves that even a generation of kids surrounded by video projections and computer animation will be entertained by classic lessons about the persistent tortoise and the arrogant hare and the silly shepherd who alarmed his village by crying wolf when the tales are told well....
Would you invite a stranger to your home specifically to pass judgment on it? Would you allow him to stay for weeks and encourage him to analyze your housekeeping, personal hygiene, entertainment habits, and recreational pursuits–in short, to criticize your “life-style”? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wilson’s piece is the first in the MCA’s series of “Op-Ed” programs, which, in an inversion of standard order, will allow artists to evaluate the work of the museum....
Prairie grasses and flowers are starting to grow in some of the hanging transparent plastic tubes that make up Michele Brody’s installation Prairie Experiment. Seeds float on the surface of water in which nutrients have been dissolved. While some of the seeds have sprouted, others have merely grown moldy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Prairie Experiment doesn’t pretend to be Eden. “It’s not a healthy system,” says Brody....
LIVING ROOM A curious metal contraption, part of David Schafer’s Model for Wild Harmony, dominates the front of the gallery; it’s essentially a three-rung ladder leading to a circular platform suspended above the floor by means of cables and painted steel beams. Both a wall label and a sticker attached to the ladder advise, “At their own risk, viewers are encouraged to climb the ladder with caution.” In addition, hanging above the platform there’s a convex mirror on which the word “DINGDONG” has been etched, and on a nearby wall there’s a large upside-down squirrel drawn with blue sign paint....
In the Mouth of Madness With Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jurgen Prochnow, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, and Charlton Heston. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Significantly, throughout these shifts Carpenter never lost the distinguishing characteristics of his earlier phases; these new genres merely constituted a widening pool of resources. In fact, all the stages of his career outlined above are present in some way in his new feature....
Captured by Nina Sandlin at newsgroup sci.bio.entomology.misc Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not really sure where else to post this question, so maybe someone here can help me. I live in central New York, and my husband and I just rented a house in the city. The problem is giant slugs! They are about 3-4 inches long, with light grey and dark grey stripes running down the length of their body....
The first feature of Russian critic and filmmaker Oleg Kovalov, who specializes in eccentric found-footage films, is a wild compilation spanning at least half a century that suggests at times a Soviet equivalent to The Atomic Cafe and That’s Entertainment! Playfully experimental and irreverent in sound and image, the film gets some of its eeriest effects from excerpts of a mid-50s melodrama of cold-war paranoia called The Case of Corporal Kotschetkov, in which the young hero’s beloved and her grandmother turn out to be capitalist spies....
One Friday night in 1979 fifth-grade teacher Jim May packed into a VW minibus with several other teachers and drove all night to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Located in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, the town was lined with cobblestone streets and antebellum houses where, May says, “you’d expect to see Tennessee Williams sitting on a porch any moment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I walked into this tent, and there was an African-American woman, Jackie Torrence, a great granddaughter of a slave, telling mountain stories,” he says....
“People come in here with preconceived notions,” Cook County circuit court judge Earl E. Strayhorn tells a group of prospective jurors. “Wipe your minds free and clear of them. Nothing you’ve seen on any of those programs–NYPD Blue, L.A. Law–is going to happen here. No one is going to jump up in the back of the courtroom and confess to the crime. Those are entertainment programs, written by scriptwriters, designed to keep you glued to the screen until the advertiser’s message is shown....
Love! Valour! Compassion!, Organic Touchstone Company, at Touchstone Theatre. If Thornton Wilder were an openly gay middle-aged man today he might have written Terrence McNally’s 1994 play, about the evolving relationships among eight plucky, temperamental gay men who spend three holiday weekends together one summer. In this elegiac comedy, McNally uses the characters’ friendships and romances to mine insight into universal issues–the nature of love, the fear of failure, the inevitability of death–as Wilder did in such works as Our Town, The Matchmaker, and The Long Christmas Dinner....
The music of Brazil–from the street sambas and bossa nova heard in the 1958 film Black Orpheus on up through the tropicalismo style of the 60s and 70s and the samba-reggaes and other assorted hybrids of recent years–has always captivated a certain percentage of U.S. listeners. But from a continent away, we Brazil nuts get an unrealistically clarified picture of that nation’s music history, as if each movement simply supplanted the previous one and the nation’s taste suddenly shifted gears....
Judgement In his preface to Judgement, British playwright Barry Col-lins cites Franz Kafka: “Only a party to a case can really judge, but, being a party, it cannot judge. Hence, there is no possibility of judgement in the world but only the glimmer of a possibility.” Audiences are used to judging the characters they see–or rather, they’re used to having the playwrights serve up a verdict. But Collins’s play and Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women defy such expectations....
This archive document includes both parts of this story, which ran on July 17, 1995 and July 24, 1995. If you asked him why he’s so restless, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. He has a hard time explaining or understanding anything about his situation these days–he’s simply afflicted by mysterious surges of nervous energy, like a lightning rod in an invisible thunderstorm. He jumps out of chairs, fusses endlessly with the objects on his nightstand, arranges himself in his bed with elaborate formality, and then, the moment he’s comfortable, bounds up to look out the window....
One rainy Friday night my friends and I got a flat. Our car had run over a pothole two blocks from the expressway, and we pulled into a gas station between Armitage and North to change the tire. The driver popped the trunk, and I got out of the backseat to help him. He had a spare, a jack, and a crowbar, but they were buried under sports equipment and several boxes of promotional fliers....
