THE KILLING Center Theater Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Big-city lawyer Marv Cohen arrives with lofty ideals when he’s called in to advise Suzette Wilson, the attorney for a midwestern Indian reservation, on initiating an on-site gambling casino. Soon afterward he meets the laconic chief, Joe Longa, and his teenage son, Bosco–badly brain-damaged as a result of water polluted by toxic waste mislabeled as fertilizer....
The Recognized Artist Seal of Approval Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Footlik, who plans to use Vera Klement as the centerpiece of Lineage’s second show, hopes her exhibitions focusing on talents who have votes of confidence from more recognized artists will help collectors ferret out the promising young stars and also aid emerging artists. The Paschke connection has already paid off for Walczak. “Ed Paschke’s recommendation carries a lot of weight,” she says....
A funny thing happened before last Friday’s game between Bulls and the Hornets at the Chicago Stadium. During the introductions, not only was the Hornets’ Kendall Gill cheered by the Stadium faithful–an expected occurrence, as Gill was a high school star at south-suburban Rich Central and played his college ball at Illinois, endearing him to Chicago fans–but Larry Johnson and even Alonzo Mourning received more cheers than boos. Johnson, a tank of a forward listed at six feet seven and 250 pounds, is the star of Nike ads in which he plays his “grandmama” and takes on all comers on the basketball court, so he is a well-known and friendly presence to most hoop fans....
Since the 1970s, the Northwest Incinerator has grown older, air-emissions standards have gotten tougher, and the environmental movement’s attitude toward burning garbage has changed dramatically. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It used to be that landfills were considered the worst place to put our garbage, because sooner or later they leak toxic pollutants into precious drinking water underground. A decade before the current environmental-justice movement emerged, working-class grandmothers were studying toxicology texts, monitoring garbage trucks, and demonstrating to shut landfills down....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, “pop” really only means one thing. Top 40 radio saturated million selling hits, performed by artists who are interchangeable and ultimately disposable. From cute kid groups (Jacksons, Osmonds, New Kids, Kris Kross) to sultry divas (Nancy Sinatra, Pat Benatar, Madonna, Whitney Houston) to hunky heartthrobs (Elvis, Rod Stewart, George Michael, Vanilla Ice), the names change but the song remains the same: slickly produced verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus....
It all seemed too easy, when they swept away the peanut vendors from the United Center’s steps. Weinberg and copublisher Steve Kohn print an issue for every game and peddle it outside the stadium for $3 a copy. On a good night they’ll sell 1,500. The Blue Line’s filled with statistics and gossip, and it portrays Wirtz as a lecherous old robber baron. One gag, written by Weinberg and Greg Simetz, a freelance humor writer, features a made-up letter from Mayor Daley....
WUTHERING HEIGHTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our culture tends to think of love as the great panacea–so much so that it seems impossible love might also be a great pathogen. To be sure, AIDS and the divorce rate have demonstrated the wisdom of tempering passion with prudence, but these problems are easily dismissed, their existence just one more reason to cherish the notion of a pure, con- stant, all-consuming devotion....
Rock and roller Ray Davies’s almost-solo show is part concert and part monologue–and at its best when it fuses the two forms into fluid music theater. The generously long two-act evening focuses on the checkered career of Davies’s band, the Kinks: humble beginnings (jamming on an eight-watt amp), paranoid passages (a U.S. tour plagued by run-ins with gun-toting chauffeurs and music-union bullies), bursts of glory, and bittersweet breakups. Sprinkled throughout the professional anecdotes are personal reminiscences: eavesdropping on his older sisters’ boyfriends (whose passionate pleas, Davies decides, were the inspiration for Kinks hits like “You Really Got Me” and “Set Me Free”), striking out with art-school “chicks,” sibling rivalry with his lead-guitarist brother Dave (whose musical surrogate here is the superb sideman Pete Mathison), an actual encounter with John Lennon Himself (told with a delicious mix of starstruck awe and snide irreverence)....
Contrary to what’s suggested in the Film Center’s Gazette, the version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 masterpiece being shown is not his first sound picture, but the film that immediately preceded it, his last silent. (Both versions follow the plight of a murderer caught between her blackmailer and her boyfriend, an investigating detective.) For all the experimental interest of the sound version (the first full-length talkie released in England), this recently uncovered silent version, which hasn’t been seen anywhere in more than 60 years, is the more fluid and accomplished of the two....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Baldridge, stop and think for a moment. In what sense was Hogan “causing a man with two children to lose his income” when she took him to court for an actionable offense? Excuse me, but it seems to me that guy put himself in the way of losing his job, etc, when he let Wee Willie Winkie do the thinking for him....
Step into Yo Mama’s cafe on Milwaukee Avenue and you’ll be greeted by Mama herself. “How ya doin’ honey,” she coos, flitting around the granite and marble tables, taking orders and giving a few herself. “Oh, you should give me that ring girl,” she tells a customer. In red lipstick, earrings, and nail polish and a pretty pink-and-green apron, she’s as sweet as only mothers can be. Except this Mama isn’t anybody’s mother, and his real name is Andy....
Stefan Wolpe was a guiding force of the prewar German avant-garde. In the 20s he belonged to the Berlin Novembergruppe, an arts collective named after the month in which the German monarchy was overthrown and dedicated to advancing radical views of art and artists. Other members included artists Paul Klee, George Grosz, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and musicians Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and George Antheil. The Bauhaus artisans and the Second Viennese School of composers were close allies who often brought their own exhibitions and concerts to Berlin....
MONKHOOD IN 3 EASY LESSONS Lisa Kron Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider, for example, the inordinate focus on penis size as a measure of virility and manhood. Kwong tells us in several stories that there’s a perception that Asian and Asian American men don’t measure up–he even tosses in a quote from former Penthouse adviser Xaviera Hollander, the “Happy Hooker,” saying they were the only men who didn’t satisfy her....
In January 1989, at the age of 25, Lisa Kaplan-Melnick was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Soon after she started chemotherapy she suffered from nausea, mood changes, and swelling. Within three weeks her hair fell out, and she found herself having to shop for something she never thought she’d need. “When I was buying a wig, I had no idea how to clean it or take care of it,” she says. “I sprayed it with perfume right after I bought it, and it ended up smelling like sweat, hairspray, and perfume the whole time I had it....
There’s something about a well-told folktale–as long as the storyteller doesn’t junk it up with lots of hokum: talking teapots, singing crabs, workaholic dwarfs. Maybe these stories appeal to my inner child, maybe their archetypal characters stimulate the unconscious, but I love things like Lynn Shapiro’s musical adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s children’s story, Mazel and Schlimazel, based on a Central European folktale. Shapiro never strays far from Singer’s simply written, witty story of two spirits–Mazel (Yiddish for “good luck”) and Schlimazel (“bad luck”)–and their battle over a likable peasant boy, Tam....
Joseph A. Morris, the Republican candidate for president of the Cook County Board, has a proposition: when the Cook County Jail becomes overcrowded, rent boats. “We have riverboats–we could have prison boats. We could take some mothballed commercial vessels, park them at some appropriate location, and march several hundred inmates on board. We could feed the prisoners, give them beds, and take them to the courthouse when necessary. When the glut goes away, the boats would go on to another use....
SMARTDANCE But when you’re living on the periphery, you live with contingencies. Not that opening night at Link’s Hall–which Smartdance rented for the Chicago stop on its ’94-’95 tour, culminating in New York in April–was disastrous. But one dancer didn’t perform, presumably unexpectedly since she was on the program, and that usually leaves holes in the choreography. A cold rain, out-of-town audience members, and poor parking meant lots of latecomers, who were ringing the Link’s Hall bell to get in as much as half an hour into the performance....
The moment was pure Matt Besser. Performing two years ago in the Upright Citizens Brigade’s partly improvised comedy Conference on the Future of Happiness, he was distracted by a gray-haired man in the audience who was quietly taking notes. Still in character, Besser stepped off the stage, waltzed over to the man, and after a brief struggle pulled the notebook out of the man’s hand. He was about to read the notes out loud when he noticed the name on the front cover....
It’s possible that no band so beloved has been so taken for granted. After a full 20 years of commercial-flop albums, unrelenting touring, and, oh, yes, having forever changed the course of rock ‘n’ roll, the Ramones are threatening to hang it up: leader Joey Ramone says he’s exhausted, and to make the point plain, their new album is called Adios Amigos, complete with a drawing of some sombrero-clad dinosaurs on the cover....
Euro-Asian and Asian-American crossover cookery is all around town these days, thanks in large part to pioneering chefs Yoshi Katsumura of Yoshi’s and Roland Liccioni of Le Francais. Even the purest sushi bars today feature California maki with avocado and other Western ingredients, while cooks at local diners think nothing of tossing a little fresh ginger and soy sauce into their turkey hash. In California, where the trend started, they don’t even call it crossover anymore–it’s “Pacific rim....
