What is the gray shape over there on the right? Is it a barbell whose ends have been partially nibbled by square-mouthed rodents? Is it a glob of Silly Putty stretched within a fraction of an inch of breaking? A slightly decayed periscope? A Rorshach ink blot? Actually it’s Herb Schumann’s Cook County Board district. He’s not too thrilled about it, but it’s his, like it or not. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
MICHAEL ASHKIN: HOLIDAY IN THE SUN As I proceeded through the eight pieces in this exhibit–and I strongly recommend viewing them in order, starting left of the entrance and proceeding clockwise–it became clear that the works had a kind of story to tell. Ashkin portrays motorized conveyances–trains, planes, cars, trucks–and the industrialized landscapes we’ve created as utterly alienated from the natural world. The vague feeling of unease generated by the sparse Long Stretches in subsequent works approaches paranoia....
Von Freeman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But legendary status can have drawbacks. It’s opened a lot of doors for Freeman, making him a familiar figure at a variety of local clubs (including the Bop Shop, the Green Mill, Pops for Champagne, and Andy’s). But appearing so often at so many places can make a performer seem as unremarkable as a crooked alderman. And the tag “legendary,” which smacks of the sort of hushed reverence usually reserved for the dead, can make a performer seem less a vital artist–one who continues to take chances–than a bloodless icon....
Lead Story Dr. Robert J. Cosgrove’s reappointment as staff anesthesiologist at Granville Medical Center in Oxford, North Carolina, was delayed briefly in December. According to a sheriff’s report, three female YMCA employees reported that a man who was dressed as a woman entered on Cosgrove’s membership card, went into the women’s locker room, and left in Cosgrove’s car. Further arousing suspicion was Cosgrove’s decision to shave his beard, which he’d worn for a long time, right around the time of the incident....
Age matters in rock music because rock is so intensely dedicated to ridding itself of its predecessors. Music, production techniques, and technology evolve, of course, creating more and more opportunities for loudness and dissonance; to some extent the music gets nastier naturally. But from the time there came to be a thing called rock (as distinct from pop, which there’d always been), the music’s main engine has been the desire to kill its parents: Bob Dylan went electric, John Lennon smirked; the hippies in their turn were gored by disco, and then punk; and punk, deliberately constructed to be the most trying music imaginable and condemned as antihuman and antimusical, is now trumped by rap, harder in every sense still, and latter-day punkers look silly when they sneer at it....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » N.A.M.E. raised a considerable amount of money from their benefit [Performance, February 12]. I am proud to have contributed my work to N.A.M.E. from the beginning of my career in 1977 until now. I have no idea why anyone would review a fund-raiser–cover it maybe, but it seems a bit strange to actually critique it, almost mean spirited....
Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How could a “scientist’s instinct” square with the unquestioning acceptance of the myth that buying a house or choosing a place to live in a highly segregated city is a “voluntary exchange”? How could a “scientist” on the one hand trumpet his preliminary conclusion that African Americans in Chicago do not suffer disproportionate exposure to hazardous waste sites, yet on the other hand “admit that it’s not the whole story”?...
DIS, CRAW 8/19, EMPTY BOTTLE Dis are a Milwaukee trio who’ve managed to transcend their early days as slavish adherents to Slint. Now they sound more like the Poster Children. On their recent second album, M 386.D57 1994 (12 Inch)–does the title suggest that Dis are fans of the Dewey Decimal System?–flimsy pop songs get the shit beaten out of them by dynamics ranging from the sound of a pin dropping to the sound of a building falling....
Terence Trent D’Arby: pop-soul messiah or hemi-demi-semi genius? It’s a complex issue: D’Arby is full of shit a lot of the time, from his chest-beating pronouncements about his incipient superstardom round the time of his debut Introducing the Hard Line to the song on his second album that warned a gay friend not to make a pass at him. At the same time, he somehow manages to produce: That first album he boasted about?...
After the Berlin Wall was demolished, signs were changed swiftly on the eastern-sector streets and public buildings that had been named for Lenin, Trotsky, and Mehring, but the parks and plazas bearing the name of Rosa Luxemburg remained untouched. As one citizen explained, she was “the revolutionary with the human face.” This diminutive, semicrippled Polish-Jewish woman was no mere mascot, however: as early as 1903 she criticized Lenin’s Central Committee for its terrorist tactics, foretelling the downfall of any government that could so compromise its principles under pressure of expedience....
Director Ron Howard (Parenthood, Backdraft, Far and Away) scores with an old-fashioned entertainment about a day in the life of a New York tabloid like the Post or the News. The contrived climaxes are strictly over the top, and the Coca-Cola plugs are so frequent that the movie starts to seem like a feature-length commercial, but a bustling script by David and Stephen Koepp and fancy turns by Michael Keaton, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close (as a snarling villain), Marisa Tomei, and Randy Quaid keep your adrenaline up even when your mind is on automatic pilot....
Aerosols I’m confused about aerosol sprays. They have been labeled one of the worst enemies of the ozone layer, producing nasty destructive chemicals by the truckload, and yet there are now aerosol cans that specifically say “environmentally safe.” How can this be? Are there different kinds of propellants used? Two related questions: Why can’t aerosol products be produced in a simple pump-spray version, and can you recycle aerosol cans like other cans?...
The late River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, and Sandra Bullock all play young country-music hopefuls in a touching romantic comedy-drama inspired by Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe. For perverse reasons known only to itself, Paramount has elected to bury this movie, but the Music Box, bless it, has decided to open it anyway. It bears as little relation to the real Nashville as Altman’s 1975 feature, but director Peter Bogdanovich, the talented cast, and the credited (Carol Heikkinen) and uncredited screenwriters (Bogdanovich, cast members, and Pump Up the Volume’s Allan Moyle) are so busy conjuring up a charming world of their own that I certainly didn’t mind....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am writing in response to the disappointing article of Jeff Huebner’s entitled “Haymarket Revisited” [December 10]. It is not a coincidence, I am sure, that the title is the same as Mr. Adelman’s revisionist history. Instead of providing a soapbox for Adelman and his cronies, why didn’t he just let Adelman write the article? It’s ironic that Mr....
Michal Rovner Six human shadows ascend a hillside we cannot see, the evenly spaced silhouettes climbing into a swirling tan sky–a group reaching for some lofty goal? Yet the sky is indistinguishable from the ground. Only a darker patch at the far right looks like solid turf. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in Israel in 1957 and now living in New York, Rovner took up photography as a young woman after she and her future husband started a center for photographers in Tel Aviv....
Women Behind Bars, Trap Door Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Eyen’s 1974 off-off-Broadway play pays witty, campy homage to the women in grade-B prison movies: it’s packed with in-jokes and sly references to films like Women’s Prison and I Want to Live! But in the fumbling hands of the folks at Trap Door Theatre, Eyen’s satire is indistinguishable from the thing satirized....
WINIFRED HAUN & DANCERS AND PAULA FRASZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frasz’s comic side is on display in The Mood Swing, a romantic trio set to cowboy music. Like her earlier works Eggs and Shoulder Pads, this dance pits two women against each other as they strive for a man’s attention. In The Mood Swing the man (Randall Newsom) seems to prefer the slender woman (Judith Chitwood), but the other woman (Frasz) keeps trying; essentially the man dances with whoever throws herself at him hardest....
As the mascara runs, Bailiwick Repertory. Written and directed by Ed Basden, this late-night one-act in the Pride Performance Series aims for the success of Claudia Allen’s Gays of Our Lives, a three-part soap-opera spoof that twists gay cliches to some bold purposes. But unfortunately, for all its warm intent and proselytizing, As the Mascara Runs merely wallows in 85 minutes of unreconstructed stereotypes. One pair of embattled male lovers (swishy and studly) are computer-matched with a female pair (ditzy and butch)....
Friday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The U. of C.’s Court Theatre is marking the opening of Frida: The Last Portrait with a fund-raiser tonight called Fiesta Mexicana, a Mexican-themed dinner and dance at the Hotel Nikko, 320 N. Dearborn. There’ll be strolling musicians, balladeers, dancers, and a pinata filled with prizes (including five trips to Mexico). Fox 32’s Lilia Chacon serves as mistress of ceremonies....
Railroad terminals are often recognized for their architectural significance, but rapid-transit stations usually get dismissed as street furniture, occupying something of a design netherworld along with bridge-tender houses, park shelters, and newsstands. Yet there’s a quasi-glorious tradition in subway station design, at least in other places. Turn-of-the-century architect Hector Guimard’s sinuous wrought-iron canopies and ornamentation at Paris metro entrances epitomize the art nouveau style; historian Nikolaus Pevsner calls them the “most insistent survivors” of la belle epoque....
