By Cara Jepsen Saturday 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the lower forms of humanity are across town sweating and waiting in line to buy $3 pickles on a stick, the city’s snootier residents will be sipping champagne and discussing art at this weekend’s Newberry Festival of the Arts, billed as an “upscale festival of the arts as unique as the Gold Coast itself....
Who would have thought that building 17 apartments in Humboldt Park for people with AIDS would be such an ordeal? Of course, any project that resembles public housing generates vehement opposition almost anywhere–be it city or suburb. But nerves are particularly frayed in Humboldt Park. “This is not about intolerance to people with AIDS,” says Kathy Phelps, a Humboldt Park resident and activist. “This is about too much subsidized housing for one community....
There’s something gentle about even the most knowing, layered work Jan Bartoszek does. However witty and twisted her use of 3/4 time in Waltz #3 (a reworking of an earlier dance), however distant she may make this 19th-century form appear, at the heart of the piece is the sinuous, careful way one waltzer partners another. In this sextet women may take on “men’s roles” and vice versa, but never mind. The look and the attitude are what count....
In 1992 Barbara Echols was working as a medical biller in Chicago when she walked into a department store, took some clothing, and left without paying. Convicted of shoplifting, she was sentenced to two years and sent downstate to Dwight Correctional Center. Though Echols was in prison for only six months, after her release she attended a meeting of the Prison Action Committee, an advocacy group fighting for prison reform. She joined the group as a volunteer, and this January she became its director....
By Adam Langer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Culver inhabits a small, dingy studio in the Ravenswood area that’s spare and messy at the same time. Beautiful black-and-white photographs of cathedrals and cloisters are piled on a long wooden table. On a nearby card table are stacks of sketches of ships and sailors that he drew for a film based on Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” he hopes to make someday....
By Michael Miner “We recognize some people were offended by Royko’s column and regret that they have misinterpreted the intent,” said the Tribune’s prepared statement. I don’t think they misinterpreted anything. The column savaged Mexico as a “corrupt narco-state,” its government as “corrupt pocket-stuffers,” and its people, “who have clearly established that they don’t know what the heck they are doing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fuller listened....
Although Ireland has produced a number of prominent pop acts–U2, Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor, World Party, and Irish Brits the Pogues and Declan Patrick McManus (aka Elvis Costello)–few of them have successfully incorporated the island’s traditional music. Given that music’s emotional and lyrical richness, this neglect is disappointing, but it may be that Irish culture is too well defined to mix easily with the rapidly mutating pop scene. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Veteran cellist Janos Starker, a principal player for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the early 50s under Fritz Reiner, is also well-known as an inspired teacher. This weekend his talents as both a virtuoso and an instructor are on display in a series of recitals and classes. In Oak Park’s Concerts Under the Dome he and longtime piano sidekick Gyorgy Sebok, a fellow Hungarian and professor at the University of Indiana, will present a pair of all-Beethoven programs....
Cellist Nathaniel Rosen and pianist Ian Hobson are both on the faculty of the music school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have both taken on hectic concert schedules. Rosen, who won a Naumburg prize in the late 70s, is one of the best young soloists around, though his star hasn’t quite ascended to the stratosphereic level of his contemporary Yo-Yo Ma. The British-trained Hobson is an excellent keyboardist whose temperament seems to suit the less flashy duties of an accompanist and chamber player....
The main message of this interesting program of 16 short films and videos selected by Chicagoan Elisabeth Subrin–nearly all of them by artists under 30 from around the country–seems to be that minimalism is finally over. An exception may be Sadie Benning’s black-and-white German Song, a rarity in that it’s a music video that breathes, but my two favorites among the seven I’ve seen–Cauleen Smith’s Chronicles of a Lying Spirit and Tran T....
Monkees Justus (Rhino) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few years previous, the notion of good-looking singers controlled by their management would have been taken very much for granted, but the Monkees had the misfortune to arrive during a major sea change in popular music. In the late 50s and early 60s, visionary producers like Phil Spector and the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller developed rock ‘n’ roll record-making as an art quite distinct from live performance; they selected and arranged the singers as well as the songs, manufacturing celebrity to sell singles to a teen market....
ELLIOTT SHARP’S CARBON 4/1, LOUNGE AX Guitarist/composer Elliott Sharp’s band Carbon used to sculpt throbbing high-tech rock instrumentation into lengthy, slow-moving paeans to minimalism, overblown drones that were head-rushing and exhilarating. Over the last few years Carbon has dabbled in hard-core, becoming a “song structure”-oriented difficult rock band. The brain-massaging combination of David Weinstein’s slippery, caustic samples, Zeena Parkins’s rubbery electric-harp twang-and-bang, the crack rhythm section of drummer Joseph Trump and bassist Marc Sloan, and the leader’s nonpareil mind-fuck guitar pyrotechnics made a swell case for the application of hardcore intensity to their economically minded prog-rock groove swells....
SEA & CAKE, 11/13, LOUNGE AX A new band led by former Shrimp Boat singer/guitarist Sam Prekop, Sea & Cake isolates Prekop’s soulful leanings and affinity for soft and lazy slinking rhythms, wrapping them in a spare but warm glow. On the band’s forthcoming debut album the fat-sounding but leanly structured percussion of former Bastro drummer John McEntire blends with Eric Claridge’s sturdy bass to support the gorgeous twin guitar constructions of Prekop and Archer Prewitt (moonlighting from his regular gig with the Coctails), which stretch from skittering, minimalist pop patterns to bubbling, east African-esque lines....
I AM A MAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago premiere of OyamO’s I Am a Man falls somewhere between the two extremes. This often gripping and pithy historical tale of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, which coincided with the assassination of Martin Luther King, features some of the best acting on a Chicago stage in quite some time. But the beauty of OyamO’s agit-jazz poetry and the talents of director Marion McClinton’s actors are sometimes overwhelmed by the, well, Goodman-esque production....
ART OF THE PERSIAN COURTS Another central feature of the best Persian painting is the art of calligraphy. Many images, the Coronation among them, incorporate calligraphic texts into their compositions; moreover, and perhaps more significant, many of the painters were calligraphers first: their skill of rendering letters with brush strokes of varying length, shape, and thickness was also used, to not wholly different ends, in image making. It is perhaps relevant that among the many outside influences absorbed by Persian art over the years was Chinese painting, brought by the Mongol conquerors; calligraphy is the traditional basis of Chinese art as well....
APRIL In Temporary Girl: The Office Christmas Party, the sequel to Lisa Kotin’s Temporary Girl, our heroine helms the switchboard while her coworkers get in all manner of trouble. The multimedia show plays at 8 tonight, tomorrow, and next Friday and Saturday, April 28 and 29, at Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division. Tix are $8, $6 for members and students. Call 384-5533 for more. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Old-timers reminisce fondly about the vaudeville circuit years when you could go to a show and see Anna Pavlova dance The Dying Swan followed by a dancing-elephant act. Nowadays we have to turn to imports for this wild mixture of theatrics and sensationalism. The Chinese Golden Dragon Acrobats, from Taiwan, provide a delectable variety with their circus and its twist of daredevil acts balanced by traditional folk dances. While a contortionist does graceful exercises on a platform, two women on each side of her dance classical East Indian steps....
By Leah Eskin Proactive, that is, because Harvard has no gang problem. Harvard High School counts fewer than a dozen students who claim to hang with gangs. Collectively they’ve managed one fistfight. Even police officer Les Lunsmann, whose career is devoted to gangbusting in McHenry County, admits Harvard is pretty much gang-free. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fine logic. Unless, of course, you consider dressing funny your God-given right as an American....
The expected thing to do when confronted with the debut record from Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters is to marvel at the pop smarts and hooky tricks conjured up by the former Nirvana drummer, who built the thing from scratch in the studio, playing everything himself but one guitar track; these are smarts and hooks that you could be forgiven for thinking he might be without, even taking into account his pre-Nirvana work with the D....
Dear Sir/Ms.: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In telling parents to “flip a coin” on circumcision, he ignores both the fact that circumcision is intensely painful and the position of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which says circumcision is not essential. As for the much discussed risk of urinary tract infections (UTIs), few male babies, circumcised or not, get UTIs, and these normally respond well to antibiotics....
