COLOR ME EDWARDO Thomas-Herrera’s work occupies that blurry space between performance poetry, in which poetry’s the game, and performance art, in which concept’s the game. But unfortunately he doesn’t seem to play to the strengths of either genre. Instead of adopting one or the other wholeheartedly, he hangs his poetry in Color Me Edwardo on a rather flimsily articulated idea about the end of the world. The result is a piece that’s tentative at best and shallow at worst....
Friday 15 Anyone interested in “the healing and empowerment of the masculine psyche” is invited to attend a seminar put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago today. Healing Men: The Male Psyche, Psychotherapy, and Individuation, is a 10-AM-to-4-PM session led by Jungian analyst Robert Moore, a professor at the Chicago Theological Seminary and coauthor of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine and other similarly themed books....
Neil Hamburger There’s not very much comedy left in stand-up comedy. Everyone with any insight or charm has his own sitcom by now, and with all those cable television channels to fill, any dimwit with a cheap sport coat and a spiral notebook (for his “societal observations”) can now turn a buck kvetching about airplane food and sex. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although he never quite gives contemporary stand-up the smack in the face it so deserves, the fictional Neil Hamburger takes some prisoners via the nearly extinct format of the comedy LP....
While so much contemporary pop is burdoned with meaninglessness, the Louisville-based quintet King Kong harks back to rock’s roots as inconsequential, diversionary fun. On Funny Farm, the band’s recent release on Chicago indie label Drag City, King Kong creates droll, way funky/garage rock with cartoonish melodies and cheesy organ trills, music that alternately recalls the B-52’s (when leader Ethan Buckler is talk-singing in his bass monotone) and Blondie (when backup singer Amy Parton is cooing)....
Another old pal of the governor is denied a job merely because he’s a felon. The neighborhood parks have never looked better, but we’re paying for it in staff and program cuts. Alderman Manny Flores is on the hot seat again, this time over a giant Dominick’s that would replace Edmar Foods. John Vasilopulos says he doesn’t dislike his neighbors because they’re gay. He just thinks they’re jerks. The Park District was only tring to clean up a toxic playlot, but bad communication poisoned relations with the neighbors....
Lead Story Mort Hurst, who in 1991 ate 16 double-deck Moon Pies in ten minutes and 38 eggs in 29 seconds (he then had a stroke), announced in January that he would run for secretary of state of North Carolina against Richard Petty, a famous race car driver. Asked if he was intimidated by Petty’s name, Hurst said no: “I been on Paul Harvey’s [radio] show; I don’t think Petty has....
In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the U.S. “space program” consisted of little more than a few captured German V-2s, and trips to the moon were still popularly regarded as the idle dream of adolescent boys. But a number of rocket engineers were already busy designing the spaceships of the near future. When their new ideas began to appear in general-interest magazines like Life and Collier’s, it was the illustrations of Chesley Bonestell that helped bring them to life....
My eight-year-old daughter Amanda, one of her eight-year-old associates, and I were bike riding through Lincoln Park near Foster Avenue a couple of weeks ago when one of Chicago’s finest drove over the curb and onto the sidewalk and told the kids to pull over. Out jumped Ms. Mad Max, complete with pistol, flack vest, combat boots, and black leather gloves with the fingers cut off at the first knuckle, claiming the bikes looked stolen and the kids looked like thieves....
Seattle-on-the-Lake: Hitsville’s Guide for Soon-to-Be-Recent Arrivals Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Billboard’s detailed exegesis on Chicago this week–four stories covering an extraordinary four full pages, detailing the scene, the labels, and the bands, all under the banner headline “Chicago: Cutting Edge’s New Capital”–makes Chicago’s status as the next big rock ‘n’ roll thing as official as it gets. (Hitsville contributed an article on local labels....
Old Wine in New Bottles Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shaped into long-form sketches by Spolin’s son Paul Sills, director Sheldon Patinkin, and others, the games were showcased by the University of Chicago’s Compass Players in the late 50s, then refined at Second City on Wells Street. As played by hip adults, these children’s games were still mocking and slightly subversive. Carving up sacred cows and exploiting nervous laughter for all it was worth, Second City converted social fears–of nuclear annihilation, of racial friction–into satire....
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE Directed by Martin Scorsese Written by Jay Cocks and Scorsese With Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, Stuart Wilson, Miriam Margolyes, Geraldine Chaplin, Mary Beth Hurt, and Norman Lloyd. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps the tribalism of the New York families is what attracted Scorsese’s interest—a thematic concern that supposedly makes this film the blood brother (if not the blood sister) of Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas....
Live Bait Theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The telethon is in full swing, with emcee Bobby Astor shepherding a motley parade of entertainers through their paces, jerking tears and donations with all their smarmy might. But tonight there’s a dissenter in the ranks: Jane Piercy, a young woman in a wheelchair who declares Astor’s spectacle to be counterproductive to achieving the goals he espouses....
By Harold Henderson Peery wasn’t arrested, and he knows that the Chicago Police have been guilty of far worse abuses. But he says, “These humiliations keep driving you toward a position where you break contact with whole groups of people and don’t think of them as individuals.” If the 20th century were a house, its basement would be packed with mildewed leftist manifestos. What sets Peery’s manifesto apart is that it’s addressing the issues of the 1990s, not trying to replay the 1960s or the 1930s....
In this Louis Malle film Andre Gregory directs a street-clothes production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (as adapted by David Mamet) in the ruins of Mantattan’s New Amsterdam Theatre, which has since been renovated by Walt Disney. Based on actual run-throughs of this play, seen by audiences of only 20 or 30, the film adroitly captures a well-honed production and incidentally unites Malle with the cowriters and costars of My Dinner With Andre, Gregory and Wallace Shawn (Vanya)....
One of the most interesting and effective aspects of this prizewinning new documentary by Arthur Dong about gay men and lesbians in the military during World War II is the fact that it’s in black and white. Among other things, this puts contemporary interviews and archival footage on an equal footing, so they seem continuous with one another. (Mark Adler’s serviceable score strengthens this continuity by playing over both kinds of footage....
In Chicago’s musical history, jazz piano starts with Nat “King” Cole and the unmistakable keyboard style he developed here in the 1930s before gaining fame and fortune as a pop singer. In the 50s such iconically Chicago pianists as Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis borrowed from Cole a featherweight touch, as well as an unusual and distinctive use of space. Eddie Higgins, the Massachusetts native who in those years was studying music at Northwestern, embodies another aspect of the Cole/Chicago legacy....
There’s something about Stewart Figa–maybe it’s his deep, rich baritone voice or his robust energy–that lands him roles demanding overdrawn characterizations, wild costumes, and lots of eye rolling. One of his first roles out of school–Northwestern University’s Theater Department–was as Macbeth in Wisdom Bridge’s long-running Kabuki Macbeth: he had to move and rumble like a Japanese warlord on megadoses of steroids. When Figa relocated to New York to seek his fortune, he ended up not with Method soul mates from the Actors Studio but with the clowns and melodramatists of a local Yiddish theater troupe, cast as a clumsy dimwit in a checkered suit....
Mars Attacks! With Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Lisa Marie, and Sylvia Sidney. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most reviewers have been describing the movie as satire, but whether it’s the cold war or the present that’s being satirized is far from clear–and if it’s both, it’s still unclear where this movie stands in relation to the two....
When it premiered in January Joseph Schwantner’s Percussion Concerto received enthusiastic notices, rare for a new work by an entrenched academic (he’s at the Eastman School of Music). Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 150th anniversary, the three-movement concerto is daunting for the soloist, requiring split-second timing and command of an arsenal of instruments. Written in the postmodern neoromantic style for which the Chicago-born, Northwestern-trained Schwantner is noted, the piece has two propulsive, ferocious outer movements that set in relief a slow, tender elegy for a young colleague....
Cellist Wendy Warner is poised for a big-time career. Since winning the Rostropovich Competition in 1990 and the Avery Fisher career grant the following year, the 22-year-old Wilmette native has appeared in most of the world’s musical capitals. This Sunday she returns to the midwest to play with the Highland Park Strings, an orchestra that hired her often when she was still a local prodigy. Once again she will come under the careful, paternal guidance of Francis Akos, a longtime Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist and founder of the Strings–this time in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D Major....
