Kris Kristofferson is a pretty darn interesting fellow. He studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, won fiction awards from the Atlantic, served in the army, and turned down a job teaching Engl at West Point to move to Nashville, whereion awards from the Atlantic, served in the army, and turned down a job teaching English at West Point to move to Nashville, where he worked as a bartender, janitor, and helicopter pilot while struggling as a songwriter....
That first summer the Jenkinses took over the Wild River Cafe you could almost set your watch by the farmer who stopped by on hot, dusty days for two Diet Pepsis. “He’d take the cans and lay down a dollar bill,” says John Jenkins. “We charge 75 cents a can here for soda, but he’d just say, “It costs 50 cents in the machines next door so that’s what I’m gonna pay....
You’ve seen them. The ads in the Discovery Center catalog, that repository of yuppie activities. They proclaim “Party Mix: An Evening That Could Change Your Dating Life,” “Flirting–How to Do It Right,” “How to Take Charge of Your Single Life.” They promise to teach you how to “know the difference between romantic illusion and true love” and how to “learn from and deal with rejection.” And the name Gail Prince pops up in all of them....
It’s an old house, older than both of them, and they are not young. In this old house they’ve raised their family, watched one cat and dog after another grow stiff and die, seen the neighborhood turn from Polish to Puerto Rican to a little bit of everything under the United Nations flag. In warm weather, up and down the block people of all colors and languages are out painting, hammering, mowing, living the American dream....
By Ted Cox Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, hockey has a little bit farther to go before it returns to its prestrike vitality. As a barometer, we mention that earlier this month, for the first time in our life, we were able to buy tickets for an appearance by Wayne Gretzky the week before he was to come to Chicago. It’s true that Gretzky, while still great, is no longer the draw he was....
What Does Laurie Abraham Want? Laurie Abraham wrote one of her new books as a fly on a tenement wall and another as a modern woman staring into her soul. The book is a harrowing family chronicle larded with the usual statistics that paint the bigger picture. Normally we would have interviewed Abraham in search of the person behind the reporter, but there was no need. In a collection of essays she and five friends published earlier this year, Abraham revealed herself....
The showdown at the Town & Garden Apartments has all the marks of a classic landlord-tenant dispute–with one major twist: it’s the landlords who say they’re the victims. For the past several months the tenants have waged an aggressive campaign, employing lawyers and tenant organizers, to force their landlords to give them a greater say in rehabbing and operating the 628-unit, near-north-side federally subsidized complex. “We’re standing up for our rights,” says Charles Pepper, president of the Town & Garden Tenant Association....
Sand: Three Plays on a Beach “Sand,” an evening of three one-acts from various points in Albee’s career, was developed by the playwright himself for the Signature Theatre Company, but there’s little here that Albee hasn’t revealed before. A Chicago premiere presented by Robert M. Stoeck, James M. Schneider, and their newly formed Sun Partners, “Sand” begins inauspiciously enough with Albee’s intentionally cryptic Box, in which a hooded figure in a sandbox tries vainly to catch a few fleeting glances of birds and sunlight overhead while a disembodied female voice delivers a monologue over a loudspeaker....
BRAINWARP II: ASS RAPE A-GO-GO Metraform at Annoyance Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Annoyance vein of bad-boy/bad-girl potty-mouthed humor is just about played out. All the best of the recent Annoyance shows have aimed for a far subtler, wittier, more intelligent kind of comedy than these folks usually get credit for: Modern Problems in Science was an improvised satire of pedants and academic pretension, That Jeff Garlin Thing a cutting-edge take on one-person shows, and Poo Poo Le Arse a foray into Dada performance....
Mojo By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » None of this would matter if Mojo stood on its own as thought-provoking theater with something meaningful or at least fresh to say. But it doesn’t. This raunchy melodrama about power struggles in the British rock scene of the late 1950s is heavy on attitude and energy but light on substance–a strutting showcase of “rock ‘n’ roll acting” (a much-overused term in any case) whose torrents of raw language and perverse, comic-ugly violence seem fabricated shock effects rather than the urgent expression of a deeply felt story and characters....
AUGUST NPR darling Andrei Codrescu–whose work the New York Times with spot-on accuracy has described as defining “the tensions at play between humor and sentiment, between one-liners and aphorism, between immigrant optimism and dissident cynicism”–makes one of his periodic stops in Chicago tonight. At 7:30, at Barbara’s Bookstore, 1350 N. Wells, he reads from his newest book, a collection of his NPR essays called Zombification. The event’s free. Call 642-5044 for details....
NINE INCH NAILS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reznor first appeared in 1989 with his debut LP Pretty Hate Machine. Working with such accomplished producers as Flood (U2, Depeche Mode), John Fryer (Erasure), and Adrian Sherwood (Tackhead), the rural Pennsylvania wunderkind polished and refined his home tapes–created with a Macintosh and an Emax keyboard–and produced one of the more impressive first splashes of the decade....
It’s a typical weekday morning on the expressways heading north toward Milwaukee. The cars are backed up for miles, creeping forward a few feet at a time. Instead, Amtrak recently announced plans to decrease runs and increase fares on the Chicago-Milwaukee service known as the Hiawatha. “It’s almost as though Amtrak doesn’t care if the Hiawatha fails,” says Jim Coston, a Chicago lawyer and train advocate who would like to serve on Amtrak’s board of directors....
At the Bop Shop the new year brings back an old custom, the double bill. Throughout the 40s and 50s, club owners commonly hired two bands to share the stage and play alternate sets to provide an evening of nonstop music; the Bop Shop’s two stages, one at each end of the music room, make the whole process even more efficient. This twin bill of veteran jazzwomen opens with bassist Marlene Rosenberg, leading a trio that includes guitarist Dave Onderdonk and drummer Mike Raynor....
Dear sirs: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First off, if Carol Burbank had read her press release, she would have known that she wasn’t going to see Attack of the Killer Tampons, but instead, an innocent romp through the budding womanhood of three young girls. Her disappointment that these characters were not “drag-inspired” leads me to wonder that if everything we did at the Factory Theater was drag, what happens to the women of the theater?...
Legal Notice IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA WESTERN DIVISION v. A. Nature and History of the Lawsuit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THIS SETTLEMENT IN NO WAY REFLECTS AN ADMISSION OF LIABILITY ON THE PART OF DEFENDANT, NOR IS IT INTENDED TO INFLUENCE THE ONGOING INVESTIGATION OR OUTCOME OF CRIMINAL CHARGES RELATED TO ANY OF THESE ALLEGATIONS....
Radney Foster looks like the kind of guy whom rockabilly bonehead Ronnie Hawkins would’ve affectionately called “Peabody:” clipped hair, wire specs, his nose poised to bury itself in a book. And while it’s true Foster’s eloquent country-rock solo debut Del Rio, TX 1959 proves he’s a literate type, his boyish, bookworm looks are a welcome change in a field glutted with boot-scootin’ cowboys. Foster honed his Nashville songsmith skills as one-half of the duo Foster & Lloyd....
Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I do not number myself among Bill Wyman’s detractors regarding his musical criticism, but I am outraged by the obscenely stupid, ahistorical drivel he slobbered recently about O.J. Simpson [Hitsville, June 24]. The obvious idiocies are stunning: first, the history of rock and roll all too plainly shows that managers, agents, producers, and label people do not consistently effuse benevolent “concern” about musicians’ “well-being....
The process of methodically buying up good seats to rock concerts and then selling them at ten times or more than their face value is not a particularly noble profession, but it is a profitable one. Fans decry scalpers’ practices, but too many support the business. On the record, artists, promoters, and ticket agencies say they discourage scalping and profess not to know how scalpers invariably manage to come up with the best seats....
The Cuban Connection: Who Controls Latino News? Viewers saw Castro at a wreath-laying ceremony on the battlefield where Marti fell. Then Vice President Carlos Lage interpreted Marti’s legacy. “Cuba isn’t governed by American laws,” Lage declared. “Cuba isn’t governed from the U.S. Congress. Cuba is governed solely by its own people.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What happened during the weekend,” Aponte told me, “is that somebody told Mr....
