The rain has been making puddles all morning on the baseball diamond at Portage Park. It’s 10 AM and there’s a lull in the storm, but this doesn’t look like a good Sunday to play ball. The Chicago Lite Seniors 12-inch softball team has seen a lot of rain outs, so they’re prepared. Out come the players from their midsize luxury cars. Out come the folding beach chairs. Out come the cigars....
LOU BARLOW And yet Personism lives. O’Hara’s thread has been picked up (unwittingly, no doubt) by a fellow inhabitant of Massachusetts. Listening to the song “High School” on Lou Barlow’s new CD, Winning Losers: A Collection of Home Recordings, it seems conceivable that, for entirely different reasons, Personism may yet be the death of literature. I mean if Frank O’Hara (or Walt Whitman or Arthur Rimbaud or Vladimir Mayakovski, for that matter) had come of age after 1965, he more than likely would have taken up a guitar instead of a pen....
The mostly tonal and highly idiosyncratic compositions of percussion specialist Marta Ptaszynska reflect her attraction to Eastern art and European surrealism. She is a master of colorful, fantastical moods and feelings. In her Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra (1985), whose three movements are each named after a surrealist canvas, the mood swiftly runs the gamut from eerie to enigmatic to agitated, presenting a daunting and dazzling challenge for soloists such as legendary Japanese percussion ace Keiko Abe....
Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I work at the Spertus Museum of Judaica, on Michigan Avenue between Harrison and Balbo. We’re next to Columbia College and across from Grant Park. A few weeks ago at work three of my coworkers and I went across the street to Grant Park during lunchtime to play Frisbee. The tulips had just bloomed a few days beforehand, the weather was beautiful, and many people were eating lunch on the grass–the park was looking fine....
A couple of tables away from us, at a Vietnamese restaurant on the Near North Side, a group of young women were having dinner. My wife and I quickly gathered that they worked at a big law firm: they gossiped for several courses, with fervent concentration and great analytic skill, about the attorneys in their office. Then they wandered on to movies and TV, and the whole group provided a detailed synopsis of that week’s Melrose Place for the one person who’d missed it....
By Robert McClory The McClures are evangelical Christians who take their religion very seriously, and that’s the major reason none of the children has ever attended a school. “No way we would have them go,” says Laurie, “not with all the peer pressure, the bad attitudes, the swearing. Some of the things that get in kids’ heads are impossible to ever get out.” The McClure lifestyle is exceedingly simple, almost Amish in design....
Hey, Faggot: Hey, BU: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As for steppin’ out for the head you deserve–sure thing, go for it. Your husband sounds like the type who’d rather be cheated on than pestered for sex. Find yourself a hot number around your own age with a tongue that won’t quit. Then take out a large life-insurance policy on the box of rocks you married, encourage him to take up drinking and driving, and keep your fingers crossed....
Why do mole hairs tend to grow thicker, darker, and faster than other body hairs? –A.C. Rotundo, Washington, D.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why do broadcasting call letters start with certain letters depending on what part of the world the station is in, e.g., K in the U.S. west of the Mississippi, W east of the Mississippi, C in Canada, D in parts of Asia?...
When I look at dinosaur skeletons in museums the thing that always impresses me is their incredible size. It has occurred to me that perhaps these animals could grow to such enormous size because effective gravity was lighter then. If earth spun faster at the time of the dinosaurs then centrifugal force might have counteracted gravity enough to make a substantial difference in the weight of massive animals. What are the scientific merits of this idea?...
“In His Own Voice: Negro Begins to Speak for Himself on Stage,” proclaimed the headline of a 1962 New York Times think piece analyzing “an indisputable trend” in American theater. Though black life had been ripe material for dramas and musicals, the stories had usually been written by whites; but a promising pair of new productions–Ossie Davis’s comedy Purlie Victorious and an off-Broadway musical called Fly Blackbird–found “the Negro serv[ing] notice that he is through being patronized by the theatre....
In 1943 a student riot broke out at the University of Munich, ignited by anti-Nazi leaflets distributed by five students. Two were promptly arrested, and the rest turned themselves in soon after. The perpetrators turned out to be no disenfranchised band of scruffs, however, but the privileged offspring of wealthy Aryan families, former Hitler Youth leaders and veterans of the student medical corps–not exactly the type of traitors the Third Reich would want to hold up to international scrutiny....
Trib Losing Perspective? “The idea is to create a section that’s provocative and more readable than Perspective used to be, and not just a dumping ground for stories that didn’t have a home in the rest of the paper,” Blau told me. “And also to have a little bit of fun–that’s the mission. The mantra has been to do all of that riding on the shoulders of the news, so it doesn’t become just a freestanding feature section the way Tempo was....
SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: HOW WE TALK WHEN WORDS FAIL In her powerful lecture/performance Speaking the Unspeakable: How We Talk When Words Fail filmmaker Michelle Citron seeks to unravel the trauma of incest. The precursor of this piece, a more conventional play called Bliss, was seen almost two years ago at City Lit Theater; Citron is presently developing the material into a screenplay, too. The story revolves around an outwardly conforming but disturbed young woman, Dora, whose highly erotic relationship with a married man uncovers a submerged part of her psyche and memories of sexual abuse in childhood....
When New York’s power-blowing reedman Charles Gayle came to town last year, he teamed up with the ad hoc rhythm section of bassist Harrison Bankhead and percussionist Paul Wertico, and the results were unfortunate: the former lacked Gayle’s energy while the latter overplayed. Supporting Gayle this year are drummer Michael Wimberly and bassist Michael Bisio. While these two aren’t necessarily capable of inspiring Gayle like the New York cohorts with whom he’s been playing of late (bassist William Parker and drummers like Sunny Murray and Milford Graves), they’ve worked with him previously and thoroughly understand his strong-willed methodology....
Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana has cropped up on the sound tracks of at least a dozen movies in the last 20 years, most notably as exhortations to battle in Excalibur and Glory. In writing what he described as “profane songs for singers and chorus, to be sung to the accompaniment of instruments and magical images” Orff was striving for a universality of expression, and he achieved it with simple bold strokes of line and color....
Atlanta-based bluesman Chick Willis’s career dates back to the 50s when he toured with Chuck Willis, the flamboyant, turban-clad “King of the Stroll.” Chick carries on his cousin’s show-stopping ways, peppering his act with outrageous double entendres and ribald tales of infidelity and hilarious romantic misadventure (“I don’t love my baby / I tell you the reason why / She filled my pants full of Red Devil lye!”). “Stoop Down Mama,” his best-known number, is a scabrous bit of signifying that allows him to single out audience members: “See that man, he’s long and tall / Bet he ain’t got no stoop-down at all!...
With the passage of time, Fred Anderson’s potent and freewheeling improvisations have only increased in value; especially now, in a period that venerates formula and imitation, his music is a refreshing but ferocious storm wind, bursting in through the windows and howling past the clutter. Anderson’s burly tenor work represents a “missing link” in the evolution of postbop jazz. His music helped forge a conduit between the late-50s “free jazz” of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and the he mid-60s flowering of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians....
Dear Reader: Last Thursday night I was standing in line to pay at the Dominick’s near Sheridan and Foster. In front of me was a couple who must have been in their 70s, waiting with a few groceries. After the cashier rang their total, they handed her a handful of food stamps. The cashier looked at the loose one-dollar stamps and refused to take them. “They have to be in their booklets,” she said to the puzzled couple....
About 15 people were standing in a slow-moving line at the Uptown post office. “I can’t believe they only have three windows open,” said one woman irritably to the man behind her. “It’s lunchtime!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A fourth employee was standing behind the counter at window six, but she was sorting papers, jiggling a key in a lock, talking to the employee at window seven....
For the last ten or so years, the wizard at the wheel of Jerry Reinsdorf’s sporting empire has been a wiry and bespectacled lawyer named Howard Pizer. By his own definition, Pizer was “a quiet boy, shy and reserved–a classic late bloomer–the kind of kid who blended in.” Born in 1941, he grew up in Hyde Park, one of three children. “I was a mediocre student,” he says. “I liked sports, but I wasn’t very athletic....
