PAVEMENT A couple of the 34 songs Pavement played at Metro last month were crap, in that they were unaffecting. They didn’t make me dizzy, they didn’t make me much of anything. Luckily, the crappy moments were short-lived. But in those moments of disengagement I was able to think of Pavement as a rock band loosely based in Stockton, California, getting a lot of play on WXRT and MTV. Being conscious of the facts ruins the fun....
JUNE “Boys kissing boys! Girls kissing girls! It’s all here and it’s all homo-riffic!!!” That’s how the Neo-Futurists are announcing their fourth annual “pride” edition of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Tonight through Sunday the ensemble promises that the 30 plays it’ll do in 60 minutes will all have gay themes. Shows are at 11:30 tonight, 9 and 11:30 tomorrow, and 7 PM Sunday. Tickets are $4 to $9–the usual $3 plus the roll of a die; the Neo-Futurarium is at 5153 N....
The tenth annual Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, featuring films and videotapes from about a dozen countries, runs from Friday, October 8, through Sunday, October 17. In the listings below, films and videos not identified by country are from the United States. All screenings are at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Single tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for children and Facets members; a pass good for four films is $15 for adults, $10 for children....
JAIL OF GENDER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kathe Burkhart’s poetry, prose, and visual art deal primarily with being an artist and a woman in an age author Susan Faludi has characterized as a “backlash,” where victories are dearly bought from a patriarchal society that claims enlightenment even while cosmetic surgery rises and rape abounds. Most of the usual issues are addressed: pregnancy, abuse, love, work, self-image....
The Russian chamber orchestra Moscow Virtuosi was put together in 1979, shortly after founder Vladimir Spivakov returned from the Ravinia Festival. At Ravinia, the well-regarded violinist had made an auspicious conducting debut; back in Moscow, heartened by the reception, he became a full-time maestro heading an ensemble of first-chair musicians from various top-rank Russian orchestras. The Soviet government barred the Virtuosi from touring abroad until 1987; these days they are based in Spain and have a thriving international career....
MY OTHER HEART Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which is too bad, because aside from its conventionality and an occasional hint of smugness, the play isn’t so hard to swallow. Set in Spain in 1494, it focuses on the moving if predictable friendship that grows between Pilar and Cara, the Indian woman Pilar’s husband brought back from the New World as a slave. It’s clear from the first that Pilar, and Cara have a lot in common, including Pilar’s charming pig of a husband, a navigator on one of Columbus’s ships....
Lead Story In September the Zhu Ma Dian pharmaceutical company won a defamation lawsuit against a newspaper and a TV station in Liaoning, China, regarding the strength of the company’s sleeping pills. The newspaper had reported truthfully that a couple, distraught over gambling losses, attempted suicide by swallowing a total of six bottles of the pills, but wound up only with bad stomachaches. Since the story appeared at the time of the Chinese National Medicines Fair, the company claimed it lost about 90 percent of expected sales....
Hey, you wanna be sick or you wanna new car? The 1992 cost of an average Chicago hospital stay, according to the Illinois Health Care Cost Containment Council: $11,601, up 9.8 percent over 1991. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The subsidized suburbs, Chapter LXVIII. Percentage of northeastern Illinois transit riders in the suburbs: 15. Percentage of public operating assistance given to suburban transit providers: 43....
The Night House is a compelling meditation on the horror of one’s own mind. In the aftermath of her husband Owen’s (Evan Jonigkeit) death, Beth (Rebecca Hall) finds herself alone in the lakeside home he built for them. The suicide she never suspected leaves her looking for answers about the man she thought she knew best. A barrage of nightmares that come in the form of bad dreams and even worse discoveries creates layer upon layer of terror....
Two years ago Khyati Shah walked into Von Steuben High School for the very first time, a 14-year-old sophomore from Bombay. She knew no one, ached with loneliness, and wondered how she would survive. Journalism saved her. In many ways the paper reflects both the school’s ethnic diversity and its academic excellence. Enrollment at Von Steuben is controlled by a lottery, weighed to guarantee an almost even mix of blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians....
Head coach Phil Jackson called Toni Kukoc and Pete Myers the “X factors” of the Bulls’ playoff run. He meant not X as in X-Men–although with his new two-tone, black-and-white goggles Horace Grant looks, more than ever, like a Marvel Comics hero. Not X as in exceptional, because Kukoc and Myers have been exasperating as often as they’ve excelled. But X as in “X the unknown,” that pet phrase of algebra teachers, for the unknown quantity of their performance under pressure....
If you’re looking for an alternative to the Chicago Film Festival, here’s a neglected movie from the past that’s better than most of the current festival entries. Of the many films by Ulrike Ottinger I’ve seen, this lovely and deliciously “irresponsible” 1979 camp item has given me the most unbridled pleasure. A nameless heroine (Tabea Blumenschein) arrives in West Berlin on a one-way ticket intending to drink herself to death, and three prim ladies known as Social Question (Magdalena Montezuma), Accurate Statistics (Orpha Termin), and Common Sense (Monika Von Cube) stand around and kibitz....
WILLIE PICKENS QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the last four decades the Chicago jazz mainstream has flowed from two chief stylistic tributaries, each of which distinguishes the local landscape from that found in other burgs. In the 50s pianists Ramsey Lewis and Ahmad Jamal, bassists Wilbur Ware and Victor Sproles, and the multiinstrumentalist Ira Sullivan helped forge a style that made judicious use of space and a relatively economical use of notes, creating (in retrospect) a sort of aural correlative to the prairie....
On December 1, 1992, a mock funeral procession headed north on Michigan Avenue past the Art Institute. A bagpipe player led the cortege, followed by wreath bearers and a horse-drawn carriage. The procession was the idea of performance artist Iris Moore, and it was just one of many local events staged that year to mark A Day Without Art, the international art community’s annual observance of World AIDS Day. The School of the Art Institute even sponsored a two-day symposium examining the cultural representation of people with AIDS or HIV....
CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY Published in 1948, just before the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist government launched its policy of apartheid, Cry, the Beloved Country was inspired by Paton’s observations of the youths he presided over as principal of the black Diepkloof reformatory. Paton sought to alert his white countrymen to their culpability in the issue of black crime–to its roots in poverty, oppression, and their disruption of the black family. He tells the story of a black Anglican preacher, Stephen Kumalo, who travels from his rural parish to Johannesburg in search of his sister and his son....
Artist Kate Remington believes that cooperative galleries are the only way to go. With fewer commercial art galleries, she says, the idea of a group of artists pooling their resources to rent their own exhibition space “just makes sense.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cooperative galleries aren’t new in Chicago; ARC and Artemisia, both in River West, are two successful, long-standing examples. But art co-ops were virtually unknown in Wicker Park’s gallery district when Remington and five other artists opened Gallery 203 in a small room in the Flat Iron Building almost two years ago....
By Neal Pollack Guy attended the November meeting. During a citizen comment period, he stood up and said to the commission, “My name is James Guy. I have the nicest house on 13th Street. And I would like to know, what are your plans for me?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “district development area” is better known to its residents as the “Valley....
Johnny Watson is yet another member of that remarkable generation of bluesmen who stormed out of Houston in the late 40s and early 50s, melding the smooth stylings of Texas guitar pioneer T-Bone Walker to the more aggressive sounds of R & B and, eventually, rock ‘n’ roll. Watson moved to California in the early 50s and worked with Chuck Higgins’s Mellowtones as a pianist before signing on with the Modern label and adding “Guitar” to his name....
January 2 January 21 Another American home was found stuffed with guns and bombs, this time in Roopville, Georgia. Aubrey Mark Turner allegedly lifted propane tanks from a store and when sheriff’s deputies tracked him to his home took a shot at them from the bushes. Inside they reportedly found 16 bombs. Sheriff Tony Reeves reassured everyone that Turner had no connection to the Olympic Park bombing: “He was just a local boy that liked to make bombs....
Bloomington and Normal are located in Illinois’ biggest county, McLean, which is about the size of Rhode Island. There are a lot of colleges here besides Illinois State University, including Illinois Wesleyan and Lincoln College. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Downtown Normal is pretty much the main campus of Illinois State University and therefore tends to be full of students. Those preferring to be more among the locals should escape south to Bloomington....
