To the editors: After CANDLES’ Inquest the U.S. Justice Department, Mr. Neal Sher, stated that Josef Mengele lied about having osteomyelitis. I guess Josef Mengele wanted to enhance his chances of being accepted into the SS since we know that the SS liked only sickly people–of course I am being sarcastic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is no dispute that Sedlmeier and Karl-Heinz Mengele visited Dr....
Electronic composer and instrument builder Nicolas Collins dabbles in improvisation–other people’s improvisation. He’s a minimalist at heart though you’d no sooner mistake his music for Philip Glass than for Gustav Mahler. An inventive interloper, Collins creatively meddles in the affairs of other improvising musicians by taking what they do, editing it, and twisting it into something in line with his minimalist aesthetics. To sample, distort, distend, and divert the course of his partner’s free play, he uses “trombone-propelled electronics,” a contraption he invented by mounting a small computer on the husk of a trombone....
Five years ago Jose Navarro left the predominantly Mexican southwest-side community in which he was raised. He was openly gay, and he didn’t think the community would tolerate that. And a liberating one as well, he says. “This was about more than marching in a parade–it’s about gays being accepted in the communities in which we were raised. For years we have had to choose between a closeted existence or moving to gay ghettos....
EDWIN McCAIN 9/29, OTIS’ A protege of Hootie & the Blowfish leader Darius Rucker, Charleston’s Edwin McCain peddles the same heart-on-sleeve cardboard sentiments as his mentor, within an equally sleepy folk-rock setting. “Solitude,” the first single off his bland debut, Honor Among Thieves (Lava/Atlantic), is a weepy duet with Rucker that seems to be about a mother who locks away one of her sons in their dank basement after she catches him guzzling Sterno in the kitchen....
What started as a performance component of the Bucktown Arts Fest has taken on a life of its own: this is the fifth annual incarnation of the Rhino Fest, whose name is inspired by surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big). Organized this year by Beau O’Reilly, Michael Martin, and Colm O’Reilly, who have endeavored to combine a broad scope and a cutting-edge sensibility, the three-week event showcases some 25 individuals and ensembles (plus several live bands), including well-known folks like Jenny Magnus, Theater Oobleck, Paula Killen, Marc Smith, the Curious Theatre Branch, John Starrs, David Hernandez, Splinter Group, Frank Melcori, Redmoon Theater, and New Crime Productions....
Women’s sporting events have never been popular in Chicago, and they are now in more trouble than ever. Certainly at the Olympic level the competition between female athletes is as fierce and involving as it is between male athletes, but the Olympics are not likely to come to Chicago anytime soon. There are no ski slopes here, so the speed and daring of women skiers are but a televised rumor. The city has never been able to work up much interest in track and field....
Free Street Theater has its offices and rehearsal space on the third floor of the community building in Pulaski Park, just west of the Kennedy between Division and North avenues. The timbered brick building feels like a cross between a country club and the state penitentiary. A big veranda stretches around the south courtyard, but it’s fenced in. There are some shade trees and a wide lawn perfect for baseball or soccer, but it’s muddy and strewn with glass....
Paul Weiss is just your average 26-year-old rabid rock fan. Saw Soundgarden five years ago, saw them last weekend at the Aragon. He’ll talk in great detail about this concert or that, or happily reminisce about the halcyon days of indie rock, hanging out with Mike Watt of Firehose or with the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood and his dog Kevin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In one crucial respect, however, Paul Weiss is different from your average 26-year-old rock fan....
Before they began experimenting with LSD and Yoko Ono but after they’d abandoned the singsong style of their early hits, the Beatles were writing elaborate pop songs that employed sophisticated (by early rock standards) chord sequences and long, lilting melody lines (“We Can Work It Out,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”). Like a mutant virus, that style spread wildly through England (the Zombies, the Kinks, the Hollies) and then to America, where it infected bands as diverse as the Byrds, the Left Banke, and the Beach Boys....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The union to which I belong, Chicago Typographical Union No. 16, has been around since 1852 and has seen many instances of greatness and stupidity in city government. The latter kind found its epitome during the Loop flood. The union’s Reporter for June reported as follows: “For those of us who have been following the flood story, one of the errors in the city’s judgment, aside from breaking up the department of public works that had repaired two tunnel breaches earlier, was to send film taken of a breach in the city’s tunnel system to a drug store for developing....
Fifty years after they made their debut as a team with the landmark Oklahoma!, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein remain the preeminent musical dramatists in American theater. Others before and after them may have been wittier, jazzier, more polished, more romantic, or more sophisticated. But none have equaled the duo’s ability to dramatize an individual’s emotional self-discovery through the flow of words and melody. That’s not to deny the material’s sentimentality: Believing in humanity’s innate goodness (though not naively–after all, these were Jews writing in the heat and aftermath of World War II), R & H imbued their multidimensional characters with their own strongly felt values....
One hundred and five minutes of spontaneous talk from a homosexual named Jeffrey Strouth, seated in the back of a 1957 Cadillac in Columbus, Ohio, may sound like thin fare for a feature, but Reno Dakota’s 1992 movie–a tribute to his wild and uninhibited friend, who subsequently died of AIDS–kept me mesmerized and entertained. Recounting various episodes in his difficult life–bouts with his alcoholic and abusive father; being kept at age 14 by a 400-pound drag queen; hitchhiking to Hollywood with a campy boyfriend, a tiny dog, and a caged bird; numerous tragicomic scrapes with the police; and much, much else involving sex and drugs–Strouth often calls to mind some of the comic gross-outs of William Burroughs (whom he openly imitates at one point) and the picaresque hard-luck stories of Nelson Algren, not to mention the road adventures of Kerouac....
Militant Bolshevik Greetings Comrade! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In point of fact they are a clique of liberal dilettantes wallowing in petty bourgeois individualism. Like the old joke about recognizing University of Chicago professors by their hunter’s shirts, petty bourgeois liberals are typically chicory drinkers in Birkenstock sandals, pacifists and “Nature Cure” quacks, and the “Bohemian” art girls who live on daddy’s trust fund....
We discovered Jim and Sue Gill braving the line for Passion Fish. Their outfits–two sets of prerumpled weekendwear–were rigged for a long evening slouched in folding chairs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both outfits might have been poached from wardrobe at Northern Exposure. According to Fairchild’s Dictionary of Fashion, the pattern for Sue’s mackinaw jacket in blanket plaid (larger than but similar to lumberjack plaid) has been tromping around since 1811, when Captain Charles Roberts, a wayward Brit, washed up stranded in the Straits of Mackinac....
HER ACHING HEART Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Her Aching Heart is a send-up of gothic romances. Two contemporary women, Harriet (Sara Nichols) and Molly (Teri Clark), happen to be reading the same cheesy novel at the same time. While they pursue an utterly conventional relationship their literary counterparts–the haughty, willful aristocrat Harriet Hellstone and the simple country maiden Molly Penhallow–plunge into a tortured affair, complete with guilty kisses, foppish male courtiers, and even an occasional sword fight....
Though I was only three when it was published, and thus exempt from most of the societal upheavals that it described, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying nonetheless occupied a reasonably significant role in my coming of age. I’d always heard rumors of its outrageous salaciousness, but when I finally got around to reading it–sometime in college–I was perplexed; to my mind there was far too little sex and far too much explication of the evils of Freudian therapy (why didn’t the heroine just get a nice female therapist, I wondered)....
Maria Kalaniemi and the group JPP are both in the vanguard of Finland’s contemporary folk music scene, which has revitalized stagnant traditions by ignoring stylistic boundaries. JPP (Jarvelan Pikkupelimannit, or “Little Fiddlers of Jarvela,” a mouthful even for natives) play Finnish folk tunes infused with Celtic, Swedish, and classical influences. The group’s lineup–harmonium, stand-up bass, and four violins–may appear cumbersome, but at heart JPP are a dance band, combining the well-drilled precision of a crack chamber music ensemble with the energetic drive of a big band....
The best two films in X-Film Chicago’s latest series couldn’t be more different. In Greg Biermann’s 17-minute Montage, allusive, often abstract images–a silhouette, some trees, geometrical light patterns–are intercut to form repetitive and rhythmic sequences. But just when you think Biermann’s using set patterns, the order switches. The mysterious aura that results leaves you feeling that the images are indeed trying to say something; you just can’t figure out what it is....
Dear Reader: When I moved to Chicago in the 80s, the northern skyline was dominated by the PLAYBOY sign, its neon fuchsia clashing with the staid Old English letters spelling out “The Drake.” The 80s collapsed, the building stood, but the Playboy corporation moved out and the sign fell. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the apartment where I moved to in the 90s, I can just make out the Prudent in the Prudential sign, its letters as red as the one Hester Prynne wore, the buildings blotting out the rest....
SATURDAY MORNING LIVE In short, Win One is messing with my most sacred cows: Scooby-Doo, Land of the Lost, Capt. Caveman & Teen Angels, Fat Albert & Cosby Kids, Superfriends, Hong Kong Phooey, and perhaps the holiest of holies, Grammar Rock, America Rock, and Schoolhouse Rock. I know these programs better than I know my own family. I may not be able to tell you what my Aunt Janet does for a living (or even where she lives, come to think of it), but I can tell you that Casey Kasem did the voices of Shaggy and Robin....
