A native of Scotland, Evelyn Glennie lost much of her hearing by age 12. Around the same time, with characteristic determination, she decided to take up percussion. Three years later she won a scholarship to attend London’s Royal Academy of Music. By then she’d learned how to compensate for her disability. When performing with other musicians she relies on visual cues. To learn a piece she puts a tape recorder between her knees and lets the vibrations be her guide....
In the summer of 1991 Bruce Orenstein made a video that played on all the local news shows, and for a few days he knew how it must feel to be David Gergen. “This is not art and it’s not journalism–it’s video organizing,” says Orenstein. “I use video technology the same way corporations do. But while they use it to advance their monied interests, we’re using it for social change. That’s what this is all about....
Big-Tooth High-Tech Megatron vs. the Sockpuppet of Procrastination The postmodern techno-fantasy that technology turns free will and moral agency into obsolete curiosities has already degenerated into an alarmist cliche: we’re envisioned as mindless, grinning drones worshiping the instrument of our own evisceration. Gloomy tomes lament the decline of “reality,” then their authors convene on somber panels to have their words of wisdom entombed in Harper’s. And now that the Internet’s tendrils have penetrated the sanctuary of the suburban American single-family home, we can expect the consternation to increase tenfold....
In a small country chapel lit only by candles, an organ sadly groaned the last weepy bars of a somber hymn. Shadows jumped the walls of painted knotty pine and flickered over the faces of the solemn congregation. But I had come primarily for rest and relaxation. While a chance to explore ethereal dimensions sounded intriguing, it was not part of my planned agenda. The extent of my investment, I figured, would be the $10 a night it costs to stay in one of the 30 simple white cabins that form a peaceful circle on the bluff above town....
Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After reading your “Scalper Scam” article [Hitsville, December 1] I became compelled to tell my story. I was scammed twice at the former Rose Records on 53rd Street. The first time occurred while attempting to get decent R.E.M. tickets in January for the June 2 show. The lottery tickets were supposed to be given out at 9:30....
JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK The triumph is the greater because this uncompromising play has an immense capacity to enrage and depress. It’s easy to imagine riots breaking out today over Juno and the Paycock, as they did over O’Casey plays decades ago. This playwright relentlessly exposes his fellow Irishmen (with emphasis on “men”)–their penchant for phony sentiment and religious rigidity, their lazy love of bluster and beer, and the wasteful way they worship the martyred dead and ignore the needy living....
Also known as For Fun, a title I prefer, this is a delightful comedy from mainland China (1992) about grumbly old men, directed and cowritten by a young woman, Ning Ying, who studied film in both Beijing and Italy, was assistant director on The Last Emperor, and is currently director of the Beijing Film Studio. An old man is obliged to retire from his job as house manager for a local Peking Opera troupe, and after he finds a few opera buffs around his age in a park he organizes a club that meets in an abandoned hall....
After a long and successful career in day care, Ruby L. Oliver made this, her first feature, originally known as Leola, in her late 40s. It’s a remarkable debut: assured, tightly focused, surprisingly upbeat considering the number of problems it addresses without flinching–and the best low-budget Chicago independent feature I’ve seen. Set in contemporary Chicago, it concerns a 17-year-old girl from the ghetto whose plans for the future are jeopardized when she finds herself pregnant....
We’re in the first inning of a little league play-off game, near the end of a long, hot, humid season. Nerves on edge, no one’s happy. One side says the other side has batted out of order, and though it’s just a minor error an argument grows to include several parents. The coaches are yelling. Kids sit down at their positions. The scorekeepers shoot sarcastic broadsides across home plate. The base runners sit down....
Tulare Dust: A Songwriters’ Tribute to Merle Haggard Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On most tribute records, the varied interpretations of a single artist rarely amount to anything more than a greatest-hits package once removed, and often an uneven one at that. But the sheer volume of tribute albums on the market almost guarantees occasional exceptions to this rule. One recent example is Tulare Dust: A Songwriters’ Tribute to Merle Haggard (Hightone)....
Regarding your July 19 column on cats always landing (relatively) unharmed on their feet after falling considerable distances, I thought you might be interested in knowing about an experiment carried out by a friend of mine when I lived in rural northern California. I should stress that this person is reliable (not given to lying or stretching the truth) and is the kind who would carry out the experiment described below....
Trial by Goudie, Part 2 Here they come again, hanging Helmut Carsten Hofer. On January 21 Channel Seven reported that the “baffling murder of a North Shore socialite appears on the verge of being solved,” the socialite being Suzanne Olds of Wilmette, the prime suspect being Hofer, a gay German model and a business partner of Olds’s estranged husband, Dean Olds. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A month ago the state’s attorney dropped the spurious check-kiting charge, and Hofer made plans to go back to Germany....
Uptown String Quartet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Prior to the formation of New York’s Uptown String Quartet, its members had jammed together with Max Roach, the venerable jazz-percussionist dad of violist Maxine Roach. The four women decided to join forces permanently six years ago, after cellist Eileen Folson met up with Maxine again in the orchestra pit of a production of Into the Woods....
Elimination at Sheffield’s Beer and Wine Garden Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A collaborative effort by performers Brian Mendes, Chris Sullivan, and Vicki Walden and director David Pavkovic, Elimination takes place in a 13-foot-square playing area fenced in on all sides by the audience. Above the performers eight bare bulbs hang from a grid of copper pipes. Below them the floor is an inch deep in salt....
Wrens, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, at Footsteps Theatre. Great acting requires a great moral dilemma the way an Indy car needs high-octane fuel. Playwright Anne McGravie, with the help of directors Karen Kessler and Scott M. Verissimo, eventually pushes Rivendell’s stellar seven-person cast to the brink of a moral chasm and into overdrive. But it takes an entire act to get her engine started. Her semiautobiographical Wrens is set on the eve of VE day in an unassuming barracks of the Women’s Royal Naval Service....
CASSANDRA WILSON What, then, was Wilson’s Park West performance, in which she and her five-piece band (drummer, miscellaneous percussionist, acoustic bassist, guitarist, and a multiinstrumentalist who played violin, mandolin, and harmonica) played a set featuring Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey,” Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Hellhound on My Trail,” Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and a smattering of originals? Was it jazz, pop, or something else altogether?...
AD-NAUSEAM In this respect Doe has a lot in common with his creator, writer-director Ned Crowley. Given two acts and two hours of stage time, he can’t seem to decide whether he’s writing a character-driven comedy about a sad-sack writer, or lampooning the ever-deserving ad industry, or creating a dark, surrealistic satire about the way television has subverted the democratic process. An inspired writer could do all three, but Ad-Nauseam looks for all the world like the sort of comedy someone writes when he has nothing to say and two hours to say it in....
So here we are, on the darkling plain of Jeffrey Kamberos’s painting The Beatnik Killers. An ominous horizon rises before us, a sliver moon hangs in a dangerous sky, and Kamberos races in our direction, a rocket-propelled, Spock-eared comic-book hero. He comes to a hovering, agitated stop directly in front of us. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Off in the distance there’s a miniature Allen Ginsberg, wearing an Uncle Sam hat and carrying a mother lode of bad beatnik karma....
This first program of X-Film Chicago’s new season is one of its best, but with a twist: the strongest films explore existing genres but become extreme enough to also transform themselves. Mark Street’s Lilting Towards Chaos is not the only autobiographical film about a diffident protagonist, but it’s so relentlessly flat and so pointedly affectless that it becomes a kind of antiautobiography–one wonders if the narrator even has a life. The paranoid fantasies implied by Mark Nugent’s Manual Labor–that a large drug company is distributing LSD, for instance–have been aired before, and the film’s aggressive tone is a bit unpleasant at first....
As much as I relish the clever way Die Hanswurste tricked certain members of the press into believing their ragtag group of American comic actors were really handpicked representatives of a fictional school of German “clown performance art,” I have two regrets about their September show. One, their hoax overshadowed what was really a fine evening of intelligent physical comedy–a rare thing at a time when slapstick is associated more with drooling fools like Jerry Lewis and the Three Stooges than with such masters as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Jacques Tati....
