Bill Clinton isn’t really a junk food junkie, says Keith Luce, who ought to know. Luce spent the past two years as the White House sous chef, feeding Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and thousands of their closest friends. Now he’s the executive chef at Spruce, the smart new Streeterville eatery. Don’t expect to find any White House dinners on the menu at Spruce. “Obviously my style is the same, but the meals here are less formal....
ROMEO AND JULIET Oak Park Festival Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is quintessential summer Shakespeare–women in heavy dresses, men in tights, masterful swordplay, and truly excellent actors, whose flawless diction and delivery bring out every nuance of Shakespeare’s text, allowing the audience to completely forget about the annoyingly overmiked sound system. James Krag and Mary MacDonald Kerr make a splendid, ageless all-American Romeo and Juliet who convey all their characters’ youthful exuberance and folly without sacrificing the maturity of the language....
CHERRY POPPIN’ DADDIES 3/31, DOUBLE DOOR A goofball white party band from Eugene, Oregon, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies purvey an energetic and fairly competent blend of ska, horn-drenched funk, and old-timey R & B, but if you’re looking for anything beyond beer-hoisting kicks you’ll leave hungry. POPA CHUBBY 3/31, BUDDY GUY’S New York blues-rock guitarist Popa Chubby seems to be using his physical appearance as a marketing hook; he’s huge, dresses like a badass biker, and is bald but for a little tuft on top....
The Java Jive Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seattle’s Best has a long way to go to catch up to Starbucks, which has more than 880 cafes across the country and has reaped an estimated $465 million in revenue in fiscal 1995. But growth has carried a tremendous price tag: of that $465 million, only $26 million was profit. Still, last year Starbucks’s profits were $3 million higher than Seattle’s Best’s total revenue....
By Ted Cox The Knicks and Bulls had met in five of the previous seven years in the playoffs, including each of the Bulls’ three championship runs, and while the Knicks had won the last meeting, two years ago, that was the one time in the last 11 years that the Bulls didn’t have Michael Jordan at their disposal. The Bulls seemed to recognize a whipped-dog carriage to the Knicks and at first were diplomatic, not wanting to rile an opponent ready and willing to be beaten....
How do the television program codes for VCR Plus work? VCR Plus is a handheld device similar to a TV remote control that tells the VCR to record a target program at a specific time, channel, and duration based on a numeric code listed in TV Guide and many newspapers. I see no pattern to these codes, which have a different meaning each month. One month “12345” may indicate a Friday night news show on Channel 2, the next month something entirely different....
Yo La Tengo is endowed with an abundant sense of musical and personal history. The Hoboken-based trio draw on the best rock music of the last 30 years; during their Lollapalooza performances here last summer they had the crowd swaying to the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and moshing to the Dead C’s “Bad Politics.” And when the makers of the forthcoming film I Shot Andy Warhol needed a band to play the part of the Velvet Underground, they hired Yo La Tengo....
Colin McFrangos “hated every minute” of an advanced drawing class he took a year ago at the School of the Art Institute. He says he’d been making “pretty hermetic” prints, “spilling my guts out in such a coded way that no one would ever care about the work.” The drawing instructor, whose own art he actually liked, was interested in discussion, analysis, and relations between abstract shapes that, McFrangos says, “play with the figure-ground idea”–connecting objects with their surroundings–“a very specific framework that I was interested in breaking with....
Chicago aldermen had a busy time at last week’s City Council meeting, overwhelmingly passing Mayor Richard Daley’s $3.64 billion budget and his $19.5 million property-tax increase. Not too busy for some good old-fashioned sniping, however. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alderman Joseph Moore proposed cutting $500,000 from the budget for lawyers representing aldermen who are defendants in a lawsuit over the 1990 ward remap (Moore and other antiadministration aldermen brought the suit, charging that the map deliberately reduced minority voting power)....
I’m a bit confused by the widely held notion that comic Denis Leary sits on some Sam Kinison-like id-splotched politically incorrect comedy throne. His vociferous defenses of his personal vices–which on close examination come down to eating meat and smoking–are something less than sociopathic; his saliva-spewing delivery and indignantly raised voice far more often deal with safer subjects like drugs neither he nor his audience are likely to use (on crack: “I would never do a drug named after a part of my own ass”), New York (“There are so many ways to die”), and easy political targets (Ted Kennedy: “A good senator but a bad date”)....
Harold Henderson’s article “Up Against the Sprawl” (September 6) was an excellent, comprehensive look at the causes and effects of sprawl, a vital subject for Chicagoland, one that must be addressed more effectively by the citizens of Illinois. I would like to take issue, however, with his comment regarding the loss of farmland. While from a national standpoint farmland is not “scarce,” this is certainly no consolation to localities where farmland is being eaten away so rapidly it is evident that local farming will not survive....
Playwright-director George C. Wolfe’s take on the career of Creole jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton is debatable. Wolfe’s 1992 Broadway musical insists that Morton’s professional rise and fall was due to his escalating racial self-hatred rather than inevitable swings in musical taste, treating his proud and only somewhat exaggerated claim to having invented jazz as a grotesquely clownish arrogance. But Wolfe’s tartly funny script, Susan Birkenhead’s clever lyrics, and Luther Henderson’s ingenious adaptations of Morton’s brassy, buoyant tunes (superbly played under conductor Linda Twine) make Jelly’s Last Jam a provocative piece that celebrates the vitality and variety of African American music while also reminding us that its popularity has failed to rectify the injustices inflicted on the people who created it....
Kate Jacobs’s stories aren’t your typical singer-songwriter narratives. She reduces plot to poignant, telling details; her lyrics read more as paragraphs than stanzas. “Iris Has Faith,” a song off her first album, The Calm Comes After, that salutes country-folk singer Iris DeMent, transforms conversation into an art form: “Iris has a lover named Elmer / He’s a fireman, and he’s much older than her / I say why not find somebody better?...
Seminude Michelle Banks stands with her back to the audience in a black latex bustier, boa draped over her shoulders, sinuously moving her hips from side to side, punctuating each movement with a little stomp of her foot. So begins Tanya White’s seamlessly written and directed Lana/Smoking, a monologue/inner dialogue on sex, sexism, racism, smoking, incest, and the politics of power as told by exotic dancer Lana. Lana smokes, dives to the floor, rolls on the floor, sits at her table drinking from a silver flask, and speaks to her audience so naturally that we seem to be eavesdropping on her very thoughts....
PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE Set in 1904 (the year Picasso settled in France for good, and a couple of years before he painted his revolutionary, African-influenced Les demoiselles d’Avignon), Martin’s play posits a barroom encounter between the volatile young Spaniard and the quirky German, who was developing the theses whose publication the next year would make his name and revolutionize scientific thought. (The script wrongly suggests Einstein was living in Paris in 1904; he was in Switzerland, working as a patent officer....
Album of the Year? I demand a recount! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve all been told what a talented songwriter Phair is, but to my ears she wouldn’t know a song if it crawled up her ass. The woman is obviously so full of herself that she lacks the humility to objectively listen to her music and realize she should limit her singing to the shower....
To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those guys protesting the city’s decision to raise fees at the public tennis courts at Waveland and to bring in a private firm to manage the courts [Neighborhood News, June 23]–is it possible to imagine a bigger bunch of rich crybabies? I can’t. They live on Lake Shore Drive, and they’re complaining about paying an extra $10 a year....
KODO 2/18, CENTRE EAST, 2/19 & 20, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE The live performances of this Japanese percussion ensemble have earned a reputation for transforming ritualistic drumming into a transcendent art. Abetted by carefully choreographed dancers, loinclothed men pound on massive 880-pound taiko drums amid lighter percussive layers and simple flute melodies. The dynamic range of their tribal frenzies–from a quiet patter to a thunderous barrage–is remarkable, but based on a listen to the recently released Best of Kodo (TriStar Music), I’d guess they’re probably better experienced live....
“The first thing to remember is to keep your correct distance,” Ned Mochel tells me. I face Scott Cummins and extend my right arm to a point near the center of his sternum. “The second thing is to maintain eye contact so that he knows when you’re going to start the hit.” While we wait for rehearsal to begin I ask the four men and two women performers how they first got into this relatively new field....
Headquartered in San Cristobal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, this ensemble (whose name means “monkey business”) began ten years ago as an outreach program of Sna Jtz’ibajom (House of the Writer), an agency dedicated to reclaiming the Mayan heritage suppressed since the coming of the Spanish Catholic conquerors. Working under the guidance of American stage director Ralph Lee, an Open Theatre veteran and artistic director of New York’s acclaimed Mettawee River Company, Lo’il Maxil has groomed a solid ensemble of writers and performers whose plays, performed in Spanish and the Mayan language Tztotzil, reflect ancient myth and folklore and, increasingly, the dichotomous lives of industrialized Mexico’s impoverished rural population; plays like Las antorchas para amanecer (“Torches for Awakening”), a satire of Spanish-centric learning, and Todos para todos (“All for All”), about the struggle for land rights, dramatize the issues of educational oppression and economic injustice that also lay at the heart of Chiapas’ current guerrilla war....
