YO-YO MA, LARRY COMBS, and DANIEL BARENBOIM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is as close to an ideal lineup for a chamber recital as they come: one of the most accomplished cellists of our time teaming up with a superlative pianist and joined, in one work, by a virtuoso orchestra principal. Yo-Yo Ma is a mesmerizing performer, bowing the cello passionately and coaxing a mellow yet disciplined sound from it....
Rebound: The Odyssey of Michael Jordan These thoughts kept returning to me as I read Rebound, Bob’s second hagiography of Michael Jordan. Bob’s first book on Jordan, Hang Time, eclipsed Lives of the Saints. This time out, Jordan leaves basketball, tries baseball, then returns to basketball, while Bob dogs his steps like a pull-toy duck. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bob starts out by dismissing any information about Jordan that doesn’t come from first-person interviews....
It’s unfortunate that England is so obsessed with categorizing music for the sake of fashion; the limiting tag “acid jazz,” by encompassing such a remarkably wide range of styles, tends to denigrate the good stuff and exalt the bad stuff. Formed in 1985, when this music was an underground phenomenon, Brand New Heavies are the good stuff. They play 70s-style funk and soul with striking verve. Their 1991 debut found them jumping seamlessly from scorching funk instrumentals clearly indebted to James Brown and the Meters to slinking, groove-heavy soul sung by then-guest N’Dea Davenport, an Atlanta-raised, LA-based session singer brought in by the label....
Friday 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If, like us, you’re unclear on what movies belong to which of Eric Rohmer’s film cycles, Facets is here to help set things straight. As part of the theater’s French-film month, it’s presenting Rohmer’s seldom-seen feature debut, The Sign of Leo (playing tonight at 8, tomorrow and Monday at 7, and Sunday at 5:30), and the first five entries of his first series, the “Contes Moraux,” or moral tales....
All right! Who’s been proofreading with the spell checker again? From a recent suburban press release: “Excellent Whether Makes for Outstanding year at Festival.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Things welfare “reformers” don’t want to know, from “Welfare Reform and Child Care” (July), Toni Henle and Eve Ali’s paper for the Illinois Job Gap Project: “Workers just entering the labor force, particularly those in service establishments such as hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and stores that are open 24 hours a day, may have to work the hours more senior employees do not want, late at night or on weekends....
Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy beats girl . . . that’s the premise of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s second collaboration: the story of carousel barker Billy Bigelow, a doomed young drifter who vents his self-loathing by smacking his wife around. The team’s most operatic musical, featuring Rodgers’s most sweeping score, is also their darkest drama, largely told through what remains unsaid: Hammerstein’s libretto brilliantly portrays people unable to express their feelings directly....
It’s a paradox–a mystery–an unpleasant fact in the center of our lives that we manage not to think about much: The Great American Education Machine is broken. We’ve been shoveling money into the schools’ locomotive firebox for more than a generation, but our train keeps falling behind. His point? For the last 50 years educators have been beavering away in exactly the opposite direction. They convinced us that bigger schools and centralized education funding would be good for kids....
Nancy Landin calls her current series of photographs “Small Stories,” because many of them suggest “magical” tales to her. Her subjects are mysterious and suggestive: some leaves on a wall, a broken window, an indistinct nude in gentle light. The colors are soft, supple, sensual, with none of the glossy assertiveness of much conventional color photography–a result of the unusual process she uses to print them. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Pocahontas With the voices of Irene Bedard, Judy Kuhn, Mel Gibson, David Ogden Stiers, Linda Hunt, Russel Means, Christian Bale, Billy Connolly, and Joe Baker. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course the romance Disney creates between Pocahontas and John Smith is pure fabrication, but even the details in the movie are often scramblings and distortions of historical records whose truth is itself disputed....
When the musical group Negativland released a record sampling a U2 hit, U2’s label sued, forcing it to be recalled. Craig Baldwin’s Sonic Outlaws takes this event as a starting point for a densely layered meditation on borrowing and originality in art. Baldwin interweaves lots of images–clips from old movies, Warhol’s Marilyns, and humorously modified billboard advertisements to name a few–evoking the way our culture is constantly recycled. What “nature” was to earlier artists, media is to ours....
Winifred Haun & Dancers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately Haun’s Minutes, which she premiered last fall at the Athenaeum, suffers in such close quarters. The piece is dominated by a huge black table: Haun’s subject is business meetings, and by extension the power struggles and confrontations of corporate life. Seen from a distance the table must dwarf the seven dancers, making them seem ineffectual, toylike; but from a couple dozen feet away the table seems more playground equipment than oversize furniture....
Star System Stephen Chapman, Tribune * 1/2: “Alternately sensible, pedestrian, soaring, and incomprehensible, Chapman’s column is a hit-or-miss event.” Timothy McNulty, Tribune **: “White House. Although some of his articles on foreign affairs lack depth, McNulty remains a sharp White House watcher.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Moberg, In These Times ***: “Senior editor. . . . Sharp and provocative, the talented Moberg is one to turn to in these times of changing economic and labor conditions....
As the Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second week, two more films with distributors have been added to the list. Persuasion–a thoughtful, intelligent adaptation of the Jane Austen novel that provides a welcome alternative to Merchant-Ivory–is replacing Deathmaker and is being handled by Sony Pictures Classics. Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, filling the “surprise” film slot, is on all counts the dumbest Hollywood movie I saw in Cannes last May–an egregious Tarantino spin-off with everything the mainstream press is screaming for: a simple (even stupid) contrived plot, intimations of deranged and nonsensical violence, macho stances, movie stars, a fancy title, and the Miramax logo....
One of the major essays of Chris Marker–which automatically makes this one of the key works of our time–this remarkable video is provisionally about his friend and mentor, the late Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989), in the form of six video “letters” sent to him posthumously. More profoundly, it is about the history of Soviet cinema and the Soviet Union itself, about what it meant to be a communist, about what these things mean now....
Now, from the mayor who wanted to plunk a huge airport down on top of stinky, half-dead Lake Calumet, comes another airport idea that’s for the birds. This time in only the most positive way. The Chicago Park District owns the ground under Meigs, but has been leasing it to the city for 48 years. The lease is up in 1996, and Daley says he won’t renew. With support from him and the city’s parks, aviation, and environmental overlords, Meigs’s yield looks like a sure thing....
Ann Peebles Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Along with Al Green, Ann Peebles was one of the twin pillars of the late-60s, early-70s Memphis soul sound pioneered by producer Willie Mitchell at Hi Records. The Hi sound was less showy than the flamboyant rootsiness that characterized Stax, Memphis’s other R & B giant, but at its best it attained a fusion of sensual and spiritual longing that has seldom been equaled....
By Bill Wyman Swiss photographer Robert Frank is probably best known for the unblinking outsider’s view of the country expressed in his collection The Americans. But he’s also a respected avant-garde filmmaker; besides his seldom seen Rolling Stones tour documentary, Cocksucker Blues, he’s created mid-length experimental films for decades. A series of this work put together by the Film Center begins tonight with Frank’s first film, Pull My Daisy, a half-hour adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s play The Beat Generation, narrated by Kerouac and starring Allen Ginsberg....
By Jill Riddell I’m curious, because Tim’s way out on a limb on this one, sitting almost alone in his appreciation of crows. They’re right up there with pigeons as one of the most loathed birds in America. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t predict what animal fad will next capture the fancy of American shoppers, but I can tell you it won’t be crows....
Ten years ago a group of new, mostly young appointees took over City Hall intending to overthrow Chicago government and reform it as it had never been reformed before. Many of them had never worked in government. Some had never even had a real job. But to them Harold Washington’s 55 months in office was the Chicago version of Camelot. His death was as much a blow to their aspirations as John F....
When the Museum of Contemporary Art moves to its new Chicago Avenue digs this June, two works in its permanent collection won’t be making the trip–Max Neuhaus’s Sound Installation, 1979 and Charles Simonds’s Dwellings. Both artworks are site specific, so their ultimate fate, according to MCA curator of collections Lucinda Barnes, rests with the future owners of the Ontario Street building, though she says Neuhaus and Simonds have been invited to create permanent pieces for the new museum....
