1975: Grant Ford, publisher of Gay Life, declares for alderman of the 44th Ward and then, after voter registration efforts are well under way, mysteriously drops out of the race and supports te regular Democratic candidate. 1986: A gay rights ordinance is defeated in City Council, a “wake-up call for the community.” 1987: Dr. Ron Sable challenges incumbent 44th Ward alderman Bernmard Hansen and nearly wins with 46.3 percent of the vote....
As Roger Amador sees it, one day a few years ago for no reason at all the city took $350,000 out of his pocket. More specifically, the City Council passed a ban on issuances of new liquor licenses and transfers of old liquor licenses in the 25th Ward. As a result, a prospective buyer withdrew a $350,000 offer on Amador’s store, Amador Liquors, at 1167 W. 18th St. But many aldermen say the bans are needed to halt the spread of crime, litter, and noise that accompany obnoxious bars and stores....
Who is correct? Are we becoming better off or worse off? Where are we heading? Moreover, during the movie’s initial release, you could see An Affair to Remember in CinemaScope–as you could at the Chicago Film Festival’s CinemaScope retrospective a couple of years back, and as you probably still can in Paris today. In Sleepless in Seattle you can catch only “scanned” clips of it on various TV sets, with about a third of the image removed from both sides of the frame....
MOONSHAKE/NEW KINGDOM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » London’s Moonshake has retained the massive groove it lifted from Can (along with its name, the title of a 24-year-old Can tune), but in the foreground the music now bears little resemblance to the group’s early work. The first recordings made liberal use of jarring guitar parts, but when coleader Margaret Fiedler left to form Laika, so went the guitars....
While No Man of God isn’t the one Ted Bundy movie to watch, it is one worth watching. Ostensibly about FBI analyst Bill Hagmaier, the film spans from his initial meeting with an incarcerated Bundy during the inception of the agency’s criminal profiling unit to Bundy’s last days alive. Bundy, of course, still steals the show, making the choice to present things from Hagmaier’s point of view seem like a cowardly one aimed at skirting any criticism about sympathizing with a serial killer....
Coolio Dogg Food Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the biggest rap albums of ’95 put this critique to the test–Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise and Tha Dogg Pound’s Dogg Food. Like no other contenders, they are at least trying to demonstrate hip-hop’s continued significance. When put together they offer a de facto morality play between the Bad Rap Duo and the Good Rap Hero, staged in a media theater as big as the nation....
Television Personalities Yes Darling, But Is It Art? (Seed) Treacy is one of the few alternative rockers who isn’t afraid to critique the values and ethics of his own milieu. Long a foe of mainstream political, social, and religious conformity, Treacy has also cast a sardonic eye on youth culture’s mob mentality, which rockers often reinforce. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It happened all too quickly I was too young I had too much Before I’d even begun But I’m feeling much better now I’ve only just begun And soon I know my day will come Don’t get me wrong It’s not hard luck story number 39....
Jacky Terrason (This did not constitute Terrasson’s Chicago debut, by the way. Several years ago he left the Berklee School of Music in Boston–where he had come to study from his hometown Paris–and moved here on the advice of Chicago bassist Dennis Carroll, whom he’d known at Berklee. Then in his mid-20s, the pianist spent the next ten months or so playing with Carroll at Blondie’s–an unlikely jazz cellar on Rush Street–and, in his own words, getting to learn music “three times faster than in class, since I was on the spot onstage all the time....
FREAKWATER 1/12, LOUNGE AX On their fourth and finest album, Old Paint (Thrill Jockey), Freakwater continue to make their hillbilly appropriations more organic, imbuing their music with greater warmth and beauty than ever before. In the past the group tried too hard to maintain a formal purity. But their striking originals now reside easily with old country and folk nuggets; the material serves them rather than the other way around. The untrained warble of Cathy Irwin intertwines masterfully with Janet Bean’s refined croon, and Bob Egan’s spare pedal steel and National guitar offer just the right amount of ornamentation....
Letters we couldn’t finish because we were rolling on the floor. From a dog food company: “If dogs could talk, what might they say? Chances are they would fret about fat. Sixty percent of American dogs are overweight…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why don’t professionals fear free trade? Is it because the new global economy rewards their skills and expertise? Not likely, writes Michael Lind in Harper’s (June)....
David Hauptschein’s interest in “outsider” literature–writing by eccentrics, social misfits, the mentally ill–began about five years ago, when he was looking for source material for his own writing. “I had been exploring the underbelly of the mind: the subconscious, dreams, delirium,” he explains. “I came across a magazine called Kooks, which specialized in “insane’ writing.” He was so intrigued by what he read in Kooks that instead of incorporating it into his own work he put excerpts from the magazine onstage as part of “The Outsider Cabaret,” a performance series he was curating at Club Lower Links....
“Come on, people!” Rich Cotovsky shouts through a black toy megaphone in his distinctive drowsy style. “Abbie Hoffman died for your sins!” But the people passing by Daley Plaza don’t even raise their heads. This is the fourth year in a row that Cotovsky and company have kicked off their three-day, more or less round-the-clock festival with a procession from Daley Plaza to the Mary-Arrchie theater space, a block south of Irving Park....
Dear Reader editors: Bryan Miller’s article on women and guns [February 4] was the most persuasive polemic I’ve read in favor of widespread handgun ownership. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are much more convincing counterarguments. There is great potential that gun ownership will lead to accidents, that guns will be used in domestic disputes, and that innocent people will be shot by paranoid gun owners (as in the Louisiana case where the Japanese exchange student was killed)....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Mencimer’s pomous-ass imagined superiority over alcoholics, prostitutes, Elisabeth Shue, and apparently all white, male heterosexuals is just plain absurd. Her inability to provide details of just the characters’ actions, intentions, or motivations makes her terribly ill-suited to this task (it would do her good to read some Tennessee Williams). Her narrow insight into Sera’s line “You should know that included with the rent around here is a complimentary blowjob,” is completely ignorant and without compassion....
As David Orr was leaving his May 24 fund-raiser at Michael Jordan’s Restaurant, a young, somewhat paunchy man came up to him and said, “Mr. Orr, I’m a city policeman. I work here on my days off, and I want you to know that if you’ll run for mayor you’ll have 40,000 city employees behind you. I just wanted to tell you that. I hope you’ll run.” Orr shook the policeman’s hand, thanked him, and then he said, “I hear that all the time, every time I walk down the street, every time I get in a cab, every meeting I go to....
The Petrified Forest It must have been a thrill to be an American socialist in 1935. The Bolsheviks had proved they had staying power. Upton Sinclair had made an impressive bid for the California governorship the year before with his socialist EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform, receiving nearly one million votes. And to cap it off, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, creating the first federal welfare programs in the nation’s history....
Nixon Christopher Wilkinson, and Stone Isn’t it only a matter of time before Stone or one of his successors gives us a Stalin for Christmas? Such an epic compendium of 20th-century great-man theory would explain how, sure, the man was a mass murderer and had his share of personal problems, but, hey, “he had greatness within his grasp” (the key advertising slogan for Nixon). And, poor guy, he never had all the love he needed....
Last weekend my friend Kevin bagged going to see a late movie with a group of us because he’d promised a woman he’d arrive at her apartment at 10:30 to spend the night. Not for amorous pursuits, he insisted, but because she was terrified of being alone at night. He explained that she’d just moved to the ground floor of a new building after years of living in high-rises, and kept hearing noises in the alley that sent her imagination flying and made it impossible to sleep....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Washington Post reported in May that ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem are campaigning against the popular modern practice of wig wearing among married women, who by religious law must cover their hair and have traditionally done so with snoods or cloth coverings like scarves. The ultra-Orthodox say the wigs don’t meet religious requirements and that a woman who wears one is “preparing herself for hell....
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Rating **** Masterpiece Directed and written by Jacques Demy With Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey, and Harald Wolff. During my first visit to France I looked up a former teacher, who was working the night shift at a local newspaper in Rouen, and when I accompanied him to work one evening I was amazed to see him shake hands with every one of his coworkers when he arrived....
