I have never, to my dismay, seen a UFO. Not that I haven’t tried. In my preteen years I avidly cultivated my inner alien, racing through the accumulated, um, literature on the Bermuda Triangle, cryptozoology, strange disappearances, the Nazca markings, and so on, in search of something beyond my suburban bedroom. Yet despite my best efforts I failed to bend a single spoon, read my brother’s mind, or encounter mysterious lights in the night sky....
The Hustler Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » March’s first project was a January 1992 compilation, Uncharted; a companion show at Metro sold out. “I think what helped us out was that we were the first CD release of unsigned bands,” Skippy says now. (Uncharted volume three has just been released.) He also hooked up early with a couple of fairly big local acts: Catherine, solidly in the “shoe-gazing” school characterized by My Bloody Valentine-ish guitar washes, and Big Hat, an ear-friendly space-rock outfit marked by the keyboard work of leader Preston Klik and the ululating vocals of Yvonne Bruner....
Filmmaker Ron Rice completed only three films before he died in poverty in Mexico in 1964, among them the wonderfully absurdist Senseless and the visually lush orgy-dream Chumlum. He also left a partly edited version of The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, which has recently been completed with the assistance of actor Taylor Mead, using both additional footage Rice had shot for the film and Mead’s recollections of Rice’s intentions....
Do Americans really have to pay income tax? I have been told the 16th Amendment, which authorized the income tax, is invalid because Ohio was not legally a state at the time of ratification. So far I haven’t had the nerve to actually try this argument out on the IRS, but with Christmas coming I could use the extra cash. What do you think, Cecil, is it worth a shot?...
By Ben Joravsky “This would be a devastating loss–you’d be talking about 67,000 residents without any indoor gym or activity center,” says Ken Brucks, executive director of the Edgewater Community Council. “Maybe the governor’s not familiar with the issue, so our job is to get him to understand how important this is.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the National Guard began scaling back its operations in the late 70s, the community asked the Park District to take it over and convert it into a recreational center....
Hansel and Gretel, Ballet Chicago’s first full-length ballet, premiering at this year’s Spring Festival of Dance, is everything a ballet should be: gorgeous, charming, magical. Choreographers Daniel Duell and Gordon Peirce Schmidt intelligently incorporate the moral and psychological underpinnings of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale , making a ballet as meaningful as it is beautiful. The music (based on Engelbert Humperdinck’s century-old opera of the same name, adapted for orchestra by Kimberly Schmidt) is lush and captivating....
Black Pajamas, Shattered Globe Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This late-night show is well suited to its time slot: a tight, tense play, Black Pajamas explores the dark side of the psyche often associated with the night–the haunting, unfinished business avoided during daylight hours. In the silence and stillness of a bar after last call, bartender Sky is visited by a mysterious woman, PJ, who seems to have appeared out of thin air....
“They have a saying in Latin America, “It’s better to die standing than to live crawling,”‘ said Sandra Aponte. Usually the figures on that check–along with the laughable cover story about “pursuing other options” and the shameless letter of recommendation–compel silence. But the figure offered to Sandra Aponte by WGBO, Channel 66, where she’d worked just a few months, was $2,134.80. Instead of signing the “separation and general release agreement” they gave her, she blew off the money....
HOT MIKADO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps because its pseudo-oriental setting raised it to a new height of comedic improbability, The Mikado quickly proved susceptible to spoofing and tinkering; the Thatcher, Primrose, and West Minstrels’ The Mick-a-doh, for instance, played in New York within a few months of the original’s London opening. Probably the most famous takeoffs appeared in 1939, the year that two African American adaptations vied for New York audiences....
HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO This season at the Civic, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago revives Nine Sinatra Songs, the fifth work acquired for its Tharp Project. And these 14 dancers do remarkably well, especially in the duets with a touch of humor or aggression. This is one of the straightest Tharp dances I’ve seen–it’s even literally straight, the dancers more upright and the limbs more spiky than in earlier works. But it does have its cynical, teasing side....
By Paul Pekin The second man was also wearing waders and one of those billed caps with earflaps pulled tight over his bald head. He was even older than the man from Kalamazoo. “That’s rough over there,” he agreed. “Last year one of those hillbillies said I was in his spot, said he was going to kick me into the river. And I said, ‘Come on over here and do it if you think you can....
Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After reading Fred Camper’s review of the Richard Tuttle gallery exhibition (November 24), I wish to invite him to attend a new show by the underappreciated Chicago minimalist Sky Brown, which will run indefinitely in the alley behind my apartment. The show features many of his more important works, such as Rock, Stick, Crack In The Cement, and Partially Crushed Empty Detergent Box #6....
Portugal is the source of one of the world’s virtuoso guitar traditions–fado, the cousin of flamenco–but Lisbon-based guitarist Rafael Toral doesn’t deal with complex picking patterns and lush romantic exhibitionism. Instead this 28-year-old stringer draws inspiration from the traditions of noise guitar and resonance-oriented composition, playing sheets of electric guitar that drone, hum, and shimmer like some white-hot radioactive material. Toral cites composer Alvin Lucier and his investigations of acoustical resonance as a crucial precursor, though his own pieces are decidedly electric....
The two best restaurants to open in the past year escaped from New York. Tra Via features a chef who worked at some of the Big Apple’s highest-rated dining rooms; the Park Avenue Cafe is the first out-of-town venture by David Burke, a lauded New York chef and cookbook author–though he installed a local chef to oversee the kitchen here. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Burke says, “We picked Chicago for our first out-of-town restaurant because we thought it would be the most accepting city for the kind of thing we do....
RICHARD III at the Second Unitarian Church Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This, the fourth of Footsteps’ unigender productions (which is also being performed at the Cultural Center on April 22 and 24 as part of “The Lancaster Cycle”) puts psychology before biology: the all-female cast make no attempt to reproduce the physical traits of their characters–Richard’s deformities are limited to an almost unnoticeable limp....
Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was with great annoyance, and little amusement, that I read Bill Wyman’s latest volley in the continuing juvenile pissing contest between himself and Rick Telander (“Bad Sports II,” Hitsville, June 24). Shame Bill’s tongue, fat with promise. Telander’s piece on Kurt Cobain’s death was pretentious and misguided; Wyman’s initial response [Hitsville, May 20] was based on a misinterpretation of Telander’s point and appeared strangely defensive....
Still best known for his lifetime membership in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, multireedist Roscoe Mitchell has had a fascinating career on his own. Just a few weeks ago at the Bop Shop, his playing fit seamlessly into the riveting piano hard-bop of longtime cohort Jodie Christian, while some of Mitchell’s recent work has found him fronting a dynamic combo with three percussionists and a pair of bassists. He’s placed himself in many different configurations over the years, bold to any and all challenges, but one of his best situations is the solo concert....
SABI-SABI, Pintig Cultural Group, at Greenview Arts Center. It’s the third anniversary of Lainie’s Filipino restaurant and karaoke club, but the merriment of friends and customers is only a mask for the sorrowful secrets that split families apart, sending unhappy children fleeing from their parents in search of love, identity, and a place to belong. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sabi is a term roughly equivalent to “hearsay”–as in “those things that everybody knows but nobody talks about....
Even in New Orleans, where versatility is a given and unorthodox stylistic blends are coin of the realm, guitarist Snooks Eaglin is a musical universe unto himself. Eaglin was there when Crescent City R & B was being born: that’s his guitar on “Jock-A-Mo,” Sugar Boy Crawford’s rollicking 1954 prototype for the “Iko Iko” cycle of Mardi Gras tunes. Eaglin’s early-60s recordings for the Imperial label are treasured R & B collectors’ items today; his acoustic folk-blues sessions for archivist Harry Oster are considered classics of that genre as well....
The 11th annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, continues from Friday, March 31, through Monday, April 3. Film and video screenings will be at the Three Penny, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division; at Northwestern Univ. Norris Center, 1999 South Campus Dr., Evanston; at Northeastern Illinois Univ., 5500 N....
