What’s the difference between a street, a road, an avenue, a boulevard, etc? There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to how the names of public ways are suffixed. Does it depend on width, length, importance, or (more likely) the builder’s whim? Please advise. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whatever scarcities we may have in this world, a shortage of street-name suffixes isn’t one of them....
Geraldine Fibbers On the surface rock ‘n’ roll may be about fucking or fighting or driving really fast, but the subtext of most of it is that these are just things we do to escape our boredom with the world, to push down, if just for a moment, that sense of futility that would otherwise drive us to fritter away our lives watching TV in our bathrobes. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Transparent Hinges Art and politics are frequent bedfellows. The most obvious of political dances tend to advocate specific agendas. Liz Lerman’s company of senior citizens promotes respect for the elderly. Most folk dance ensembles advocate ethnic pride and respect for tradition. Sometimes a dance’s politics are as controversial as motherhood and apple pie, and then art is usually the dominant partner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the politics are controversial, they dominate....
BEVIS FROND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nick Saloman, who for most intents and purposes is the Bevis Frond, is single-handedly keeping aloft the torch of first-wave psychedelic rock. As a teenager in the 60s, he played in a group called the Bevis Frond Museum, but he didn’t release any records under the name until Miasma in 1986. Since then, though, 15 studio albums–some of them doubles–have poured out of him, full of songs untouched by post-1972 musical developments but too graceful and serious to be period pieces....
Journalists are notoriously competitive, and they rarely get the praise they crave. So few events are more charged than the yearly awards dinner of the Chicago Headline Club, the local reporters’ fraternity, at which the club gives out its Peter Lisagor awards for exemplary journalism. Actually, many people familiar with the paper’s role in Austin do dispute that. Dan Haley, publisher of the rival Austin Weekly News, says, “That the Headline Club would give an ethics award to the Austin Voice is appalling....
CORNELIUS CARDEW’S TREATISE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The search for alternative ways of putting music to paper has taken composers down many different paths in the last half century, and among the most heavily trod is graphic notation. Geometric designs, colored patterns, and stimulating visual signals meant to represent or elicit particular sounds or techniques are now standard tricks in the postwar-classical bag....
By Michael Miner City News Service made an offer for CNB before Christmas. Faigin and Tom Quinn, who run the LA wire, are both Medill alumni and Quinn worked at CNB when he was starting out. But their credentials were more impressive than their original terms. “I have received no serious offers,” Joe Leonard, the Tribune associate editor who’s president of the CNB board, told me the other day. “I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the news directors....
Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham and Other Stories, Emerald City Theatre Company, at the Old Town School of Folk Music Children’s Center. Emerald City proves once again that it’s one of Chicago’s best children’s-theater troupes with this musical celebration of all things Seuss. Under the expert direction of Nancy Howland Walker, this imaginative staging opens with songs based on some of Dr. Seuss’s best-loved works: Yertle the Turtle is interpreted as a rollicking gospel number, and Green Eggs & Ham takes the form of a Busby Berkeley-style musical extravaganza....
Joel Hall’s Nuts & Bolts keeps the candy colors and holiday sense of license and celebration from The Nutcracker–and little else. Where that 19th-century work focuses on the traditional family and material goods–hiding any romance or sexuality behind the weird smoke screen of a prepubescent girl, a peculiar godfather, and a prince who isn’t quite flesh and blood–Hall in his stripped-down, very urban suite ignores “family values” and bourgeois trappings. Instead, in a version still suitable for kids, he gives us a Coffee and Tea male-female duet that mocks chivalry, divertissement dancers in drag, and other oblique allusions to the treacly original....
JON JANG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jon Jang has become the Johnny Appleseed of Asian-American jazz. Through his finely etched compositions and translucent recordings, and especially his Pan Asian Arkestra–with its perfect balance of big-band jazz, Eastern themes and timbres, and avant-garde expressionism–the Chinese-American pianist has done more than any other musician to help this music blossom into a distinct (and distinctive) idiom....
By Cara Jepsen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of his first day jobs was jerking sodas for $4 a week at the flagship Walgreen’s on the south side, where new recruits attended school to learn the lingo. Horn considered Charlie Walgreen a good boss: “He would always say, ‘Don’t ever steal anything, just take it and tell me.’” Horn jerked at several soda fountains in Chicago before running away to New York City, where he worked alongside James Cagney, waiting on customers like Bela Lugosi....
In 1847, at the Battle of Cerro Gordo during the Mexican War, soldiers from the Fourth Regiment Illinois Volunteers sneaked behind enemy lines and emerged with the Mexican commander’s leg. It wasn’t as grisly as it sounds: the leg was artificial and the general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, wasn’t wearing it at the time. The leg was brought to Pekin, Illinois, as a war trophy and was displayed to curiosity seekers at ten cents a peek....
I have seen the future of the Chicago Cubs, and his name is Corey Patterson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Lugnuts (they play in Lansing, Michigan, home of the Oldsmobile, thus the silly auto-assembly-line nickname) arrived in Geneva two weeks ago Monday, and every paper in town sent a sports columnist out to cover Patterson, the Cubs’ top draft pick last year and the third player chosen overall....
rROBERT BRADLEY’S BLACKWATER SURPRISE 11/21, PARK WEST The rags-to-riches story here seems a little too good to be true: blind, 46-year-old singer-songwriter Robert Bradley is busking on the streets of Detroit when a young rock band “discovers” him; they get signed to RCA and he gets to be in Liar’s Poker with Flea and Mike Tyson. The twist is that the rock band needs Bradley and his gritty, soulful voice a lot more than he needs its competent, if familiar, R & B rock (think Dave Matthews Band meets Canned Heat)....
Sweet Smells Success Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sweet has wanted to stage I Sent a Letter to My Love ever since he came across the story in the late 70s. A journalist at the time, he’d been dispatched to the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, to interview its artistic director, Arvin Brown. The theater was presenting Rubens’s own dramatic adaptation of her novel, and Sweet stayed for a performance....
Tavern on the Green Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two-story structure will resemble a New England boathouse, with a facade of stone and weathered clapboard and numerous windows to take advantage of the view. The first floor will be divided between the harbormaster’s office and storage space for the restaurant, while the second floor will encompass a dining room seating 100 and an outdoor patio seating another 60....
TOM ZE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his first U.S. tour, 63-year-old tropicalia pioneer Tom Ze is using most of the Chicago avant-rock band Tortoise as his backing group, and it should be an interesting matchup. While Brazilian music has been at most a tasty tidbit on Tortoise’s giant plate–it’s far more prominent in the music of their labelmates the Sea and Cake–the now vaunted world-in-a-blender ethos of the tropicalia movement is close kin to their own philosophy....
Rock, Pop, etc. MARY J. BLIGE Next Friday, September 22, 8 PM, Star Plaza Theatre, I-65 and U.S. 30, Merrillville, Indiana. 773-734-7266 or 312-559-1212. EUGENE CHADBOURNE Banjo, guitar, and electric rake. Next Saturday, September 23, 7 and 10 PM, theater, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 756 N. Milwaukee. 312-243-9088. DJ YELLOW, ALEX PRAT, STEFFEN DIXON perform at an opening for “The Red Sessions,” paintings by Dzine. Friday, 6-9 PM, Eastwick, 245 W....
Visitor From the Living Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann originally interviewed Maurice Rossel, a Swiss Red Cross official who inspected the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, for his epic 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah. In this 65-minute video (1997), distilled from their three-hour conversation in 1979, the two men chat comfortably, Rossel shooing away an offscreen child who coughs on the sound track, and Lanzmann lets him describe his experiences, contradicting him only occasionally....
By Al Hoff Legend has it that stock car racing grew out of moonshining, out of the races those bad boys in souped-up hot rods had with the law. In the 1930s and 1940s, stock car races were disorganized, staged haphazardly with arbitrary rules and purses that rarely materialized. But a mechanic from Daytona Beach, Florida, “Big Bill” France Sr., recognized the sport’s potential. In 1948, France formed the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing to unite pro racers under one governing body whose rule was law, one that could guarantee the prizes and declare a definitive champion....
