Bevis Frond The Bevis Frond has just released North Circular, its 15th LP in a little over a decade. Many forward-thinking musicians and critics will respond to it with an emphatic “So what?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1985 Saloman used that money to set up a home recording studio and began laying down both songs and dark, crusty guitar freakouts for his own amusement....
Pooped Out Well, it’s not so much the horses as what they leave behind. “The manure’s awful,” says Denis Vulich, vice president of Chicago Lift Truck Company at 322 N. Leavitt. “In the summer there’s this constant stench blowing through the open windows and horseflies as big as bumblebees. I mean, these are big, tough flies–no matter how many you kill they keep popping up. It’s disgusting.” “The neighborhood’s become so interesting,” says Vulich....
Your boys-will-be-boys advice to Strip Club Widow really bothered me. You told her that most straight guys want to fuck other women, and that she should turn a blind eye to her boyfriend going to strip clubs because it probably helped him blow off that wanna-fuck-other-women steam. Most straight men do not want to fuck around! And though I disagree with that premise, it pisses me off that you imply women don’t lust after 18-year-old boys....
SONNY RHODES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Texas-born Sonny Rhodes is one of the few remaining masters of lap steel blues guitar, the tail end of a gulf-coast tradition that started with Hop Wilson and L.C. “Good Rockin’” Robinson in the late 30s and early 40s. One of the lap steel’s best qualities is its range of emotional and melodic possibilities, and Rhodes can coax it into any mood: his graceful interpretation of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is a perennial showstopper, but he can dig just as effortlessly into a grinding backstreet-Chicago shuffle....
By Paul Turner Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jones lives in Wheaton now, but he’s spent most of his life in the neighborhood. He grew up as one of six children raised by his mother in an apartment kitty-corner from what’s now Murphy’s, by the bleacher entrance to the ballpark. He graduated from Lake View High in 1970 and went straight into the army....
I was a little disappointed by your recommendation to use so many chlorine products in your column on toilet plumes [April 16]. Chlorine is an extremely toxic chemical and is listed in the 1990 Clean Air Act as a hazardous air pollutant. It’s also on the EPA’s Community Right-to-Know list, and in 1993 the American Public Health Association issued a resolution calling for the gradual phaseout of most organochlorine compounds. Chlorine bleach contains sodium hypochlorite, a chemical precursor to chlorine....
Now Tom McLaughlin, he was almost ready to get out of the army when the war came. He’d been drafted four years before, with the idea that this war was going on in Europe and we were going to be ready. So then he was in for the duration of the war. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So we went to Our Lady of Sorrows for mass in the morning, and then I saw him off downtown at the train station....
Founded a little more than two decades ago by a handful of off-Loop actors led by Arnold Aprill, City Lit Theater Company first made a name for itself with concert readings of classic and contemporary short stories in places not usually associated with theatrical performances (the Three Arts Club, the Clark House). As its success grew, the company leaped to fully staged productions of its own adaptations: Aprill’s version of Lynda Barry’s comic memoir The Good Times Are Killing Me remains for me an exemplar of great off-Loop theater....
“The situation in Kosovo was ripe for nonviolent struggle for the simple reason that the Kosovars outnumbered the Serbs 9 to 1,” theologian Walter Wink tells Messenger (May), the Elgin-based magazine of the Church of the Brethren. “That meant they had the numbers to launch massive forms of nonviolent struggle, like a general strike, which might have made it impossible for the Serbs to govern the country and made the Serbs more amenable to some sort of compromise....
The living-wage movement nationwide “has so far directly benefited only a tiny portion of the low-wage work force,” writes David Moberg in the American Prospect (June 19-July 3)–perhaps as few as 46,000 people out of the 28 million who earn less than $8 an hour. But “the movement has great potential to expand to thousands of new political jurisdictions and to set standards for any business that benefits from public spending…....
FRANK LOWE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Free jazz in the 90s has been marked by a rekindled interest in flamethrowing saxophonists–investigate the expanding discographies of David S. Ware, Charles Gayle, and Ivo Perelman if you doubt it. From the sound of his scorching debut, Black Beings (ESP), or his early duet with drummer Rashied Ali, Duo Exchange (Survival)–both from 1973–you might think Frank Lowe fit snugly into that niche....
“Rose leaves her husband to get another one,” says Mike Moore disapprovingly, calling her a “poster child” for the me generation. “What a shallow person.” “She was like a person who’s committed a crime and doesn’t want to be discovered.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rose’s life might make a good subject for a soap opera, but she’s actually a character from Ann Patchett’s novel The Patron Saint of Liars....
By David Whiteis I first met Junior in January 1979. I’d just driven to Chicago from New England in a sputtering Datsun loaded with all my worldly possessions, on a pilgrimage to the blues mecca. The city was still digging out from under the great blizzard, but on my first Friday night in town I negotiated my way through the snow-choked streets to Theresa’s Lounge, the world-famous basement juke at the corner of 48th and Indiana....
Call me naive, but unlike many of my colleagues I thought the unexpected runaway success of The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999 was encouraging, not depressing. I saw it as an indication that contemporary teenagers are far from the hardened cynics media “experts” make them out to be and that special effects and a handful of stars aren’t their sole reasons for wanting to see a movie. Its appeal offered a clear challenge to the studios and even forced the film industry to let it play in malls—an astonishing accomplishment for an independent pseudodocumentary that cost only $30,000....
schultz.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was particularly interested in the article because I had been considering conducting some researches of my own, much more informal than yours, into the causes of respiratory failure in certain hospital patients. Two close friends of mine died in recent years as a result of suffering unexplained respiratory failure while they were in the hospital for seemingly unrelated treatments....
Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture Nineteen ninety-eight is the tenth anniversary of rave culture, and though it hasn’t elicited the kind of hoopla that, say, the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s did, it hasn’t gone unremarked either. But while ravers may be every bit as self-interested as baby boomers, rave nostalgia seems like an oxymoron, not least because techno ain’t over yet. Still, the subculture is attempting to sum up its contributions to popular culture so far, with everything from parties dedicated to capturing “that old school vibe,” as a flyer from Chicago put it, to cover stories in British magazines about “acid house ten years on” to compilations like Moonshine’s Classic Rave....
I’m a straight female, overweight, but it’s in all the right places! I haven’t had sex for months. Recently I started seeing someone I met on-line. He’s a very nice guy, pretty good-looking, and has an excellent personality. But he happens to be very overweight. I’m not attracted to heavy men and I have never slept with an overweight man. Never! But I really like this guy, so all signs were pointing in that direction....
Mere Mortals Woody Allen has been doing this for years, transforming his simpleminded takes on existentialism and Ingmar Bergman into hours of moviegoing fun. More recently Steve Martin has staked his claim to this territory, recycling theatrical ideas that were hip before your mother was born and getting credit as a fresh new voice in American theater. But unlike Aristophanes, Swift, Wilde, Shaw, or any of the real heavyweight comic writers in the Western tradition, Allen and Martin would never offend their affluent audience’s sensibilities or challenge its worldview....
Sweet Surrender ” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gregg flew here from Columbus, Ohio, after reading about McDade on the Internet. After five years in the leather community, he wanted to take his S-M experience as a submissive one step further. “I don’t get the impression that this was a shell game, and that’s very refreshing,” said Gregg, who’s 36. “If there wasn’t anything else, then this was going to be the end of the chapter for me....
REZEDENTS RIGHTS & RISPANSABILITIES: THE REST OF THE STORY (3) Professor Salikoko Mufwene, chairman of the linguistics department at the University of Chicago and an expert in English-based creoles, says the brochure phonetically reproduces the sound of Caribbean English and bears some resemblance to Jamaican patois. Jamaicans write notes and such in patois, but it’s considered slang, and no one in Jamaica would write a formal government document that way. The HUD brochure reflects “a demeaning attitude, a condescending attitude,” says Mufwene, a Congo native who studied patois in Jamaica....
