PAT MARTINO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Pat Martino has pulled off two pretty good tricks in the last couple decades. First, he cheated death: in 1980, in his mid-30s and at the height of his career, he survived a brain aneurysm and the subsequent surgery. Then, having lost most of his memory and motor skills on the operating table, he taught himself to play again, using his own records from the 60s and 70s as a guide....
The dog had been housebroken. Then Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski decided to operate. They took out its pancreas–a tricky business in 1889 in the then-German city of Strassburg–so that they could better study how the body reabsorbs fats. The operation succeeded; the dog recovered. Then it started peeing on the floor. Take polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs, until recently used to insulate and fireproof electrical equipment. They can interfere with thyroid hormones, which stimulate brain development in the growing fetus....
Around 1992, six years after he’d left his native Istanbul for Chicago, Metin Kurtulus was working as a waiter at the Italian Village, and customers were always asking him where he was from. “They would ask where to have good Turkish food,” he recalls with a smile. “But I was embarrassed. What some Middle Eastern restaurants called Turkish dishes were not real–they’re cheaply put together to make a quick buck. Those were not the dishes originated in sultan’s palaces or like the humbler ones my mother used to cook....
The Young Man From Atlanta By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Foote’s is the more old-fashioned of the two pieces. A 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner headed for Broadway, The Young Man From Atlanta is as well made as its impressively realistic setting at the Goodman–designer Tom Lynch’s sprawling living room, complete with stone-walled hearth–and as carefully arranged as the two strands of pearls with which costumer David C....
Hey, Faggot: “If she wants to do a sexy femme top scene with no pain, I would suggest sensory deprivation combined with a lot of suspense and mindfucks.” Now, without S/M jargon: “Get dressed in sexy lingerie or something fetishy. Tie him up, blindfold him, and gag him.” Get real leather restraints if you can afford them. Handcuffs hurt, and badly done rope bondage can lead to burns, pinched nerves, and amputated limbs....
JERRY JOSEPH 5/2, UNCOMMON GROUND; 5/3, HOUSE OF BLUES; 5/4, EXEDUS II What this west-coast singer-songwriter is doing playing Exedus II’s Reggae Spring Fling I can’t imagine. But while he hasn’t got a lick of Jamaican riddim, his new solo demo does display the right ratio of irony to passion, a soulfully husky voice, and a good sense of dynamics. The coffeehouse gig is probably the best place to appreciate him; the Fabulous Thunderbirds headline on Saturday....
STANLEY TURRENTINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now nearly 65, and having spent two-thirds of his life in the public ear, the tough-talkin’ tenor man Stanley Turrentine just keeps steaming along. Grounded in the hard bop of the 1950s, Turrentine quickly learned to apply the harmonic sophistication of that idiom to the simple, catchy yearnings of Motown and its various pop aftershocks; you won’t find a better example of this than his temperature-raising croon on the Buddy Johnson hit “Since I Fell for You....
By Ben Joravsky Welcome to education in Chicago, where on the eve of the 21st century few of the city’s 580 schools have air-conditioned classrooms. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “One can argue for or against year-round schooling, but you shouldn’t implement it without air-conditioning–at least not in our climate,” says Dion Miller Perez, a community organizer for the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, a not-for-profit government-spending watchdog....
The View From the Chair Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is in response to the Neighborhood News story “Lake of Ire” [August 13] and the two subsequent letters that followed [August 20]. As a former lifeguard for the Chicago Park District, I have dealt with the frustrations of beach patrons firsthand. I hope this letter provides a simplified answer to their concerns. Sometimes I can empathize with them and other times I feel the need to fill them in on reality....
Pleasantville Rating ** Worth seeing “The movie is sincere about inexplicable mush.” –Manny Farber on Samuel Fuller’s China Gate Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A calendar reads April 1958, but in fact the clothes and decor are from five or six years earlier–around the same time, in fact, that Ozzie & Harriet was launched on television after almost a decade on radio. And as the new Bud and Mary Sue head off for school, the Pleasantville they encounter is less the 50s than the sitcom version of it–“Nerdville,” as Jennifer/Mary Sue calls it–made surreal by their 90s perspective....
It Happened Here With Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, Honor Fehrson, Rex Collett, Nicholas Moore, and Colin Jordan With Miles Halliwell, Alison Halliwell, David Bramley, Dawson France, Phil Dunn, and Terry Higgins. This was certainly my reaction when I first saw Winstanley in London a year after it was completed. At that point it still didn’t have an English distributor and had turned up for only a limited run shortly after the release of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon....
By Jonathan Rosenbaum One woman who recently rang my office wanted to know if the fact that a film was reviewed in the Reader meant that it was available on video. Not surprisingly, she came across Reader reviews on the Internet: I suspect that it’s only within the vast playpen of cyberspace that such confusion could take root. In this zone, history, causality, and agency are often only dimly defined: this same woman was under the impression that I was Dave Kehr, my predecessor at the Reader who departed a dozen years ago....
ALBITA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When salsa singer Albita Rodriguez defected to the U.S. from Havana in 1993, much of the attention lavished on her in Miami was prompted by her unconventional appearance: she sported tailored, double-breasted suits and short, slicked-back hair. Popular Latina artists such as Celia Cruz and Celina Gonzalez have never fucked with gender, not even as moderately as Albita....
Big Apple Circus Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Founded 20 years ago by a pair of former street jugglers, the Big Apple Circus combines the artiness of Cirque du Soleil with the good old Barnum & Bailey-ness of more traditional American circuses yet never stumbles into Cirque du Soleil’s Eurotrashiness or Ringling Brothers’ elephantine love of bigness for its own sake (three rings of chaos for your entertainment pleasure!...
Have a Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box At the time my mother’s reaction puzzled me. I assumed “Have a nice day” was just a long-standing substitute for “Good morning.” And not until last month, when Rhino released the elaborate seven-CD set Have a Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box, did I learn how it actually seeped into the vernacular. In the late 1960s University Federal Savings of Seattle launched a PR campaign using the slogan “Have a happy day” and the yellow smiley face that most recently came out of retirement to shill for that great bulldozer of small-town America, Wal-Mart....
FRIDAY, JUNE 7:10 PM Rance Allen Group Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Persistence paid off for the Canton Spirituals, who’d been singing around their native Mississippi for nearly 50 years when, in 1994, the famous Williams Brothers, who run the Blackberry label out of Jackson, took up their elders’ cause, producing and releasing their first nationally distributed album, Live in Memphis. The record, which mixed old-time harmony with updated rhythms, was a hit, and with their current smash, Living the Dream: Live in Washington, D....
By Ted A. Donner Richard Thomas: I don’t know, right now just the touring companies, and I’m running some workshops. I have sort of an idea for a new improvisational form. Close: I’m going to try and quit smoking, believe it or not. I’m never going to give up marijuana. I just love it. It makes me a better person, it’s good for me. But these things are–I’m getting particularly old now....
GOD’S MAN IN TEXAS, Northlight Theatre, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. Televangelist Phillip Gottschall oversees a multimillion-dollar ministry with its own bowling alley, multiplex cinema, and dinner theater, yet David Rambo’s play is not about hucksters. In fact, what’s most intriguing and gratifying about this comedy-drama is that it treats its characters–including the spry 81-year-old Gottschall; his potential successor, the earnest Reverend Jeremiah Mears; and the born-again sound technician and gofer Hugo Taney–with refreshing seriousness and respect....
Tom of Finland By Mark Swartz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom–who was born Touko Laaksonen in 1920, on the south coast of Finland–had a fantasy life both single-minded and boundless. And after nearly 40 years of making homoerotic drawings for magazines, his talent for indulging in these fantasies began to win him recognition beyond the readership of those publications. The first successful public exhibit of his drawings was held in 1978, and from that time until his death in 1991 he enjoyed considerable fame, mostly within the gay community....
It seemed like destiny when the phone rang at Jimy Rogers’s Lake County home last March and a voice on the other end asked if Rogers could put the Mauds together for a gig in July. The Mauds were Rogers’s hot 1960s R & B group; the gig was the Cellar Blast reunion, a nostalgia party for the Arlington Heights teen club where they’d been a house band. “I thought, ‘If I have to bring a guitar and stand there by myself, I’ll do it,’” Rogers says....
