Two years ago at the annual Pilsen East Artists’ Open House, Douglas Grew spent two long afternoons on Halsted Street doing clown routines and passing the hat. Crowds streamed by, strolling in and out of artists’ studios, looking for bargains, walking past him with hardly a glance. “In the lobby of the Blue Rider Theatre some artist had his paintings set up, and he made about $3,000,” says Grew. “I made 25....
Bittersweet Motel The smudged line between documentary and fiction proved irresistible to blase filmmakers in the 90s, generating numerous “mockumentaries” and finally the superior dramatic entertainment of The Blair Witch Project. Meanwhile “reality-based” TV has evolved from home-video melanges to a staged survival drama, with the local dailies fulfilling their own prophecies of the show’s cultural importance by reporting heavily on it as news. In his 1998 cultural critique Life: The Movie, Neal Gabler wondered whether our endless hunger for entertainment was transforming not only our media, our government, and our institutions but also our shared human awareness....
Etta James is for many the epitome of the ballsy, brassy R & B mama. Her best-known hits have been characterized by torrid sexual longing pumped into overdrive by protofeminist assertiveness–and the personal dues she’s paid for her outlaw lifestyle have become legendary. But behind the legend is a versatile and sophisticated stylist who’s dabbled in virtually every genre, from blues and R & B in its various incarnations to hard rock, blues rock, pop, funk, even country-western....
By Michael Miner But Stampfler felt terrible. As the adviser to the Bulldog Express for the past four years she’d built a paper that had won top honors from the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association. She’d taught the young journalism students who produced the paper that news was one thing, good news often another. She’d taught them journalism was about telling the truth. Last week Stampfler, Dan Vagasky, principal Susan Minegar, and the Otsego school district’s director of curriculum tried to draw up Bulldog Express guidelines everyone could live with....
When Mantuila Francois Nyombo was a little boy in what is now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, he took apart his father’s radio. “I wanted to get someone to come out to teach me how to play music,” he says. His father, a dean at a Catholic school and a strict disciplinarian, responded by punishing him, a common occurrence: Instead of studying, Nyombo would listen to classical music on the radio until he fell asleep....
Lead Stories In August, debtors Norman and Melissa Cameron of Hartford, Connecticut, said in court documents that God told them they didn’t have to pay their mortgage. In January in Baltimore, Dean William Trammel, 22, charged with assaulting a flight attendant, said in court that God told him he didn’t have to remain seated during the landing. And in Aurora, Colorado, in June, Priscilla Lee Jansma, 44, arrested for killing her husband, told police, “Jesus told me it was OK to do it....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Late one evening in December, Miami resident Edna Benson heard someone knocking on her door and grabbed her Taurus 85 handgun to see who it was. Her visitor was Mayor Xavier Suarez, who Benson said “looked mad, really, really mad” and was clutching the four-page letter she had written criticizing him for firing the police chief. After she shouted at him, Suarez finally walked away....
In 1954, sculptor Milton Horn created Chicago Rising From the Lake, a three-ton bronze relief that trumpeted the city’s role as the breadbasket and transportation hub of the nation–and the world. For more than a quarter century, the sculpture graced the front of a now-demolished city parking garage on West Wacker. But until its reinstallation at the Columbus Drive Bridge last spring, the work was considered missing–it had languished for 14 years in a southwest-side junkyard....
A shocking and controversial masterpiece, Yasuzo Masumura’s no-bullshit antiwar film tells of an army nurse (Mizoguchi discovery and Masumura regular Ayako Wakao) in the Sino-Japanese war who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. Shot in black-and-white ‘Scope, this 1966 feature can’t be recommended to the squeamish or to viewers bound to the politically correct, but neither its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus can be easily shaken off....
Jenny Holzer: Blue at Rhona Hoffman, through May 29 Holzer told an interviewer that in a group of early works, “Inflammatory Essays,” she was trying to convey “a great sense of urgency about the subjects, which I thought could be done by…using really hot language.” The same might be said of the texts in the six 1998 works–four LED signs and two stone benches–at Rhona Hoffman. Responding in part to atrocities against women in Bosnia, perhaps also to her mother’s recent death, and apparently to violence against women in general, Holzer writes texts certain to provoke strong reactions: “The color of her where she is inside out is enough to make me kill her....
The Third Man With Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Ernst Deutsch, Siegfried Breuer, and Erich Ponto. Korda, the Hungarian-born British producer, played a much more active and creative role on the film than Selznick. He’d also developed many previous film projects for Welles to direct, though none of them ever came to fruition (including Around the World in 80 Days, Cyrano de Bergerac, War and Peace, an American version of Pirandello’s Henry IV, and two original scripts, V....
YO-YO’S Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 70s costume pageant that started in the 90s is still rolling merrily along, and now that we’ve revisited Detroit protopunk (the Go, the Bellrays), power pop (Sloan, Fountains of Wayne), metal boogie (Nashville Pussy), and the Ramones (the entire roster of Lookout Records), the Yo-Yo’s, a pack of grinning blokes from Richmond upon Thames, are bent on reviving tuneful Britpunk....
By Ted Shen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sinise and Perry turned out to be movie fanatics too, and so have most of the actors and directors who’ve joined Steppenwolf over the years. “We’ve always wanted to do cinematic things in our plays,” Kinney says, “bringing the light down to a certain focus, using music to connect scenes. If we had any signature in the theater world, it’d be our cinematic approach....
After the Gold Rush Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fig Dish has managed to outlive some of its faster-rising guitar-pop peers–the more sought after Loud Lucy, for instance, broke up after one poorly received album. Fig Dish’s first LP, That’s What Love Songs Often Do, is actually better than the new When Shove Goes Back to Push (Polydor), its simple but pleasant hooks presented with a charming snottiness and driven into the brain by sheer exuberance....
BLUE NOTE NEW DIRECTIONS BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No factor played a greater role in the success of Blue Note Records in the 50s and 60s than the stable of musicians the label assembled. Most of the players participated in many of one another’s projects, with respected leaders acting as valued sidemen; and the hundreds of albums that resulted helped imprint the “Blue Note sound” on the listener’s consciousness....
Richard Dindo’s riveting 1987 documentary examines three cases of young working-class men whose deaths were caused by overzealous cops in Zurich. The filmmaker methodically pieces together eyewitness accounts of the victims’ final hours and the memories and reactions of family, revealing a Switzerland that’s obsessed with law and order and willfully negligent of its troubled adolescents. The narration is dispassionate, calling to mind the clinical tone of PBS’s Frontline, and while Dindo clearly shares the families’ anger and sorrow, he avoids both sentiment and sensationalism, investing even the most ordinary images and testimony with a dignity and poetry that underscore the tragedy of lives cut short....
F/M RECEPTION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Keyboardist and electronicist Bob Falesch and cellist Bob Marsh met at HotHouse in 1994 and played their first concert together at Lunar Cabaret in ’96. About two years ago they started a joint project called F/M Reception, and its mischievous, unclassifiable soundscapes have grown more and more fascinating. They often sketch the structures of their improvisations ahead of time, and Falesch, who’s an electronics engineer by day, applies systematic constraints to the output of his keyboard with synthesizer software he calls the “metaPiano....
By Ben Joravsky To Dorizas, Rogers Park symbolizes opportunity. Born on Cephalonia, a Greek island, he sailed to Virginia in 1959 on a merchant marine ship. “I figured this is America, land of opportunity–I want to stay,” says Dorizas. “I didn’t want a life at sea–it was too hard. I decided to make a new life. I was 17 years old, spoke little English, and had $55 in my pocket. I had an uncle in Chicago....
Elizabeth D’Agostino: Journals From the Silk Current By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The backdrop for From the Scarlet Curio Series is a large piece of silk dyed red and gold with roses stamped or drawn on it in black, stretching from the floor almost to the ceiling. Before it on the left hangs a line of curious objects, odd dark red bell shapes D’Agostino made by dipping Styrofoam pyramids in wax; around their bottoms are roses in relief....
FLAMING LIPS BOOM-BOX EXPERIMENT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last time they played Chicago the Flaming Lips seemed downright bored with themselves, bypassing material from their melancholy Clouds Taste Metallic to walk through older tunes. A few months later guitar wizard Ronald Jones quit, leaving the band a trio. But instead of retreating to their punk roots, the Lips surged foward, creating their own do-it-yourself electronic orchestra....
