By Ben Joravsky As successful as she’s been, Rubin’s not sure there’s still a place in today’s market for a woman like her, who spent most of her 20s and 30s raising her four children. She got her start in the 1970s, when she took a part-time job at a bookstore in Glencoe. By 1982 she owned her own store. “I’m not saying it was easy. It’s always been a fragile existence with stores going in and out of business, but the market was fairer when I started,” she says....
“Poor people in Milwaukee have responded to the loss of steady employment by starting thousands of new, mainly ‘off-the-books’ businesses,” according to a new report by John Hagedorn, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Among those businesses are car repair, house painting, child care, haircutting, street vending, and–the most profitable–selling drugs. “What I found was a very deep adherence to mainstream values of success and in wanting to get ahead by whatever means they could do it....
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai By Jonathan Rosenbaum Some viewers have been irritated by all these quotations, and there’s no question that each of them stops the story dead in its tracks–paradoxically, at the same time it offers interpretive commentary on what’s going on. The quotes remind me of a rather obscure fantasy tale of the 40s by Lewis Padgett (the most frequent pen name of Henry Kuttner), “Compliments of the Author,” which is about a magical 50-page book that offers all-purpose instructions to the owner on each page about how to resolve various dilemmas–“Werewolves can’t climb oak trees,” “He’s bluffing,” “Try the windshield,” “Deny everything,” “Aim at his eye”; the relevant page number appears magically on the cover each time it’s needed, a total of ten times per owner....
King Lear Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nine years ago, when the folks at Shakespeare on the Green began performing the Bard’s plays on the artfully landscaped front lawn of Barat College, there was only one other company in the Chicago area performing Shakespeare outdoors, the Festival Theater of Oak Park, now 26 years old. But today, thanks to Hollywood, Shakespeare is very much in vogue and there are no fewer than four companies doing the Bard outside....
Jerry Maguire Rating * Has redeeming facet Directed and written by Cameron Crowe With Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., Renee Zellweger, and Jonathan Lipnicki. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Writer-director Crowe (Say Anything and Singles) is a former music critic, so it should come as no surprise that there’s a lot of music in Jerry Maguire. Yet Crowe’s use of music is surprisingly uncritical....
Mesopotamia on His Mind An inquiry at the banquet hall next door is answered by the manager. “Those statues are called lamassu,” he says. “They’re a symbol of the Assyrian people–like the bald eagle is the symbol of America.” He says the building is the Mesopotamia Museum. How does he know this? “I am Assyrian,” he says, “and I know the man who started the museum.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
By Cara Jepsen Jim Sorenson bought the Atkinson Market in 1975. He sold it and retired 20 years later, but he can still be found at the counter of the Branding Iron Cafe, a bustling restaurant in the same building as the market. Most mornings it’s hopping with locals who come for coffee and social hour; even the mayor of Atkinson (population 1,000) is in attendance. Most of the customers are over 40, and everyone seems to know everyone else....
By Mario Kladis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the front of the line is a Ford Escort, crowded with a man and four boys. Eyes wide, mouths hanging open, they’re listening to the Bears on the radio. Shane Matthews throws a touchdown. “Hell yeah!” shouts the man, as he high-fives the kids. Their cheers are smothered by the rumbling growl of a souped-up V-8 engine–a red Mustang has swerved around the end of the line....
By Ben Joravsky By the end of the month she and others were spreading the news that ducks were dying and the Park District was at least partly to blame. “They could have done more to save the ducks,” says Lassila. “They should have done more. If the media hadn’t done stories I don’t know if they would have done anything.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the planning, it seems that each phase of the project is greeted with as many jeers as cheers....
On the busiest shopping day of the year, Arnold Klein is driving to his temp job at the Brickyard Mall. Klein quit school at 16 to work in a defense plant. “I was an inspector testing things for the B-52 bombers. I can’t say what.” He moved on to a job at the old Schwinn bicycle factory in Humboldt Park, where he remembers “riding the saddles down the conveyor belt.” In 1964 he became a painter and joined a trade union....
With his second feature, a follow-up to 1993’s caustic What Happened Was…, Tom Noonan offers a brutally frank, bittersweet take on marriage. The setup is straightforward: on a snowbound evening in their renovated farmhouse in upstate New York, Jack and Rita, a New Age husband-and-wife therapist team, are surprised by a visit from a patient, Cosmo, and his wife, Arlie. Ignoring Rita’s hints, Jack invites the couple to stay for dinner....
By Elana Seifert Schuessler’s knit scraps and plastic yarn cones now fill containers alongside stacks of slightly damaged paper, used books, odd-lot items, and bins of various manufacturing remnants. Some items are priced–vinyl runners are 25 cents a yard, a ream of paper is $3, cabinet doors run from $1 to $3 apiece. Everything that’s not marked–various rubber, ceramic, and metal items–is $3 per bagful. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
“I’m not the only gay man in the General Assembly,” state representative Larry McKeon tells Illinois Times (May 6-12). “I’m the only one to tell the truth about it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those philosophers are more competitive than you thought. According to The Philosophical Gourmet Report, the University of Chicago has the country’s top department if you want to study continental philosophy, Hegel and German idealism, or Foucault....
Out of Sight With George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks, Steve Zahn, and Catherine Keener. By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I saw these movies on successive days and couldn’t give you a coherent synopsis of either one to save my life–not only because both pictures leap about in time with willful abandon, but also because they have much more to say in terms of style than in terms of plot....
Halloween: H20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The seventh Halloween film is being described as the last, and that may actually turn out to be the case because there’s an earnest and successful attempt to give the series a satisfying closure. Jamie Lee Curtis–who made her reputation on the first Halloween but hasn’t been part of the series since the second–is now, 20 years later, teaching at an exclusive private school in northern California, raising a son as a single mother, and once again trying to fend off her murderously insane brother, who won’t stay dead....
CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER The South Loop club (31 E. Balbo; 312-362-9707) lives up to its name with a week’s worth of bookings practically guaranteed to light fires. Thursday, September 2, at approximately 9:30 HotHouse starts the first of its “Jazz Fest Aftersets” with tenor saxist Vandy Harris, a grizzled AACM veteran and unreconstructed avant-garde soloist who’ll celebrate the release of a CD, The Lighthouse Keeper, with a Chicago all-star quintet featuring pianist Jodie Christian and trumpeter Robert Griffin....
PADDY CASEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Case, who headlines this particularly strong singer-songwriter bill, has been banging out rock ‘n’ roll since Gerald Ford was president. Chuck Prophet, who’s warming up for Case, has released eleven albums, including five with Green on Red in the 80s. But don’t be surprised if the first act, 24-year-old Paddy Casey, gives them both a run for their money....
Between 1957 and 1965 over 150 sword-and-sandal movies were unleashed on the American public. But when MGM archivist and gladiator-film buff John Kirk started researching the popular genre, he found very few mentions of Hercules and Goliath movies in film-history texts. “It’s as if they were nonexistent or too embarrassing to bring up, which is strange to consider, since they were quite popular and made quite a bit of money for the film industry,” he says....
Chicagoans continue to gobble up all the fish they can find, but somehow specialized seafood houses have a tough time surviving. Though seafood scarfing has increased exponentially since the early 80s, and the mainstays–the Cape Cod Room, Shaw’s Crab House, and Nick’s Fishmarket–have all enjoyed long life spans, many other fine fish houses have sunk without a trace. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » None of this fazed intrepid restaurateur Roger Greenfield, who opened the Bluepoint Oyster Bar in the Randolph Market area a little more than a year ago....
Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This obviously is not normal. Am I doomed to be a dirty baby-fucking pedophile? Do you think I should get a shrink to examine me and my very tiny pocketbook in minute detail? I’m scared that a shrink will say I’m a risk to my kids–when I have them–and take them away as soon as they’re born....
