Perusing the Ark’s selection of purses hanging from a Peg-Board, my eye fell upon a shabby black vinyl number with an unusual barrel-shaped buckle. I fussed with the buckle and out of habit poked around inside the handbag. Tucked away in the back pocket was a cheap gold-colored plastic bus-pass holder that opened to reveal a senior-citizen RTA travel card with photo. A handsome woman with curiously plucked eyebrows stared out....
Bailiwick Directors’ Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bailiwick Repertory’s 10th annual showcase of directorial projects features one-acts ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material. This year’s edition, in which three different plays are presented each evening, finds 18 directors chosen from “numerous applicants . . . identified only by their social security numbers, not names, so that the merit of their directing proposal and resume outweighed any personal influences,” a press release proclaims....
Michael Altenberg of Evanston’s Campagnola has a straightforward ingredient-driven approach to fine cooking: seek out the best, mess with it the least, and create a masterpiece. When he and partner Steve Schwartz opened their rustic Italian restaurant in 1996, they launched themselves on a fanatical quest for the best possible ingredients nationwide. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it comes to meat, Altenberg subscribes to the belief that flavor and humane practices go hand in hand....
Chicago Moving Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nana Shineflug, artistic director of the Chicago Moving Company, has always taken two different tacks in her choreography, a lyrical spiritual one and a wild kitschy one–I’ll never forget her roller-skating in a piece in the late 80s. Both facets are evident in her troupe’s upcoming concert even though she’s only one of four choreographers presenting their work....
Several crayons short of a full box. In a recent company press release, condominium developer American Invsco congratulated itself on its “history of supporting a diverse mix of Chicago neighborhoods including the Gold Coast, Michigan Avenue, West Loop, Lakeview.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It is a truism that children need role models, but where is the research that says role modeling is about color?...
EDDIE COTTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eddie Cotton grew up singing gospel and to this day serves as minister of music in his dad’s church in Clinton, Mississippi–and though the 30-year-old guitarist cites Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Milton as primary influences, he shows his roots on his debut CD, Eddie Cotton Live at the Alamo Theatre (Proteus), cooking up a blend of spirituality and carnality that has more in common with southern soul than northern blues....
The revolutionary must heed the mind but also sustain the body. So 25 years ago, after long days spent struggling to make ends meet, a group of black parents in their 20s and early 30s would go jogging through the Grand Crossing neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. The parents staffed a tiny African-centered school called the New Concept Development Center, which was housed in a storefront at 78th and Ellis. Their jogs took them past Saint Francis de Paula School on South Ellis, a two-story red brick building near the corner of 79th Street....
The source of Tyler Creek is in farmland in Rutland Township in Kane County. It flows east and south through new suburban developments and golf courses, an Elgin city park, a Kane County forest preserve, and the grounds of Judson College before joining the Fox River. Aquatic biologists have developed a classification system for the macroinvertebrates of our streams and rivers. (“Macro” here means that the creatures can be seen with the naked eye....
Joe Gould’s Secret Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This charming and evocative period piece about Greenwich Village in the 40s is also a subtle cautionary tale for writers against the danger of losing all your work in talk. The delicate and wryly witty screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, perhaps best known for his work with Steven Soderbergh, tells the true story of shy southern New Yorker editor Joseph Mitchell (Stanley Tucci, who also directed) discovering and profiling the legendary Joe Gould (Ian Holm in a career-defining performance)....
MARY J. BLIGE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With her first two albums singer Mary J. Blige inadvertently helped producer Sean “Puffy” Combs become the hugely influential star he is today. But the two no longer work together, and both have suffered for it. Though he’s still prolific, Combs has gotten lazy, too often looping huge chunks of painfully familiar hits (David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” or the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” to name but two) and contributing little of his own....
PINETOP PERKINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the cover of Born in the Delta, his 1997 release on Telarc, Pinetop Perkins drapes his arms over a toy piano–appropriate, because even though he’s 86, he still plays and improvises with the bright-eyed ebullience of a child. Schooled in the jukes around Helena, Arkansas, in the 40s, Perkins joined Muddy Waters in 1969 and stayed with him until 1980, when he and his bandmates struck out on their own as the Legendary Blues Band....
By Cara Jepsen Stratman, who drives a Ford pickup and teaches film and video at the School of the Art Institute, eventually decided to focus on a group of African-American racers who drive older, eight-cylinder American cars. She first encountered some of them outside her west-side apartment, near the corner of Fulton and Damen. Soon she learned the owner of a body shop next door, Tim Mullins, was a former racer, and she decided to scrap her original idea in favor of making a video documentary....
Techno Recluse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At his most bizarre, Green Velvet is techno’s answer to hip-hop’s Dr. Octagon: anything but real. The beats on the first Green Velvet full-length, Constant Chaos (on the Belgian Music Man label), come in reliably relentless sets of four, but his austere mix of robotic rhythms, analog synth squelches, and occasionally hallucinatory lyrics sounds like nothing else out there....
Mark McMahon’s signature appears on tile murals at O’Hare International Airport, the Tribune Company’s Freedom Center printing plant, and a parking garage at Van Buren and Federal. But the Lake Forest artist also put his name on a lawsuit filed last June in the U.S. District Court, alleging that the city of Chicago contracted him to create a series of ceramic panels for the Riverwalk Gateway mural project but then awarded the commission to another artist....
By Jeff Huebner In the back of the van six large coolers are stocked with blue ice packs and hundreds of plastic containers filled with what Manesky calls his “world food, ethnically diverse, mostly Mediterranean style” sauces and spreads: hot and mild salsa, salsa verde, hummus, red pepper hummus, tomato basil sauce, marinara sauce, and Asian sauce. The 7- and 13-ounce tubs bear an unfancy label (“All natural”), nutrition facts, and an expiration date two weeks after the food was made....
Can we build a few around the edges of Bridgeport? Sam Smith writes in the September 8 “Progressive Review” that “to bring an end to ethnic conflict one need only place a Wal-Mart between the combatants. The reason…is that [Wal-Mart] destroys whatever culture it is near. Thus centuries of cultural enmity can be wiped out as though it were just one more main street dress shop falling victim to Sam Walton’s megalomania....
COMFORTABLY NUMB Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Megaraves have a tendency to crumple under their own weight–a la the disastrous Big Top tour of ’97–but this one looks quite likely to deliver on the promise of its hyperbolically impressive lineup. Organizers and costars Terry Mullan, who’ll DJ, and Woody McBride, who’s slated for a live PA, are veteran promoters who have learned over the years how to keep a party going all night, in both the atmospheric sense and the legal sense....
A small photo hanging in Larry Marshall’s law-school office depicts a longhaired Rolando Cruz and a taller, rangier Rubin “Hurricane” Carter getting ready to rumble, while Marshall stands between them, his arms outstretched. All three are smiling. “That was taken on death row,” Marshall says. The three men have been instrumental in pulling together this weekend’s National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty, being held at Northwestern University’s School of Law: Cruz was the instigator, Marshall the main organizer, and Carter the inspiration....
Dream Boy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vintage southern gothic, Jim Grimsley’s unabashedly homoerotic 1995 novel is both reassuringly familiar and wonderfully dissident. Its North Carolina setting conjures up a world of eternal summers and boyhood larks–but three artful subversions undermine the Tom Sawyer mystique. First, as in Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing, the two young protagonists discover they’re gay only when they fall in love; there’s no choice, just destiny....
Inflation, There’s the Rub Jam Productions’ Steve Traxler, a coproducer of The Irish…and How They Got That Way, believes most off-Loop theatergoers balk at $40 tickets. “We could have charged a lot more for this show,” he says, “but we wanted to hold the price down to emphasize that this is a family show and to attract that audience.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Higher ticket prices may be justified, but are these companies driving away younger audiences?...
