By Neal Pollack “Everybody knows Stosh,” says Pete Rodriguez, who’s been stopping by the store for nearly 40 years. “You gotta know Stosh.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stosh is a tiny man with big eyes, pants hiked up high, and a full head of hair that’s not entirely his own. In warm months, he sits on his stoop in a rusty brown colored chair, mumbling about the White Sox and waiting for the kids to stop by....
Boys Don’t Cry With Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard, Brendan Sexton III, Alison Folland, Alicia Goranson, and Jeannetta Arnette. With Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Jennifer Edwards-Hughes, James Cada, and Harry Dean Stanton. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The propagandizing is obvious in the Teena Brandon movie, Boys Don’t Cry, where practically everything we see and hear conspires to feed our outrage at the sexual intolerance of other characters in the story....
Chicago’s off-Loop theater is so focused on young and emerging talent that it’s easy to forget how barren the landscape was three decades ago, when Ruth Higgins moved to town. In 1969 she and her husband, Byron Schaffer Jr., founded Dinglefest Theatre Company, one of the off-Loop scene’s early success stories. Five years later Higgins started the Chicago Alliance for the Performing Arts, one of the first trade associations to serve the music, dance, and theater industries (not to be confused with the Chicago Association for the Performing Arts, which books the Chicago Theatre)....
Friday 6 October Robert J. Siegel directed this sweet, low-key movie set in Myrtle Beach about a shy but perceptive teenager named Frankie (Lauren Ambrose) who, along with her older brother, manages the family restaurant during the summer tourist season. She and her flirtatious best friend (Jennifer Dundas Lowe) spend their evenings guy watching and prowling for dates, but their relationship is threatened by the arrival of a seductive waitress, who instigates Frankie’s sexual awakening....
urdangen.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am fond of Rolando, and he’s made impressive progress given his decade of sensory deprivation on death row. He has been an articulate spokesperson for those who have experienced profound suffering at the hands of morally corrupt prosecutors and means-justify-the-ends judges. That said, I must register my strong disagreement with his comments about Scott Turow. It was I who approached Turow to take on the appellate representation of Hernandez....
Empty Bottle and Lunar Cabaret: An Open and Shut Case Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, despite a long tradition of pioneering jazz in the city, it’s never been a piece of cake drumming up local support for the music. Hard work and persistence on the part of a few individuals has built the audience that’s made multiple venues sustainable and such an ambitious project as the Empty Bottle festival possible....
One can safely assert without hyperbole that Jean Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece about French and German officers during World War I is better than anything being presented by the Chicago International Film Festival. You might think you’ve already seen it, but a good print hasn’t been available since the 30s, so you might be in for a revelation; I know I was. (Unfortunately the subtitles, unlike the French dialogue, don’t explain the film’s title; a better translation might be “the great illusion”–the deluded belief that this war would soon end and be the last one....
In response to the city’s request for proposals to redesign Cabrini-Green, Landon Architects drew up a plan. But it never really thought it had a chance to win part of a $50 million grant to develop 9.3 acres of the north-side property. Still, for months the firm met regularly with officials, made presentations, and participated in weekly town meetings. Landon Architects advocated working with residents to give them a sense of ownership and a voice in their future....
KURT ELLING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his first album Chicago-based vocalist Kurt Elling intrigued audiences, and on his second he challenged them. On his newly released This Time It’s Love (Blue Note), he tries to massage them–and woo a few new listeners as well–with an album of love songs. But Elling’s artistic restlessness and natural iconoclasm wouldn’t let this be a typical “ballads” album....
The Trouble With Peggy: Sometimes ambition does itself in. Peggy Guggenheim, perhaps America’s most influential champion of modern art, had enough ambition to do herself in several times over. Whether she did or not is open to debate. In amassing one of the most significant art collections of the 20th century, did she achieve greatness or merely surround herself with it, leaving her own potential undeveloped? In launching the careers of Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, was she setting renegade aesthetic standards or simply buying up what others knew to be great?...
SCOTT HAMILTON & BUCKY PIZZARELLI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton hit the scene in the mid-70s, he raised eyebrows all around the jazz world: It was fusion’s heyday, but while his contemporaries plugged in and embraced elements of rock, Hamilton chose Coleman Hawkins as a model. He played swing standards with a hot bounce and a plush, velvety tone, and he even looked anachronistic–he wore a slicked-back do instead of shoulder-length hair, and boxy suits instead of bell-bottoms and body shirts....
Last week’s New Republic remembered a horrendous event–the 1858 seizure by papal police in Bologna, Italy, of a six-year-old Jewish boy whose nanny had sprinkled him with water behind his parents’ back. The church, which had encouraged the “baptism,” refused to return the boy, and he grew up to become a monk. McClory is a former priest who teaches journalism at Medill and until recently was a Reader staff writer. What drew him to his recondite subject was the Vatican’s 1995 announcement that the ban on the ordination of women must be considered an infallible teaching....
“When I was 13, my mother made me take an acting class over the summer,” says Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s new resident director Anna Shapiro, making it sound like her mother forced her to eat soap. “I think I was irresponsible in some way during the academic year, so I had to make up for it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the time Shapiro wanted nothing to do with the theater....
The 16th annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival runs Friday through Sunday, March 21 through 23. It highlights shorts as well as features by women, including documentary, animated, narrative, and experimental works. Screenings are at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl.; Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division; and the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $7, $5 for Women in the Director’s Chair members, students, and senior citizens with a valid ID; festival passes are also available....
Louise Nevelson: Sculpture But a very different Nevelson emerges at Richard Gray Gallery, which has long represented her (she died in 1988). Presenting her sculpture as she preferred to display it, surrounded by darkness and lit with dim bluish spots simulating moonlight, reveals how inappropriate the bright, clinical lighting of museums is to her work. Of the 22 late sculptures at Gray, 2 are painted white and 5 include found objects left in their natural state, but 15 are completely black, and these play off each other in the dim, moody twilight, filling the space with their presence while seeming to lose their physicality: Nevelson’s painted black surfaces vibrate between materiality and invisibility....
Chicago Latino Film Festival Three short stories by Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues inspired this 1998 anthology film about sexual infidelity, directed by Arthur Fontes, Claudio Torres, and Jose Henrique Fonseca. (Water Tower, 6:00) Things I Forgot to Remember Sonia (Johana Martinez), a young Honduran woman working as a maid in Los Angeles, is disturbed by dreams of her dead mother beckoning her to return home. Her life as a single mother in the U....
Attention shoppers: apocalypse in aisle 14. An information-systems executive concerned about computers that will have problems with the switch to the year 2000 told this story to the Food Marketing Institute’s annual gathering at McCormick Place on May 4: “An executive from one major chain…set the clocks in a store ahead to the year 2000 to see what would happen. The horrifying news was that within 45 seconds the store was paralyzed, and that wasn’t because of the scanners....
DAMNEE MANON SACREE SANDRA, Bailiwick Repertory. Michel Tremblay’s 1977 drama is the kind of play Bailiwick’s Pride series should present more often. Unlike the formulaic relationship dramas and nudie domestic comedies that give the festival a breezy irrelevance, Tremblay’s demanding meditation on the inseparability of purity and corruption plunges an audience headfirst into one of the 20th century’s defining moral dilemmas. Tremblay pits the tortuously devout Manon, who struggles to transform herself into pure spirit with the help of a watermelon-sized rosary, against the wearily hedonistic Sandra, a chain-smoking transvestite who finds religious fervor in a life of pure carnality....
FREDDY COLE QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forget chromosome mapping; if you want to prove the power of genetics, just dial up the vocal work of Freddy Cole. Without even trying, he conjures up his legendary big brother, Nat “King” Cole, whenever he opens his mouth. Oh, he might have developed the naturalistic phrasing, the breathy plunge at the end of a lyric line, and even the precise emphasis of his diction by studying Nat’s old records....
KAPOOT, Lid Productions, at Strawdog Theatre Company. They’re made up in whiteface, but these are not your usual Marcel Marceau wannabes. Flog and Plotz–the clowns comprising the cast of Kapoot–are grotesque creatures with death’s-head visages (allegedly based on the masked demons of Hopi and Zuni mythology) dressed in striped suits like prison uniforms and headgear sporting protean antennae. Human nature being universal, however, their chief activity is taking advantage of each other: communicating in wordless monosyllables, they squabble over food and compete for the attentions of a pretty girl (conscripted from the audience) but unite in humble obeisance to a likewise inarticulate God....
