Channel surfers may have thought they’d discovered a new paid programming station earlier this month. Not so–that was Channel 11’s latest fund-raising drive, featuring New Age health guru Gary Null and lightweight financial guru Suze Orman. Their modestly titled infomercials–Null’s How to Live Forever and Orman’s The Courage to Be Rich, both designed to sell their books and tapes as pledge premiums–played almost nonstop while the authors joined fawning PBS hosts during breaks....
By Ben Joravsky But that doesn’t seem likely. Coston’s been backed by Illinois senators Carol Moseley-Braun and Richard Durbin, by Mayor Daley and Chicago’s congressional delegation, and even by the major railroad workers’ union. A lot of the world can’t quite understand why a 42-year-old lawyer with a lucrative practice has spent so much time aggressively pursuing a position that seems so marginal, but they don’t see the world as Coston does....
A city job. I twitched, remembering my mother’s nagging. “Get a job, any job, but go out and find some work!” I saw her dark face with its almond-shaped eyes and prominent nose, saw the papers. “Come on, sign these!” It’s not like we didn’t suffer for that money. Besides the occasional nasty remark it was winter, and it got really cold for guys who couldn’t do something to warm up....
OTIS CLAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Otis Clay’s most recent CD, This Time Around (Bullseye Blues & Soul), reunites him with Memphis-based producer Willie Mitchell, the mastermind behind Clay’s Hi Records glory years, 1968 to 1974. But the opening bars of the first cut, “You’re the One I Choose,” make clear this is no exercise in nostalgia: swirling strings, horns so choppy and precise they almost sound synthesized, and a serpentine pop-funk melody line all proclaim it a decidedly contemporary soul-blues outing....
Dan Sinker chuckles as we pass the gold plastic nameplate on the door of his antiseptic new Ravenswood office. Until last month Sinker ran Punk Planet–the fat, clean-looking bimonthly zine some punknoscenti are calling the successor to Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll–out of his apartment. Now the chintzy nameplate is all that distinguishes his work space from those of the photocopier repairperson, diet food company, and kitchen designer down the hall. The move is part of Sinker’s plan to make the five-year-old publication live up to its name, to broaden its readership and perhaps even draw an income from it....
Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Me, I know why I’m still a virgin: a 257-pound man is not exactly that attractive to the opposite sex! But I know why I’m unattractive, and I’m doing something about it: getting my load lightened and my head screwed on tighter. Don’t be passive, waiting for the girl to come to you. Ask women out even if you’re dead sure they’ll turn you down, get involved in hobbies and activities, or even take out a personal ad, for Pete’s sake!...
Seam’s Korea Move Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’ve all pretty much wanted to play over there, but we hadn’t been very aggressive about it and it wasn’t until we had some kind of personal connection that it would even seem possible,” says Park. An American friend who works for MTV Korea laid the groundwork, spreading the buzz and making it known that the band would come if asked....
HOT WATER MUSIC 11/17, EMPTY BOTTLE This hard-touring Gainesville quartet, which will release its sixth LP, Never Ender (No Idea), this week, has mastered the science of post-hardcore punk rock. They’ve nailed down the exact ratios of punk truism to metal suggestion, of tight tunefulness to ragged edges, of I-don’t-care to I-care-too-much, of chops to slop–at this level it’s not formula, it’s craftmanship. BLONDE REDHEAD 11/18, FIRESIDE BOWL; 11/19, DOUBLE DOOR The New York trio Blonde Redhead takes yet another step away from their third-generation no-wave “roots” on the new Melodie Citronique (Touch and Go)....
CAFE R&B 1/9, BUDDY GUY’S LEGENDS My hackles stood up immediately at the idea of this careful, James Cameron-esque evocation of postwar electric blues and early R & B (from, where else, LA), but if we must tolerate retro, I’ll take it this way. In the blues, it’s not what you say so much as how you say it, and on Black & White (It Works), front woman Roach says it very well....
The Vagina Monologues at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Vagina Monologues is an Obie-winning work, based on Ensler’s interviews with women, at the center of a new movement. Valentine’s Day 1999 was the second annual “V-Day,” part of an international campaign encouraging the use of theater to raise awareness of violence against women. Ensler herself staged the first benefit in New York in 1998 with an all-star cast that included Glenn Close, Lily Tomlin, Calista Flockhart, and Whoopi Goldberg....
Coffee With David Hauptschein and Joseph Fosco By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hauptschein is perhaps best known for his “found text” performances, in which he invites people to read letters or diary entries onstage. Earlier this year he teamed up with WBEZ’s Ira Glass to broadcast stories pulled from the Web. Now he’s teamed up with composer and performance artist Joseph Fosco to put onstage what they call a “nonvirtual chat room....
Statuary historian Julia Bachrach of the Park District’s planning department says records indicate that the capital of the column was made of marble quarried in ancient Sparta. The shaft is composed of a rock compound known as breccia. The column is believed to have been brought to Rome during the reign of Hadrian (117-138 AD), who fancied Corinthian architecture and probably used it in a temple. Later the column became part of a fortress erected at Ostia, the port serving Rome, to help provide safe passage to navigators steering ships bearing the plunder of empire....
Chicago Improv Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In addition to performances, an “improv education extravaganza” April 9 through 11 features workshops and a bus tour of significant sites in the history of Chicago improv (“from Mike Nichols to Mike Myers,” says a brochure). Workshop leaders and speakers include director-teachers Sheldon Patinkin, Josephine Raciti Forsberg, Charna Halpern, Susan Messing, Mick Napier, Shira Piven, Martin de Maat, Mark Gagne, and Michael Gellman, Second City producer Kelly Leonard, screenwriter Denise De Clue, and the Upright Citizens Brigade....
By Joy Bergmann Before January 28 the 11 AM narcotics bond call at 26th and California began with people who’d recently been arrested for drug possession and delivery lining up along a corridor outside the large, stately room 101, where Judge Ford would emerge from his chambers ready for the daily onslaught of around 80 men and 20 women. On the first day of the new system, disoriented family members, grumbling and confused, wander into room 111, which is around the corner from room 101....
Roger McGuinn By J.R. Jones Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The phonograph thrust folk music into the 20th century by adding performance to what had previously been a purely literary record. When folklorist John Lomax was compiling the celebrated print anthology Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), he dragged a 1906 Ediphone around with him, recording his discoveries on crude wax cylinders. By 1933, when Lomax and his son Alan discovered and recorded Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison, he had traded up to a 315-pound portable recorder that cut discs from the trunk of his Ford sedan....
FRED VAN HOVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The list of records Belgian pianist Fred van Hove has cut as a leader is relatively short (and the list of those that have been issued in the U.S. is even shorter)–which makes his imposing presence on the European free-jazz scene over the last three decades all the more remarkable. Best known as a frequent collaborator of German saxophonist Peter Brštzmann–on screech classics like Machine Gun and Balls–he’s able to summon great reserves of stormy violence, as in his thunderous, bass-heavy clusters....
Young Playwrights Festival When I was a reader for the Philadelphia young playwrights’ festival, I often blamed the plays’ sameness on the influence of television or on controlling teachers who wanted to use playwriting classes as consciousness-raising sessions, encouraging movie-of-the-week scenarios about teen pregnancy, drugs, and gang violence. The playwrights’ joy in the process didn’t make up for my disappointment in the plays’ comforting moralism. The teen playwrights employed cultural stereotypes with depressing regularity–everything seemed to be about cycles, cycles of gang violence, cycles of abuse....
The Overcoat The overcoat–worn so thin it resembles cheesecloth–is hardly sufficient for the bone-numbing winters of Saint Petersburg. The laughingstock of the city, it’s the bane of Akaky Akakievich’s existence, a constant reminder of his position as a low-ranking bureaucratic functionary unable to perform any but the simplest of office tasks. It’s no wonder that when he’s able to scrape together the rubles for a lavish new coat, his entire life changes....
Walk around Utrecht past the charming shops, the old-world bookstores, the throngs of cheerful, attractive bikers, and immaculate, slim streets and narrow canals with nary a gum wrapper befouling them, and you can’t help thinking that the Dutch really have it together. Holland is nearly perfect. It has the most productive economy per capita in the world, the shortest workweek (32 hours, by law!), and the most elaborate social safety net of any country on earth....
By Michael Miner I’ve quarreled with Byrne over things he’s said and how he’s said them, but I’ve never doubted that he writes what he believes. Though he retired last year from the Sun-Times editorial board, he still freelances a couple of columns a week for the paper–and I’m sure he expects his readers to take them seriously. “I’m a commentator,” he tells me, “not a reporter.” But a commentator is a journalist who asks you to trust his convictions as well as his facts....
