An article in the February 18 Wall Street Journal says, “The average mattress will double its weight in ten years as a result of being filled with dust mites and their detritus.” This sounds impossible. Is it true? Who figured this out, and how? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I contacted the Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the article in question (“Those Costly Weapons Against Dust Mites May Not Be Worth It”)....
VIENNa WALTZ ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a trip to Czechoslovakia in 1991 Greg Sarchet made an unexpected discovery: much of the live music in cafes, taverns, and restaurants was performed by a combo of two violins and a double bass. As a bassist, he’s always on the lookout for pieces that spotlight his instrument, and on subsequent visits to archives in Europe he found lots of sheet music for such trios....
Vietnam: Long Time Coming Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Essential viewing. This documentary about a group of American and Vietnamese war veterans, many of them disabled, bicycling 1,200 miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City is many things at once–act of witness, account of a multicultural exchange, sports story, journalistic investigation, and mourning for the devastation of war. Ultimately it may be too many things to yield a cumulative effect, yet its scenes of former soldiers struggling with the meaning of the war are the most moving ones on the subject since Winter Soldier (a wartime agitprop film in which Vietnam veterans confessed their “war crimes”)....
ARTHUR BLYTHE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fat, blowsy sound of alto saxist Arthur Blythe collars listeners like an outsize uncle’s bear hug. And though he varies its timbre, from sweet barbecue to dark menace, it informs everything he does, from his fast, wide vibrato–which lets him swing hard even when camped on a single note–to rococo turns of phrase that burst from petit point into CinemaScope....
Dana & Karen Kletter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few years ago Granta subtitled its controversial “The Family” issue “They fuck you up”; if Dear Enemy (Hannibal), the first album by identical twins Dana and Karen Kletter, had been out then, the magazine could’ve included it as a subscriber’s bonus. The 12 songs address a broad array of issues with stories and memories–some sad, some angry, some nostalgic, all of them poignant....
By Ted Kleine As he continued down the line, Valadez praised Richard Martinez, a former aide to retiring alderman John Buchanan; Kenneth Ladien, a Chicago public-school teacher; Neil Bosanko, the executive director of the South Chicago Chamber of Commerce; Yolanda DeAnda, a guidance counselor; and Bob Wisz, a restaurateur and landlord, for all they’d done for the southeast side “without the assistance of Mayor Daley’s machine.” “I heard you were at one of Pope’s meetings,” Martinez said, leaning into the window of the man’s rusty car....
By Ted Kleine “Are there children among them?” The scene, which lasted less than five minutes, was a re-creation of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, the best-publicized atrocity in Indonesia’s 23-year-occupation of East Timor. The massacre–or “incident,” as the Indonesian government calls it–killed anywhere from “a couple” (the consulate’s figure) to 271 (ETAN’s figure) Timorese who had gathered at the grave of Sebastiao Gomes, an advocate of Timorese independence slain by the Indonesian army....
Lead Stories The Litigious Society Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lucia Kaiser filed a lawsuit in February against the Ohm restaurant in New York City, claiming that her birthday party there in December (with Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones among the 400 guests) did not meet her expectations. The restaurant owner said he fully complied with the contract, but Kaiser is asking for $30 million in damages....
POCKET OPERA COMPANY OF CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Pocket Opera Company of Chicago wants to take new operas to the masses. Though the four works it has performed since 1993, all by founder and U. of C. professor John Eaton, are pretty highbrow adaptations–of material like Don Quixote and the Book of Genesis–the company’s stagings have been daring, cheap, and portable....
In the Old Town warehouse of Tekla, Inc., Sofia Solomon gingerly unwraps, several giant pyramids of Pointe de Bique, a goat cheese from the Loire Valley in France. Next to the wrinkly, golden-hued pyramids that have been aged 30 days, a group of similarly shaped but moldy specimens rests in a wooden crate, resembling something you might find in the back of your refrigerator after several weeks of neglect-splotchy, discolored, and somewhat deflated from the humidity....
Let me thank Michael Miner for injecting into the gun debate at least a little common sense, historical perspective, and even truth–things so rarely seen in the mainstream press coverage (Hot Type, May 7). Johann von Goethe observed that “there is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action.” The antigun movement thrives on ignorance: that of the yuppies and cultural elite–especially journalists–who inhabit places like New York, Washington, LA, and yes, Chicago....
Beast Women Women have no wilderness in them–according to poet Louise Bogan, at least. More often than not I’ve reluctantly agreed with her: I’ve seen more coy confessions than wild experiments from Chicago’s female performance artists, poetry slammers, and monologuists. Though there’s plenty of entertaining rage, terror, artistic iconoclasm, and moral sentiment on Chicago’s boards, it’s the rare performer–male or female–who seems as unpredictable and ruthless as a wild beast....
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, Bailiwick Repertory. Heavy-handed and bewildering, Scott Cooper’s gender-altered adaptation for Bailiwick’s Pride series takes Shakespeare’s “how quickly bright things come to confusion” all too literally. The plot doesn’t thicken–it congeals. Here the fairies are gay males, and the “rude mechanicals” heterosexual females (except for Bottom, a stereotypical pushy male who wants to play all the parts in “Pyramus and Thisbe”). The lovers are straight when they enter the enchanted wood, but thanks to a fairy spell (or conversion?...
BOSS HOG, DELTA 72 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of all the white-boy blues bands that broke out in the 1990s–the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Jack O’ Fire, the Make Up–the guys carrying the torch highest these days are the Delta 72, who spike the music not just with punk but with a strong shot of funk. Since forming in 1994 the Philadelphia-based group has changed lineups four times; on the new 000 (Touch and Go), founding singer and guitarist Gregg Foreman is joined by former Mule drummer Jason Kourkounis, bassist Bruce Reckahn, and new keyboardist Mark Boyce, Reckahn’s old bandmate in the Goats....
BRANFORD MARSALIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think most people who’ve listened to Branford Marsalis consistently for the past 15 years would agree that on his current record, Contemporary Jazz (Columbia), his playing has reached its peak to date. Leaving his soprano sax at home and concentrating on the tenor, Marsalis has convinced me that he can do just about anything he wants on the instrument: he’ll race through an exacting hard-bop marathon at a blistering tempo or pour out a bittersweet ballad in perfect pitch, and even his eruptions of glottal screeching no longer sound like he’s tacking them on for hipness’s sake....
One highlight of a season dominated by Irish theater—from the Seanachai Theatre Company’s revival of Brian Friel’s Translations to the Free Associates’ Friel parody Chancing at Lunacy—is this week’s remounting of a brilliant 1995 TurnAround Theatre production of Friel’s 1979 play, the tragic tale of an itinerant Irish faith healer and his cockney promoter and long-suffering wife. Touring the peasant villages of Wales and Scotland, the exiled Irishman has an unreliable gift for working miracles, a skill rooted in an inner power more demonic than divine; the story of his destruction is a poetic meditation on the artist’s talent as both gift and curse....
Kate Kane, a criminal defense attorney in Milwaukee, gained notoriety in 1883 after tossing a glass of water in a judge’s face. She had grown tired of his insults, she explained to the press, and said that he had been trying to drive her out of his courtroom for some time. The bedraggled judge seized the opportunity to do so after her outburst, jailing her on contempt charges. In one of its seven articles on the incident, the New York Times referred to Kane as being “mad as a wet hen” and criticized her method of “getting even” as “decidedly feminine....
By David Moberg But contact with Brazilians had brought diseases, and inadequate medical care allowed these new illnesses to spread. As a result, within a relatively short period the Kayapo had become “dependent mendicants,” Turner says, “wards not being well looked after. It was a period of cultural demoralization and economic misery.” He returned to Harvard and enrolled in its famed department of social relations–which encompassed the study of anthropology, sociology, and psychology–and from there he went to live with the Kayapo....
The 11th annual edition of this multidisciplinary arts festival, which was founded by the late Jim Happy-Delpech to showcase artists in the Wicker Park and Bucktown neighborhoods, features a scaled-down, more selective, and more artistically diverse theater and performance component than in previous years. Local groups–including the Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre, the Bumblinni Brothers, Asylum 137, Shakti Dance, and the Mammals–are joined this year by out-of-towners, including former Chicagoan Amy Seeley, New York director Nick Colt, and Seattle Mime Theatre member K....
Block Museum’s Growth Spurt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The addition will be the work of Dirk Lohan, who designed the new Blue Cross-Blue Shield building on Randolph. Plans call for vastly expanded exhibition space, a 200-seat auditorium, a 40-seat classroom, an art library, a print and drawing study center, and new offices for administrative staff. Final renderings for the addition haven’t been completed, but Mickenberg promises a much more dramatic architectural statement than the nondescript concrete bunker now housing the museum....
