Posts

By Howard L. During my interview, I exaggerated my drinking habits, hoping to fit into the “heavy/binge” category demanded by the ad. “Oh, uh, three or four.” “When I was going to community college, I drank a bottle of wine every night.” “I was going to community college,” I said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t qualify for the “heavy/binge” test, but I was eligible for a similar study, testing the effects of stimulants, sedatives, and alcohol on the nervous system....

Friday 3/13 – Thursday 3/19 If meat’s not your meat, perhaps the “maggots, rodents, whores, junkies, and blacked-out, anonymous creeps” that dominate local artist and poet Tony Fitzpatrick’s latest drawings will float your boat. Twenty-five of his disturbing “Dope Drawings” are featured in his new book, Dirty Boulevard, with text by Lou Reed. Fitzpatrick will sign copies tonight from 7 to 9 at Edward R. Varndell Gallery, 2153 W. North. It’s free....

Devil of a Deal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years the board has seen many plans come and go, even as it searched for the more than $30 million needed to build and endow the proposed theater. But after a prime site at Cityfront Center fell through in spring With Bryan’s blessing, Guthman got the rest of the directors’ attention, and over the past few weeks a flurry of meetings led to a revision of the architectural plans....

By Neal Pollack Fernando likes to look good, so before every bout he chooses a different hooded sweatshirt in which to make his initial appearance. That night he came out of the locker room waving his gloved hands in the air, wearing a sleeveless gray jersey with black and gray stripes down the middle. He did a little dance for the crowd, which was definitely on his side. Then he allowed his cornermen to remove the shirt....

Terra Brockman describes her new quarterly newsletter, “Food & Farm Notes,” as a “sort of virtual dinner party–a mingling of people and thoughts, food and conversation.” In the first issue, an expanded version of the one-page weekly newsletter she’s been handing out at her family’s stand at the Evanston farmers’ market, she promises to write about everything “from garlic to Galen, beans to Bogart, genius to madness (ripeness to rottenness), and from Jean-Paul Sartre to rhubarb tart....

JANE A. JOHNSTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jane A. Johnston is the quintessential Manhattan cabaret entertainer–a veteran of Broadway’s golden age who’s carved out a second career singing songs that demand the kind of hard-earned wisdom only a long life and lots of experience can bring. Specializing in a rarefied sort of arch comedy associated with such long-gone stars as Beatrice Lillie, Johnston juggles standards by the likes of Arlen and Berlin with witty novelty numbers by the likes of Dave Frishberg and her pianist, Billy Barnes–whose most famous song, the bittersweet ballad “(Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair,” Johnston introduced not long after making her debut in the 1956 Ethel Merman musical Happy Hunting....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The alleged $19,000 per year per prison inmate is “progressive” hogwash and similar to the lobbying tricks we used to employ in the welfare establishment when we wanted more money. We would cite only the cash grant, deceptively omitting medicaid, food stamps, furniture and clothing vouchers, etc. I contend that it is twice that when you include the cost of building the prison; legal fees defending against “jailhouse lawyers” claiming abuse; an army of teachers, social workers, psychologists, etc; and the often-forgotten land that the prison is on that not only is taken out of productive taxpaying use (say, 100 homes or 50 businesses) but for miles around....

No Commercial Break Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Denise Rozkuszka, a spokesperson for WTTW, explains that sponsors prefer series to specials, which may get only one airing. But another source at the station says that sponsors are also demanding more bang for their buck: “Corporations used to look at underwriting as a charitable contribution, but now most of them see it as a marketing expense and want to know what kinds of benefits and exposure they’ll get....

A little over three years ago Joe Bardetti left a job as a copywriter for Leo Burnett to become a full-time stand-up comedian. He knew he was giving up security, but he didn’t expect what happened next. One week after his resignation, some local comics tried to boycott Zanies over wage issues. Then both the Fallout and the Improv shut down, victims of the comedy bust. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

PETER GRIMES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The moral tone of Peter Grimes, the most popular of Benjamin Britten’s 15 operas, is as gray as the skies of the Suffolk coast, the story’s locale and the composer’s beloved home base. Is Grimes a renegade fisherman justly scorned by his fellow villagers for his ill treatment of boy apprentices? Or is he a free spirit whose independent streak is resented by self-righteous, duplicitous accusers?...

Reason Over Passion Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joyce Wieland’s rarely screened 1969 masterpiece is a neglected landmark of avant-garde film. Taking the form of a cross-country trip on the Trans-Canada Highway, a mostly two-lane road that snakes through forests and mountain ranges, it affords views very different from those offered by U.S. interstates. The sameness of a road trip–the way all windshield views begin to look alike–is modified by a feeling of openness, as Wieland joins images not to fuse two parts of the land but to suggest the unseen spaces between them....

BOBBY CONN 5/16, 6 odum; 5/20, POOP STUDIOs After glittering around the Chicago underground for almost a decade, serving as devil’s advocate and postcelebrity celebrity, at last Bobby Conn has convinced someone to put money where his mouth is. His full-length debut, Bobby Conn (Truckstop), features some sterling guests letting their ya-yas out–and didn’t you suspect all along that the Antichrist would sound more like Donovan than Johnny Rotten? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

BLONDE REDHEAD 9/27, FIRESIDE BOWL On its third full-length, Fake Can Be Just As Good (Touch and Go), this international band (singer-guitarist Kazu Makino is Japanese; twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace are Italian) puts forth the chunkiest and most accessible version of its no-wave-lite sonic melange yet. No-wave-influenced bands should always have at least one truly annoying feature; Blonde Redhead’s is the upper registers of Makino’s voice, apparently aimed at the hearing-impaired-canine market....

THEE HEADCOATS & THEE HEADCOATEES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Art brut cottage industry Billy Childish has released roughly 80 albums in the last 22 years–which means he’s now rewritten the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” several hundred times. Wearing his working-class English rasp like a medal, the singer-guitarist-painter-poet has gotten harsher and funnier in his middle age, but he’s yet to stray from the corner of the garage he’s staked out....

Laurel Greenberg’s compassionate 1999 video documentary about the last decade in her grandmother’s life combines family chronicle, psychiatric case history, and autobiographical essay to examine the modern dilemma of retired seniors who must themselves cope with the deteriorating health of their parents. Born in the Ukraine and bound by tradition, Belle spent most of her first 60 years caring for her husband and two sons in Philadelphia, and though she wanted to spend her twilight years living with her elder son–the filmmaker’s father–circumstances forced her into a geriatric center....

The Speed of Darkness Technophiles have a remarkable capacity for optimism. The history of belief in progress is a history of boosterism, celebration, and tantalized delight at the vision of a custom-tailored future just around the corner, brought a little bit closer by each technological innovation. Artists are generally less giddy. Though there have been plenty of shiny, happy futurists who flirted with polished-chrome fascism, they’re outnumbered by paranoid science-fiction writers and painters of apocalyptic scenarios....

ANNA KARENINA, Shattered Globe Theatre. Helen Edmundson’s powerful adaptation of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss inspired Vitalist Theatre’s current flawless staging. And she’s distilled the same emotional essence from Tolstoy’s sprawling epic in 160 minutes that blend dreamlike fluidity with pantomimed movement and expressionistic ensemble work. Giving equal emphasis to the novel’s two plots, she anchors the action in sometimes forced exchanges between Anna and Levin. (Irritatingly, they initiate each other’s stories by asking, “Where are you now?...

Bailiwick Repertory’s 12th annual showcase of projects by emerging directors features evenings of short plays on double or triple bills. The scripts run the gamut from established classical and contemporary selections to avant-garde rarities and untested original material. Each play will be performed twice over the course of the festival; an open postshow critique by local directors of each production’s first performance will allow the directors to incorporate comments from the discussion into the play’s subsequent performance....

Jackie Mason: Much Ado About Everything Hypocrisy is deadly to comedy: there’s an art to saying somebody’s full of shit without being called full of shit yourself. Woody Allen seemed a wonderful satirist of pompous New York Wallace Shawn-style intellectual windbags until it became clear that he longed for acceptance from the very windbags he was skewering. Eddie Murphy, an astute observer of racial prejudice, severely undermined his own credibility with his virulent homophobic rants, which sold hundreds of thousands of comedy albums in the mid-80s....

Captured at www.chicago2001.com/topstories.html Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Commonwealth Edison’s Chairman Tom Blackmarr explains the nature of the blackouts in the Loop as “an employee error that just could not be avoided.” When asked the nature of the error, Blackmarr responded: “A new team of employees were trying to power up the ‘Zapmar’ [a new Com Ed development for wiping out nonpaying customers]. The ‘Zapmar’ was very angry today and needed more energy than we could have expected....