The last time I was in New York City I found myself on 141st Street with a couple hours to kill. I’m embarrassed to admit what I did with my time. I went to the Hamilton Grange, the 200-year-old home of Alexander Hamilton, our first secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton built the place as a country house, but it looks ridiculous now, wedged in on a Harlem side street between an old church and a crummy apartment building....
Cecil, you are my hero. My ultimate goal in life is to be the polymath you are. My question concerns a mythical “chicken gun” used for testing jet engines. I have heard tales of store-bought poultry being shot out of a gun at 500 mph into a running jet engine to test the engine’s mettle should a pigeon or some other fowl have the misfortune to cross paths with a 747....
I’m sitting here with a cold, which means I’m getting that skanky feeling of dehydration when every cubic centimeter of water one consumes is allocated toward snot production. Aside from making me have to cough and blow my nose a lot, it leads me to wonder about the physiology of mucus. Does the body actually use it for something, or is it simply a by-product of some other process? How is it that as soon as I blow it all out, my nose and sinuses seem to fill right back up in less than a second?...
Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. TED ALIOTA & THE GROOVE MACHINE Benefit for the I & M Canal Restoration Fund....
Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. NICHOLAS BARRON Free performance. Thursday, August 10, 7:30 PM, Starbucks Coffee, 210 W. North....
Inexperienced improvisers think improv is all a matter of speed; rushing through the preliminaries, they create slapdash characters in cliched situations. Then they wonder why they don’t get laughs. Seasoned improvisers know that mental agility is more important, that time spent developing a character and allowing a scene to unfold will pay off. And no one in Chicago takes as much time or care in long-form improvisation as Robert Dassie, Rich Talarico, and Stephnie Weir, the three players in the late-night show Trio....
By Michael Miner It wasn’t the Greeks who said that, it was the Roman poet Juvenal–a point swiftly made by Sonnenschein’s adversaries as the Hyde Park debate raged on. A U. of C. alumnus and a former college professor, Grossman covered the conflict with an in-house grasp of its issues and passions. But on March 14 he went too far. Writing for the Perspective section, he contemplated the effect of the University of Chicago on those “whose minds were permanently etched there” and offered himself as exhibit A....
Chuck Close By Stephen Longmire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Close’s approach to portraiture is predicated on the idea that all the options in this ancient genre have been played out. His early images, reproducing the most commonplace photographs in paint on a gigantic scale, are less interesting than his clever, virtuosic method. Close explains his use of Polaroids pragmatically: who would sit still for the several months it takes him to finish a painting, working as he does from edge to edge so as not to privilege any area of the composition?...
Friday 10/22 – Thursday 10/28 After indulging in the extended adolescence of graduate school at the Art Institute and fronting the adolescently sweet pop band Love Child, Rebecca Odes hooked up with Esther Drill and Heather McDonald and got serious about teenagers, founding gURL.com, an interactive Web site for girls. They’ve since gone into print with Deal With It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain and Life as a gURL, a latter-day Our Bodies, Ourselves with chapters like “Boobs and What’s Up Down There?...
Lead Stories Pro wrestler Jerry “the King” Lawler finished third in Memphis’s mayoral race with 11 percent of the vote, and pro wrestler Outlaw Josey Wales IV finished third in Houston’s with 10 percent. David W. Irons Jr. won a county council seat in Seattle, beating his sister Di, who had the support of their parents. Eugene Reppenhagen beat his ex-wife Carol for a seat on the town council of Gloversville, New York....
Lead Stories Frontiers of Medicine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In February authorities at National Women’s Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, opened an inquiry into an unusual treatment practiced on premature babies in 1993 and 1994 that may have been the cause of five deaths and eight cases of brain damage. Medical workers struck the babies on their chests for hours at a time to remove congestion from their lungs....
BARDO POND 7/4, EMPTY BOTTLE This show’s the place to be on Independence Day for those who pledge allegiance to the outer limits of inner space. Bardo Pond’s wildly popular performances at both Terrastock festivals place them firmly within the new wave of psychedelia, but their tasty swoops of deep noise are as much Sabbath as Floyd, and vocalist-flutist Isobel Sollenberger sometimes snarls and declaims like a blissed-out Lydia Lunch and sometimes beats Hope Sandoval at her own game by drifting away altogether....
AMERICAN ANALOG SET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It used to be that the American Analog Set played only when the four members, all on-again, off-again college students from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, happened to be home at the same time. Now, with two albums, two singles, and an EP to their name, they’re all stationed in Austin, but their trippy pop still sounds like it might have been created in someone’s parents’ house over spring break; they even named their last LP (on Emperor Jones) From Our Living Room to Yours....
In 1980 gallery owner Paul Waggoner was on his way to a brunch in Beverly when he made a wrong turn and happened upon a yard that looked like it had come from another planet. Brightly painted hand-carved wooden figures lined the fences, climbed the homemade trellises, and stuck out of planters alongside the house. A creature on a post spread its wings above five sticks of wood that stretched upward like fingers waving hello....
Friday 8/6 – Thursday 8/12 One of the most famous lawyers to quit the bar in favor of the arts was pianist Hoagy Carmichael, who would have been 100 this year. Namesake restaurant Carmichael’s Chicago Steak House will mark the event with a night of music by Bobby Schiff and his trio, who will play signature Carmichael tunes including “Stardust,” “In the Still of the Night,” and “Lazy River.” Carmichael memorabilia will be on display, and the menu will include hoagies....
Ernest Hemingway was a young man when he left Oak Park and it was many years before they realized how much they liked him. His family still lived in a handsome house on Kenilworth Avenue when The Sun Also Rises was published and the Tribune reviewed it using words like “trivial” and “degraded.” Grace Hall Hemingway was ashamed to show her face at the Current Books Study Group after that. I would give a trip to Havana to see her sashay into one of her old hangouts like the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club next week when Oak Park throws him a 100th birthday party with a bull run and a conference of scholars and two black-tie dances that would make any mother proud....
FROM THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA, Kuumba Theatre Company, at Malcolm X College. Kuumba Theatre has returned to celebrate its 30th-anniversary season with a sturdy revival of a stirring survival saga. In this burning memoir, Endesha Ida Mae Holland spills her life story, from rape victim to prostitute to civil rights worker to American studies professor, with heartbreaking specificity and complete conviction. Most memorably the play recalls the author’s mother, Ida Mae Holland, a woman who headed north but never got there, spending her life in Greenwood, Mississippi, ironing white people’s clothes, running a boardinghouse, and serving as a midwife to women abandoned by the white medical establishment....
MAURICE JOHN VAUGHN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alligator caused quite a stir on the Chicago blues scene back in 1988 when it put out Maurice John Vaughn’s Generic Blues Album, a self-produced disc the guitarist had issued two years before on his own Reecy label. The Alligator release won widespread acclaim, and Vaughn followed it with an appearance later that year on the imprint’s New Bluebloods compilation and, in 1993, a second full-length disc, In the Shadow of the City....
MISHA MENGELBERG & HAN BENNINK WITH VON FREEMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink, two of the most important players on the Dutch contemporary jazz scene, go together like oil and water, both physically (Mengelberg is short and dumpy, Bennink tall and dapper) and musically (the pianist is a remarkable composer, the drummer a dedicated improviser, though both can swing like mofos)....
In the words of Theater Oobleck’s Danny Thompson, Theater on the Lake now has its strutting papers. In the last few years the once stodgy venue has begun to reflect the daring and diversity of off-Loop theater. “Apparently it’s not just whether Maggie Daley will like it anymore,” Thompson jokes. The Oobleck folks, the city’s most entertaining lefty agitators, have been invited to storm the lakefront with a remounting of their 1998 hit, Necessity....
