Golf is the most difficult sport to cover because the action is all over the course. It takes a little knack and a lot of luck to be in the right place at the right time, to catch a charging player at the beginning of a string of birdies or to be on the spot for his or her fatal error. For the final round especially, it’s better just to stay home and watch it all on television....
HUGH CORNWELL 3/19, SCHUBAS Hugh Cornwell’s “new” solo album, Black Hair Black Eyes Black Suit (actually a reissue of last year’s overseas-only Guilty), doesn’t have any of the vintage violence of his old band, the Stranglers, but folks who liked, say, the last couple Damned albums might appreciate his sophisticated dark pop. Between the slick cynicism and troubled romanticism he takes swipes at some easy targets (the war in the Balkans, on “Not Hungry Enough”) and slips in some low-key lewdness (he describes “Snapper” as “an appreciation of eating fish”), all in an elegant voice that screams aging English gentlepunk with every syllable....
The Chicago Five The police didn’t kick ass this time around, but they did take names. Even before Clinton hit the podium, five people–Bonnie Tocwish, Robert MacDonald, Ron Schupp, Ben Masel, and Michael Durschmid–were arrested on charges of felony mob action and aggravated battery against two police officers. The incidents allegedly took place a couple of days earlier, at a demonstration on Tuesday, August 27. At 9:45 last Friday morning, all five came together with six attorneys in a courtroom at 26th and California....
Fritz Lang’s first real blockbuster was this 1924 two-part silent epic–Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge–based on the 13th-century German legend that also inspired Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. In part one, Siegfried (Paul Richter), the son of a Norse king, wins the hand of the beautiful maiden Kriemhild (Margarethe Schon) and uses a magic sword to battle a fire-breathing dragon in the forest. Part two occurs after the death of Siegfried, when his widow accuses her half-brother Hagan of murdering him....
Stories as juicy as jazz musician Billy Tipton’s don’t come around often. Tipton, a much-divorced father of three adopted boys, was at best a minor figure in the music world, but he became world famous in 1989, when he died and it was discovered that he was a she. For more than 50 years, he had strapped down his breasts and slipped a little something extra into the jockstrap he always wore....
From the pages of Princess ¥ Number 4, June 1998 (280 Park Avenue South, 2G, New York, NY 10010; $4) I went to college to get an education, not find a husband, and I moved to New York to start a career, not a family. So would someone please tell me why it is that whenever I start to date a guy, I immediately imagine being married to him? Best of Chicago voting is live now....
BACH WEEK FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now in its 27th season, the Bach Week Festival is the best such celebration outside of Leipzig, Germany, where Bach served for nearly three decades as director of music at Thomaskirche. From the start it’s been held at Saint Luke’s in Evanston, and due to the modest size of the church’s hall the festival focuses on pieces scored for small groups: cantatas, concertos, sonatas, and the like, a pool of several hundred....
With the possible exceptions of Killer’s Kiss and A Clockwork Orange all of Stanley Kubrick’s features look better now than when they were first released, and Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated (though Eyes Wide Shut is already running a close second). This personal, idiosyncratic, and melancholy three-hour adaptation of the Thackeray novel may not be an unqualified artistic success, but it’s still a good deal more substantial and provocative than most critics were willing to admit....
bass.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That said, frequent Reader contributor Neil Steinberg can only be described as obsessed with failure. He’s gone so far as to write an entire book on the topic (Complete and Utter Failure, in which he calls the National Spelling Bee a monument to failure because every kid but one ends up losing. Has any competition known to man ever been otherwise?...
Chicago Symphony Orchestra What can I say? I thought the hall sounded better. The place used to remind me of one of those food-desiccating machines they hawk on late-night infomercials: the nutritional value of the music was perfectly preserved, but the savor had been sucked out. I often wondered, rather meanly, if that was why Georg Solti flourished there like a desert flower. He was always so vigorous and precise in his immediate effects–and so curiously indifferent to the reverberating half silences where the more elusive mysteries of music are concealed....
FRISBIE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These local popsters have been building their buzz as carefully as they craft their songs. Over the past two years they’ve gigged steadily, playing a monthlong acoustic residency at the Hideout and opening for Big Star, Marshall Crenshaw, and the Old 97’s. Tracks from their debut album, which came out this week, have been turning up on college radio and commercial stations’ local-airplay shows since February 1999....
Fixed to a tripod, the camcorder is trained on the stalls. I peer through the viewfinder: the infrared gives a cool, greenish tint to the pipes and cement walls. But it’s a deceptive cool. A heat wave is on and the Stratford Motor Hotel AC is dead. Even here and now, the ladies’ room at 2 AM, Bing Crosby breezing from the portable tape deck sitting on the baby changer (eerily crooning “all the way from Phil-a-del-phi-ay”), it is hotter than blazes....
By Ben Joravsky The proposed project, targeted for a vacant lot at 4040 N. Sheridan, is named for activist Ruth Shriman. Before she died in 1994 Shriman conducted a housing survey that showed that as many as 4,000 seniors faced displacement on the north side, as affordable units were lost to rising rents and condo conversions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It was hard because almost all of the land around here is being developed very fast,” says Dan Schwick, pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church and president of the LAC....
JAY ALAN YIM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like a lot of American composers who grew up in the 60s and 70s, Jay Alan Yim tries to reconcile influences of high art and pop culture. Yim, who wears a ponytail and admires the likes of Gastr del Sol, is also a Harvard PhD with a tenured position on Northwestern’s composition faculty; he’s won a Guggenheim that paid for a yearlong stay in Amsterdam, an outpost of the cool, cerebral European avant-garde contingent with which he’s allied....
The songs in Love, Janis–director Randal Myler’s blast from the past–are far stronger than this musical’s evasive text: singing them in effect returns the compliment of their creation, re-creating Janis Joplin. Considering how deeply she lived when she sang–and suffered when she didn’t sing–that comes as no surprise. Alternating with Andra C. Mitrovich in the punishing role of the “singing,” or public, Janis, Cathy Richardson matches Joplin in age, drive, and pyrotechnic voice–which, as Joplin admitted, bordered on screaming....
Camping With Henry and Tom Mark St. Germain’s docu-fantasy Camping With Henry and Tom is set in that natural netherworld. And in the capable hands of Chicago actor-director Gary Houston, it’s an entertaining revision of American history that explores the nature of power with satisfying finesse. Houston uses his excellent cast to full advantage, allowing the tension of hidden agendas, misunderstandings, and dangerous confidences to build into a realistic struggle for control....
It’s been disconcerting to read, over the past several weeks, of no fewer than four Hollywood projects in the works that purport to be by and/or about Orson Welles. Three of these are based on Welles scripts that he never found the money to produce: The Big Brass Ring (an original with a contemporary setting), The Dreamers (an adaptation of two Isak Dinesen stories), and The Cradle Will Rock (an autobiographical script set in the 30s)....
SHANNON WRIGHT, WAXWINGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s nothing like playing quiet acoustic music in noisy rock clubs to make you want to yell. On her gorgeous 1999 debut, Flight Safety, Shannon Wright presented her sometimes pretty, sometimes oblique melodies with a hushed, folky simplicity. She kept her fragile voice well within its limitations, tracing the contours of each song with delicate care....
The Motherlode In our culture, it’s hard to be a mother and a person at the same time. We’ve envisioned motherhood as a state of idealized nonpersonhood: the perfect mother is fully knowable through her relationships with her children, her husband, and her home–but never as herself. Mothers who “want it all”–in other words, who want to pursue their own interests while raising children–are suspect, inviting personal burnout and family ruin....
By Michael Marsh Only a fraction of the soldiers in Calley’s unit killed civilians, he says. Many soldiers refused to participate in the slaughter, and one shot himself in the foot to avoid it. “Innocent civilians get killed in war,” he says. “These people were not killed in war. It’s not what a soldier will do.” He says incompetent officers, peer pressure, prejudice toward the Vietnamese, and a desire to avenge fallen comrades fueled the slaughter....
