Dear Jane and Alison, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just picked up my Weekly Reader in order 2 C what Galleries I will B checking out tonight & was just flabbergasted ENUF 2 write & kommend U on the terrific Scottie dog–COW-lossal Takeoff your select artists did for this issue [August 6]. I love ALL Animals but am partial to Cats, being born a Leo with my birthday falling on Monday, but all these Scotties got so much PURR-sonality!...
A few years back, in your book More of the Straight Dope, you repeated the story that vampire legends might have been based on victims of the disease porphyria, which causes disfigurement and is a result of certain blood deficiencies. This hypothesis was invented by a biochemist named David Dolphin. It doesn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny, since drinking blood doesn’t actually bring victims any relief, nor do victims crave blood since they don’t intuitively know they have a blood deficiency (it was not known that that caused the disease until relatively recently)....
Is Illinois a high-tax or a low-tax state? Either one, depending on how you choose to spin the statistics. “Illinois Tax Facts” (December) reports that on a per capita basis, Illinois total 1994 taxes were $2,474.50, above the midwest and U.S. average. But per $1,000 of income–a more reasonable standard–Illinois total taxes were $110.32, well below the midwest and U.S. average rates. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our turn?...
BIG SANDY & HIS FLY-RITE BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the possible exception of Ronnie Dawson, there isn’t a better rockabilly act on the planet than Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys. Revivalists though they are, their contagious love of the music, their skill with its subtleties, and the persuasive croon of Big Sandy (aka Robert Williams) himself render moot any arguments about authenticity or originality....
Can’t Buy Love Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Founded in 1965, the IAC dispenses information and financial aid to all manner of artists and arts organizations statewide. Under Governor James Thompson, the IAC was headed by an experienced arts professional, but all that changed in 1995, when Jim Edgar handed the directorship to Lori Montana, his chief fund-raiser. Montana had little experience in arts administration, and after two years she left the IAC to become director of the state lottery....
Tom Catalano looks on approvingly as three clean-cut, dead-eyed guys slouch under a wall of electric guitars. Members of the Ukrainian rock band Yavyshche, they’re scarfing gyros before heading off to practice. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Catalano says the place is a success because he runs a clean ship and serves good food with friendly service. But the visual impact of rows of bright, shiny, lacquered Strats, Gibsons, and Ricks catercorner to rows of sweet, shiny, glazed crullers, bismarcks, and bear claws must trigger some primitive pleasure receptor in the brain to keep guitar sales going at odd hours....
DAVID MCGILL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With a recent spate of retirements from its wind sections, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is finally entering the Daniel Barenboim era. The average age in the winds has dipped below 50; their playing is more rigorous and disciplined; and their sound is brighter and more ornamented, in keeping with the Barenboim agenda of frenchifying this most German of American orchestras....
Friday 9/5 – Thursday 9/11 6 SATURDAY In the 1970s mystery writer Sara Paretsky did an analysis of the popularity of female authors by examining how much shelf space their books were allocated, how quickly they were taken out of print, and how frequently–or infrequently–they were reviewed compared to books by male authors. The results were dismal, and her findings goaded her to start Sisters in Crime, a group designed to help female mystery writers gain the recognition they deserve....
Two years ago someone named “Sky Brown” wrote a letter in response to my favorable review of Richard Tuttle, who makes art using junk materials like cardboard. This reader reviewed the alley behind his or her apartment: if one lets one’s “preconceptions fall away” in this setting, such a work as “‘Rock’…might not be…a stone at all, but quite possibly a slightly dehydrated dog dropping.” The letter writer also satirized the idea that looking at art deepens one’s seeing of rawer stuff as well....
Richard Pollak, the New York-based journalist who has just published a biography of the late Bruno Bettelheim, only met his subject once. Pollak’s “backward” little brother, Stephen, had attended the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School under Bettelheim before falling to his death from a barn loft while the brothers were playing hide-and-seek in 1948. Twenty-one years later, on a mission to learn more about the brother he barely knew, Pollak paid Bettelheim a visit....
By Ben Joravsky According to Kaluzny, he and his partners should be free to do pretty much what they want with the building since they own it. Apparently city officials agree; after talking tough in court and the press, they’re conceding defeat, leaving outraged residents to wonder if the city will ever take a strong stand for preservation. “Are there no standards?” asks Gladys Alcazar, a member of the East Village Association, a prominent community group in West Town....
Lead Stories In separate incidents in the same week in September, Debra Rodriguez, 41, of Ames, Iowa, and Kristin R. Smebak, 34, of Superior, Wisconsin, both of whom had been drinking, forced their young children to drive them home. Rodriguez’s 11-year-old daughter caused a rollover, injuring both herself and her mother, but Smebak’s 8-year-old son made it safely over the bridge connecting Duluth, Minnesota, to Superior before being spotted by a patrolman, who arrested Smebak....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 9 Gas in the news: Police in Janesville, Wisconsin, responded to a 911 call in December over a domestic disturbance that the wife said had begun when the husband inappropriately passed gas as they were tucking their son into bed. And in January in Perth, Australia, John Douglas Young, 47, was convicted of a child-abuse charge for offering two boys $5 each to pass gas in his face so that he could later masturbate to the mental picture of the encounter....
My Chicago gallery, Feigen Inc., whose cutting-edge program, although enthusiastically subscribed to by me, was determined by the young codirectors, Lance Kinz and Susan Reynolds, had opened a summer group exhibition on June 23, 1995. Among the 24 artists in the show, there was a young Brooklyn conceptual sculptor, Gregory Green. Green, a pacifist, makes sculptures and performances about violence. His works are not themselves violent, and although they resemble tools of violence, like pipe, letter, and suitcase bombs… they contain no explosives and are in no way dangerous....
Morning Star By Adam Langer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In both cases, the stories behind the plays are considerably more engaging than the plays themselves. The 91-year-old Regan, who recently finished her first novel, was a childhood friend of Clifford Odets, the playwright whose work Regan’s most closely resembles. The 1940 Broadway premiere of Morning Star, partly inspired by a tragic 1911 factory fire that killed over a hundred New York seamstresses, featured the legendary Yiddish actress Molly Picon and a very young Sidney Lumet as a boy about to be bar mitzvahed....
Jim Mendiola was inspired by Mexican ex-votos–small paintings on tin traditionally left on altars as tokens of gratitude to saints–when he created Molly Vazquez, the DIY dream girl at the center of his first film, Pretty Vacant. Molly’s got a million pokers in the fire. She’s made a couple Super-8 films and leads an all-Chicana punk band called Aztlan-a-Go-Go. But her zine, called Ex-Voto, is clearly closest to her heart. “The medium was perfect: cheap, easy–no matter how I messed with the pictures, I found they always came out great xeroxed,” she gushes, speaking for a whole generation of copy-machine Conde Nasts....
By Michael Miner Not to mention a ton of old-fashioned caring. Publisher David Radler has come to the ad staff both to speak and to listen. “He said, ‘I had no idea’ our salaries were capped,” the salesman tells me, “‘no idea’ our commission plan penalized us once we reach our goal, ‘no idea’ our parking wasn’t paid for, ‘I had no idea you need new computers.’ He said basically no one came to ask him for anything…because he never would have said no....
Historical spectaculars tend to fall into two broad categories: myths of origin (Cecil B. De Mille’s 1923 and 1956 versions of The Ten Commandments) and more ponderous inquiries into the hero’s personality (Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia). Chen Kaige’s massive 161-minute epic about the unification of China, accomplished by its first emperor during the third century BC, attempts an impossible synthesis of these two categories, beginning with Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian), the king of Ch’in, as a charismatic hero and ending with him as a murderous villain, the mantle of heroism having passed to his former mistress (Gong Li) and the mysterious assassin she enlists to kill him (Zhang Fengyi)....
CALEXICO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bassist Joey Burns and percussionist John Convertino have served as the flexible rhythm section for a variety of acts–Giant Sand, Friends of Dean Martinez, Richard Buckner, Bill Janovitz, and Barbara Manning among them–but recently they’ve opted to thrust their uncanny empathy to the fore. As Calexico, Burns and Convertino look well beyond the roles and instrumentation expected of them, playing bass, cello, guitar, mandolin, drums, vibes, and accordion....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bay Area composer John Adams has described himself as “a minimalist who is bored with minimalism.” In his early career Adams wrote music frankly derivative of Steve Reich’s work, but in 1978 he shifted gears with a piece for strings called Shaker Loops: it took its lulling, meditative pulse from minimalism, but its soaring lyricism was miles from that idiom’s stripped-down harmonies....
