Downtown Water Tower Place is nice. People who shop there are very pretty. I took the elevator to a store named Abercrombie & Fitch. One time I saw an old newsreel of Theodore Roosevelt going on a safari, and he was carrying a lot of trunks with the names Abercrombie and Fitch on them. The store no longer outfits expeditions; it sells high-fashion clothes instead. I liked the store and the high fashions but was embarrassed by the female mannequins....
Lead Stories In September customs officials at Port Hueneme, California, went into a tizzy when a nearly fully operational Scud missile was off-loaded from a British vessel, destined for a local address. Said an agent, “All you needed to do was strap on a garbage can full of C-4 [an explosive], and you had a weapon.” After an investigation, officials said the buyer was just a collector and that the British seller had merely failed to disable the missile as required by U....
Why am I voting for Ralph Nader? Ending the death penalty Ralph Nader is not “in this race,” and no celebrity endorsement or kick-ass position on drug legalization is going to put him in. While it may not be much fun having to choose between the lesser of two evils, that’s the choice adult voters are faced with this year. Ralph Nader is a vanity candidate running a vanity campaign for a Potemkin party, the Greens....
SKATALITES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rare is the musical reunion that works, particularly when the impetus is a renewed interest in the group’s original work. As the first great ska band, Jamaica’s Skatalites have been the subject of renewed interest several times since disbanding way back in 1965–most notably during England’s 2-Tone craze in the early 80s, but also during the wave of ska that’s washed over this country in the last few years....
Everybody hates HMOs. They’re inflexible, they deny care, they turn medical professionals into bean counters. Conceived decades ago as a way to focus on preventing illness, they now dump the sick. You might expect that for-profit HMOs would give better care. After all, competition between profit-seeking retailers serves the common good in other walks of life. It gives us plenty of nutritious food, ever-cheaper computers, and–once the government put its foot down–cleaner cars far cheaper than anticipated....
Tricky Pre-Millennium Tension (Island) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That time was the first half of the 90s; that place, the western port city of Bristol. Then and there acts like Massive Attack–of which Tricky was a junior member–and Portishead gained recognition for blending soul, reggae, and cabaret rock, hip-hop style, into the sad, ethereal concoction dubbed trip-hop. By and large, it was recognized as the most imaginative and commercially friendly sound yet to arise from the slippery genre that Robert Christgau has labeled “post-dance” (a genre that includes ambient, cut-and-mix dub, and other hard-to-classify strains of quirky groove music)....
A Moment of Innocence Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is one of the best features (1996) of the prolific and unpredictable Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a dozen of whose films are showing at the Film Center this month. It’s also one of his most seminal and accessible–a reconstruction of a pivotal incident during his teens. At the time the shah was in power, and Makhmalbaf was a fundamentalist activist....
The track listing for Alejandro Escovedo’s new studio album, Bourbonitis Blues (Bloodshot), his first in three years, makes it doubly clear that the Austin singer-songwriter isn’t exactly in a prolific phase. Of the nine cuts, only four are originals, and one of those, “Guilty,” appeared in a different version on With These Hands (Rykodisc) in 1996. But while his songwriting muse might be slumbering, his music is anything but tired. In the liner notes to Bourbonitis Blues, Escovedo thanks Bloodshot “for making music fun again,” and the record sounds like he means it....
ALI AHMED HUSSAIN KHAN & MONILAL NAG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This concert offers a rare treat, a pairing of the sitar–the best-known Indian instrument in the West, thanks to Ravi Shankar and the Beatles–with the sheh’nai, a hard-to-find, oboelike double reed that produces a piercing, fluttering drone. Sitarist Monilal Nag is a master of Hindustani music (the austere classical style of northern India) and a student of the Vishnupur school, which is based on the subtle, highly restrained dhrupad singing of the north; his hushed improvisations are undeniably beautiful....
On December 13, 1992, reporters from a half dozen TV stations were waiting outside Dorothy Hajdys-Holman’s front door in Chicago Heights. They wanted to talk about her son Allen Schindler Jr., a sailor who’d been beaten to death a few months earlier by two fellow crew members from the U.S.S. Belleau Wood. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On October 27 Charles Vins and Terry Helvey had followed Schindler into a public rest room in Sasebo, Japan....
GINUWINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soul singers just ain’t what they used to be: if you put contemporary star Ginuwine in front of a live soul band from the 60s, he’d get the hook faster than James Brown could say “good God!” The D.C. native claims Michael Jackson and the Artist as two big influences, but on his second album, 100% Ginuwine (550 Music), beyond the sappy cover of Jacko’s “She’s Out of My Life” and a penchant for using “2” and “U” instead of “to” and “you,” he doesn’t seem to have learned much from them....
Jim Klauba grew up listening to the wild street tales of his father and great-uncle, both Chicago cops. Klauba, now 28 and a Cook County sheriff’s deputy, says he joined the force for the stories: “I was working construction, and at the end of the day what could I tell somebody? ‘Hey, I put up that wall really fast today’?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1996 Klauba joined the county’s Special Operations Response Team, or SORT, based at 26th and California....
The four poets who make up the poetry collective I Was Born With Two Tongues emphasize their dual perspective from the outset. They frequently open their shows by saying they represent China, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Korea. Then they quickly add Baton Rouge, Jersey City, Glendale Heights, and Glenview. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple years ago Kim was an English student at the University of Chicago, regularly traveling to the north side to read his poetry in bars....
The Big Lebowski With Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, David Thewlis, Ben Gazzara, and Jon Polito. With Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, Stockard Channing, Reese Witherspoon, and Giancarlo Esposito. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My preference for Twilight over The Big Lebowski could be generational. I’m much closer in age to Bridges than to Newman, yet Benton takes me back to a world that I recognize more vividly than the Coens’ TV patchwork, and I prefer Benton and Richard Russo’s witty, functional dialogue and sturdy plot construction to the Coens’ gaudy bag of tricks, whose cleverness and imagination exist mainly for their own sake....
LADYBUG TRANSISTOR/OF MONTREAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Beverley Atonale, the second album by Brooklyn’s Ladybug Transistor, you could hear the young quartet’s reach exceeding their grasp: aiming for the orchestral splendor of 60s pop, they got a handful of flat, rinky-dink indie rock played on too many instruments. But they gamely tried again, and although there are some clunky moments on their new The Albemarle Sound (Merge), by and large the album is a success....
Indians and Jews live almost side by side on Devon Avenue. But where are the Indian Jews? Even in India there aren’t many. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Never a large group, the population has dwindled to fewer than 6,000; over the past 50 years, most have emigrated to Israel. Only 34 synagogues survive, and in 1994 Jay Waronker, an Atlanta architect, was given a grant by Chicago’s Graham Foundation to document the last temples....
MIKE WATT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the surface, Mike Watt couldn’t do anything more at odds with his past than release a “punk-rock opera,” but that’s how he’s billing his second solo album, Contemplating the Engine Room (Columbia). As the bass player for the legendary Minutemen, Watt vowed to always “jam econo,” whereas the phrase “rock opera” brings to mind sprawling, baroque beasts like the Who’s Tommy....
Painter Michael Paxton was tidying up his Ravenswood studio a few years ago when his efforts were derailed–as the best cleaning efforts often are–by a couple of boxes. They were filled with articles his grandmother had scissored from two years’ worth of the Clay County Free Press, a weekly newspaper from the mountainous area of central West Virginia that the family calls home. Paxton, now 43, had happily emigrated from the region as a young man two decades ago, but enjoyed keeping up with the comings and goings of his numerous relations in a column called “From the Pen of J....
PATRICE MICHAELS BEDI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given her ripe, sensual voice and the uncommon curiosity and intelligence she displays toward the vocal repertoire, soprano Patrice Michaels Bedi ought to be singing on some of the best stages in the world by now. But career building in classical music is a tricky matter, and Michaels Bedi hasn’t gotten the right breaks (or a New York agent)....
QUINTRON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since moving from Chicago to New Orleans a few years ago, Quintron has steeped himself in the gospel and vintage R & B of the Big Easy, but the songs on his fourth album, These Hands of Mine (Rhinestone/Skin Graft), seem at least as deeply rooted in after-school television. Though he sounds like a manic evangelist, testifying over churning, distorted Hammond organ swells, his lyrics are pure kid stuff: “Meet Me at the Club House” sets that fevered exhortation to what was once a tune by the Champs (who brought the world “Tequila” in 1958); on the very next track, “Dungeon Master,” he commands the title character to “make me go faster”; and whenever I hear the whooping war party on “Wild Indians,” I imagine the audience of a public-access children’s show running amok in the studio....
