balkin.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the devil part is correct, the other part is not. The factual truth is that there are about eight blocks and 50 old buildings left along Maxwell Street and south Halsted. And we, the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition, are trying very hard to save that for rehab and reuse to become the Maxwell Street National Historic District....
Just the thought of an afternoon of clowns leaping around trying frantically to entertain an auditorium full of little Nintendo-heads brings back memories of my little brother’s seventh birthday party. An unnaturally happy woman with pink hair, red nose, bad breath, and one balloon-into-poodle trick she kept repeating over and over “entertained” until my brother (and a handpicked pack of his better friends) left to go play with his new toys....
It’s hard work being a Goat Island fan. Not only does the company remain out of the public eye for long stretches, unveiling a new piece about every two years, but its cryptic performances require a lot of patience. Director Lin Hixson has a fondness for quotidian repetition; you can be sure that at some point early in a Goat Island show her four performers will spend a good 15 minutes executing a few exhausting gestures over and over again....
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. PAUL ANKA Saturday, 8 PM, Rosemont Theatre, 5400 N. River Rd., Rosemont. 847-671-5100 or 312-559-1212....
BR5-49 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s something funny about a band like Nashville’s BR5-49 being hailed as a leader in the alternative-country explosion when it’s clearly enamored with the classic honky-tonk of the 50s–a love evident in the group’s retro look as well as its music. The “alternative” tag, of course, arises from the antidote their music provides to the blandness of most Nashville product these days....
Mark Kater was always determined to follow an unconventional path. As a teenager in Naperville he decided against college, which carried serious repercussions in the late 60s. “I was prime meat on the hook for the draft board,” he says. After receiving his draft notice in 1969, he enlisted in the air force and became a radio and television production specialist. After a year in Texas making training films, Kater was sent to the other side of the world: Tainan, Taiwan....
Chicago Latino Film Festival Spanish director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) juxtaposes the grim and the farcical in this lavishly produced 1998 feature about a troupe of Madrid film people invited by Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels to shoot an Alpine flamenco musical at Germany’s fabled UFA studio. The Spanish contingent, headed by the starlet Macarena (eye-catching Penelope Cruz) and her Svengali-like director, are glad to escape their war-torn homeland, but then the repellent Goebbels begins to pursue Macarena romantically, and the visitors witness the persecution of the Jews....
That many? According to a random telephone survey of 340 Chicago-area blacks and bilingual Latinos, “Only 35% think their race or ethnic group is accurately portrayed on local TV news,” report Cynthia Linton and Robert LeBailly of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism (Institute for Policy Research “Working Papers,” Spring). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next year state legislatures will consider more than 140,000 separate bills, according to estimates on a chart recently published by StateNet, which collects information about such things....
First City in eating out. According to a recent issue of Restaurant Business, Chicagoans spent $7.5 billion on food outside the home. Los Angeles was a distant second ($6.38 billion) and New York third ($6.37 billion). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “For my book Real Choices, I went around talking to women who have had an abortion and to women who provide care for pregnant women,” writes Frederica Mathewes-Green in U....
Chicago has never been a shining city on the hill. Growing quickly out of the prairie, fueled by raw commercial interests, the city has always been personified by braggarts, tough guys on the make–for every Jane Addams, a score of Paddy Baulers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But today the city looks and feels different. Former factories and warehouses are now inhabited by white-collar professionals who vote for a mayor who puts flower boxes on the streets....
By Ben Joravsky “I know they think we’re annoying. I know that they think anyone who wants to get involved is weird,” says Nancy Maksomowicz, who has a child in the ice-hockey program at the McFetridge skating rink. “But the real issue is information. The Park District’s a dinosaur in terms of accountability. They have to realize this is an age of accountability–it’s time the Park District opens up.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
The Ontario Film Review Board has banned this history of U.S. marijuana laws because it contains 20 seconds of archival footage showing rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees smoking dope in a lab experiment. Apparently this violates the Ontario Theatres Act, which forbids abuse of an animal in making a film, although the board showed no concern about mice falling off a table or fish swimming sideways in the same sequence (at least the simians seem to be enjoying themselves)....
Little Dieter Needs to Fly Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dieter Dengler grew up in a small village in the Black Forest, joined the U.S. Navy, became a pilot, and in 1966 was shot down over Laos and became a prisoner of war. He tells and reenacts parts of his astonishing story in this deceptively conventional documentary narrated, produced, and directed by Werner Herzog....
NASHVILLE CALLING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hardly news anymore when a musician or an actor shows up in rehab to get off heroin or cocaine. But by all accounts the only substance Williams indulged in consistently was marijuana. According to Maureen Herman, the former Chicagoan and ex-Babes in Toyland bassist who now works for Williams as a publicist and booking agent, the intervention was less about substance abuse than about “a clash between two worlds: Nashville versus indie rock....
Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People In my early teens the Boy Scouts came out with a revised version of the handbook that downplayed woods lore in favor of good citizenship; there was even a laughably vague section about puberty. In Rockwell’s new cover the woods were gone, and in their place were small vignettes featuring cartoony pink-cheeked Scouts happily going about various tasks. I was appalled: how could someone who’d rendered the wilderness with so much feeling stoop to this?...
Showtime at the Apollo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kolson was determined that the show would go on; running through the guest list in his head, he realized that his friend Scott Bennett had been invited to the opening. Bennett, who runs an advertising jingle company, plays drums, guitar, and several other instruments (recently he’s been performing as a percussionist and backup vocalist for Brian Wilson)....
ARTHUR LEE Free performance. Saturday, 7:30 PM, Starbucks Coffee, 31 Town Square, Wheaton. 630-690-2746. CADILLAC RANCH 1175 W. Lake, Bartlett: DJs spin Wednesdays and Thursdays after 9 PM. 630-830-7200. DREAMS 935 S. State, Lockport: Music after 9:30 PM. Saturday, Elbow. Next Saturday, September 9, Orange Whip. 815-834-0084. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DUKE O’BRIEN’S 110 N. Main, Crystal Lake: Music at 10 PM Fridays and Saturdays, 9 PM weeknights....
Bruce Nauman at the Chicago Cultural Center, through June 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Other elements also contribute to the viewer’s discomfort. The unequal size of the bleachers creates a sort of power imbalance, as if one set were stronger or more important than the other. Two additional sets of bleachers in adjacent rooms face the walls that enclose the central room, creating an even more confrontational sense of entrapment....
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This unusually charming and touching Ismail Merchant-James Ivory film feels closer to memoir than fiction; it’s drawn from an autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones (daughter of novelist James Jones), but Ivory, working with his usual screenwriting collaborator, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, reportedly fleshed out the story with some of his own experiences. In “Billy,” the first of the film’s three sections, an expatriate novelist in Paris (Kris Kristofferson) and his wife (Barbara Hershey) adopt a six-year-old French boy who’s initially resented by the couple’s natural daughter....
Chuck & Buck Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charlie, who left his hometown years ago, feels obligated to return for the funeral of the mother of his former friend Buck, who still surrounds himself with toys and photographs from their childhood. Buck’s mementos have evoked an exciting and mysterious time during the bleak years of his mother’s illness, and he doesn’t seem nearly as affected by her death as by the eagerly anticipated reunion with Charlie, whom he insists on calling by his childhood nickname....
