Watching this year’s Bears has sent me back to my childhood, to the Bears of the late 60s and early 70s, who were likewise an amalgamation of bright talent and mediocrity–a mixture that naturally tends toward the mediocre, given the ability of National Football League teams to exploit weakness. The Bears of my youth had Dick Butkus, and it was enough just to watch him play middle linebacker, driving through blocks and pursuing the ball....
ALEUTIAN 8/13, EMPTY BOTTLE On its debut album, Frame Dragging (-Esque), this combo, which moved to Chicago from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, incorporates samples of Wagon Christ, Aphex Twin, and even the defunct local outfit Rome, but the dominant components of Aleutian’s music are the twangy atmospherics of Brad Prenda’s guitar and his breathy, occasionally insufferable vocals. KENDALL PAYNE 8/13, NEW WORLD MUSIC THEATRE Nineteen-year-old Kendall Payne is the latest in a long line of sensitive, post-Lilith Fair warblers....
For the past several months, basketball promoter John Walsh has been plotting and planning and working the phones. Last Saturday he got what he wanted. The country’s number one team, the DeMatha High Stags, flew in from Maryland to battle the third-ranked King High Jaguars. In 1995 he arranged his first great showdown, bringing Rock Island to DePaul’s Alumni Hall to play Farragut. “That was the Farragut team with Kevin Garnett and Ronnie Fields....
The Pillow Book Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the most accomplished chapters in Peter Greenaway’s quest to turn movies into books, this may be the writer-director’s metaphorical autobiography. Atypical for Greenaway in its emphasis on drama and linear narrative, this audacious and seemlessly successful formal experiment provides a revealing glimpse into the emotions of a filmmaker who usually keeps a vast intellectual distance from his material....
TOKYO STRING QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year the Tokyo String Quartet is trying out a new first violinist–the third in its almost 30 year existence: Peter Oundjian, who lasted 15 years in the job, has been replaced by Mikhail Kopelman from the Borodin Quartet. Such a transition–especially in the first chair, more often than not the soul and brain of a quartet–usually ushers in a shift, however slight, in sound and interpretive approach....
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST, Splunge Productions, at Zebra Crossing Theatre. Dario Fo’s tightly written political farce is an ambitious choice for a new company: its hairpin twists and sophisticated clowning require a deft touch to avoid the trap of a Three Stooges approach. But the gleefully energetic Splunge Productions keeps the play’s satire plummeting forward, thanks to Marianne White’s intelligent direction and Michael Butler Murray’s multilayered performance as the Fool, a classic European political clown role created to disrupt the precarious narrative we call “reality” onstage and off....
Broadway star Savion Glover (Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk) is among the dance luminaries offering a tap tutorial at Northwestern University beginning next week as part of the Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s tenth anniversary celebration. “People hear tap, they think flaming batons and sequins,” says Lane Alexander, who founded the program. “Actually, rhythmic dance is an ancient tradition–humans danced before they spoke. Tap, a combination of Irish and African dance, is America’s contribution to that tradition....
Burkhard Stangl & Michael Moser Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Burkhard Stangl and cellist Michael Moser are equally adept with precisely notated material and delicate free improvisations; on the 1995 debut by the quartet Polwechsel, with which the two Austrians have previously visited Chicago, they’ve combined the two to build intricate abstractions on double bassist Werner Dafeldecker’s skeletal compositions. The four compositions on Moser’s new solo CD, Violoncello (on Dafeldecker’s label, Durian), likewise borrow freely from improv’s atomic language....
CHICAGO JAZZ ENSEMBLE WITH LESTER BOWIE, FAMOUDOU DON MOYE, & THE META QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jazz stays fresh as a matter of course: if you try to reinvent the music every night, as most improvising combos do, you almost can’t help but push it in new directions. But a repertory band like the Chicago Jazz Ensemble faces a different challenge: instead of transmuting the music, you’re reproducing existing arrangements; to evolve you have to freshen the repertoire itself....
English Chamber Orchestra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since its founding in the 1960s, the English Chamber Orchestra has consistently played Baroque and 18th-century music with a lush intensity normally associated with high Romanticism. If you don’t follow the politics of classical music, you might not be able to imagine in how much contempt such an approach is currently held by the reigning ideologues of “historically informed performance”–who have decreed that early music must be played coldly and without inflection, as though written for an audience of periwigged automatons....
By Michael Miner These are ringing words, even if they don’t persuade the librarian, whose reply begins, “Your ‘argument’ is specious at best.” And it’s a familiar ring, the ring of the military mind. Trust and integrity are core military values, and politics is outside the perimeter. The military calls its jobs “missions,” and fidelity to a mission is expected from every hand. That would include the editor of a base newspaper, who might have to die for the First Amendment but shouldn’t expect to exercise it....
There are journalists in America who refuse to vote in primaries, lest registering with one party or another place their objectivity in doubt. Then there’s Conrad Black. The Sun-Times has chosen to ignore the tempest, but the tale is told in the suit Black boldly filed last month in Toronto against Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien. It seems that last February the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party notified Black that the time had come for Black to enter the peerage....
Joe Henry Among the many lasting images Stanley Kubrick left us is the ultimate shot in Dr. Strangelove, when Slim Pickens rides down to Russia astride the H-bomb. Kubrick created a perfect ironic moment: it’s absurd and pathetic, and yet Pickens as Major T.J. “King” Kong is ecstatic as he embraces not only his own death but the end of the world as we know it. In an apparent homage, Joe Henry–a singer-songwriter whose deadpan delivery of twisted tales bears some resemblance to Kubrick’s storytelling style–concludes his new album, Fuse, with a loving cover of “We’ll Meet Again,” the Vera Lynn chestnut that also closes the film....
MASS ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Close, guiding force of the Movement and Sonic Sculpture (MASS) Ensemble, has built all the collective’s unorthodox instruments–including the distinctive Close Long Bows, a pair of graceful 25-foot metal frames bearing nine strings apiece. Recently he installed what he claims is the largest stringed instrument in the world–the Earth Harp–on and around the northwest corner of the Field Museum....
By Bonnie McGrath Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though she wanted to be an actress, in order to please her parents Fanti went on to study languages in Rome and London. She landed a job with an Italian travel company and went around the world designing package tours. But in the late 80s she took six months off to try modeling in New York, and in 1991 she enrolled in an acting seminar in Los Angeles....
Off Into the Sunset Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blue Rider Theatre Company was formed in 1984 by Fiori, Mitch Covic, and Donna Blue Lachman; two years later the partners rented a space in the building at 18th and Halsted that had once housed the Palace Theater. At first Blue Rider served mostly as a vehicle for Lachman’s plays, including a biography of Frida Kahlo and the autobiographical piece After Mountains, More Mountains…the Haiti Stories....
In 1981 Lisa Lewenz was visiting Baltimore, nosing around her family’s attic, when she discovered dozens of forgotten home movies her Jewish grandmother, Ella Arnhold Lewenz, had made in Germany in the 20s and 30s. The films included footage of Ella’s prominent upper-class family’s daily life in their Berlin mansion (now a part of the city hall), parties attended by distinguished guests like Albert Einstein and Brigitte Helm, a gesticulating Hitler, and anti-Jewish signs....
A few years ago artist Kal Spelletich was working at a scenery-making shop for a boss he couldn’t stand. “He was just a loser,” he says. “He knew I had this little art career that provided something for me that a job or money doesn’t provide. He was obviously not a happy person and didn’t have his shit resolved and would take it out on the workers.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Love, Janis By Jack Helbig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Myler soft-pedals everything dark in Joplin’s story. He alludes only briefly to her drug use and zips even more quickly over her sex life. Even her drinking is treated as something of a joke through most of the show. True, there’s one scene in which Joplin talks about a doctor who warns that she’s damaging her liver, but she quickly dismisses that idea....
Ryszard Zawadzki, who runs a pair of northwest-side restaurants, got his start in the kitchen of the LA Playboy mansion two years after he arrived from Poland. “In 1971 I was in E.C. Goodman Tech Chef School in New Britain, Connecticut, and there was an announcement that the Playboy mansion was looking for a European chef,” remembers Zawadzki, who was only 22 at the time. “I went to the mansion, and they put me to work....
