The Psychopath Not Taken By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet for all its success Second City remains surprisingly, even amazingly noncorporate, its longevity explainable by a down-to-earth connection with audiences. Though its reputation hinges on the many celebrities whose careers it’s launched–audiences love to moon over the lobby photos showing famous alumni (Look how young Alan Arkin was! Look at John Candy’s long hair!...
#By Ben Joravsky “It’s depressing in here [the Rehabilitation Institute],” he says. “I mean the nurses and doctors are great, but it’s boring and dreary and very, very difficult. The worst part is the loss of vision–I can’t read and I love to read. I do my rehab but mostly I’m in bed with too much time–time to think about how it is that I wound up here.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
The shelves and racks of Ten Thousand Villages, a gift shop on Main Street in Evanston, brim with batik, wood, and woven straw, giving the place that developing-country look. It resembles a Pier 1 Imports, the giant purveyor of imported furnishings and gifts, but the merchandise is more offbeat. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than the stock, however, what distinguishes Ten Thousand Villages is its philosophy, which is to enrich its artisan-suppliers through nonexploitative business practices....
JAMES CARTER QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reedist James Carter may turn out to be jazz’s biggest disappointment of the decade. When he debuted in 1993 with the impressive JC on the Set (DIW/Columbia), his boundless energy, dizzying technique, breathtaking range, historical knowledge, and the sheer palpable joy he took in playing connected with serious and casual jazz fans alike. Unfortunately this enormous sales potential caused Atlantic Records, which signed him and released a follow-up, The Real Quietstorm, in 1995, to oversalivate, and in their attempts to make a star of the Detroit native they’ve consistently damped his development....
JUILLIARD STRING QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last summer, when founder and first violinist Robert Mann retired, the country’s premier string quartet found itself in a precarious position. On the face of it there was nothing to worry about–Mann’s spot was taken by the quartet’s fine second violinist, Joel Smirnoff, and Ronald Copes, a thoughtful former member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet, took his chair....
LEE KONITZ TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lee Konitz never lets you see him sweat. When the Chicago-bred alto saxist first came on the scene–as a disciple of the minimalist jazz pianist Lennie Tristano and the only bop-era altoist to develop a style distinct from Charlie Parker’s–he evinced a sparkling, disciplined technique at speedy tempos. He spun steeplechase runs on recordings by Tristano’s combos, and his solos flowed swift and clean out of the ensemble passages in the iconic Birth of the Cool sessions he recorded with Miles Davis....
PEABODY TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aaron Jay Kernis, who last year won a Pulitzer for his string quartet, exemplifies postmodernism at its craftiest–he’s a parodist who grasps the consequences of his referential games. His music is meticulously fashioned, and its eclecticism shows off his erudition. And he knows when to be provocative and when to be playful, even while keeping an eye on the topical....
Praise the Lord and Pass the Application “You need to talk to God first,” Jayne Jackson, ERC’s executive director, told the dozen people attending the orientation. She encouraged them, including Brown, who’d been raised Catholic, to attend Saint Sabina Church nearby. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The idea for ERC began with Pfleger, who’s best known for his protests against ghetto billboards advertising cigarettes and alcohol, stores that sell drug paraphernalia and liquor to minors, and Jerry Springer....
Cream Those Were the Days (Polydor) Most rock fans know both bands by name, but while Cream is widely considered a rock ‘n’ roll cornerstone, a near supergroup whose garrulous, blues-based hard rock set the tone for the 70s, the Zombies are dimly remembered as a melancholic beat combo whose entire legacy consists of three mid-60s singles: “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season.” Number of gold or platinum records...
[Sic] Five years ago, at the tender age of three, Roadworks put on the Chicago premiere of Eric Bogosian’s SubUrbia. Just securing the rights was something of a coup, and the production was sold out for much of its four-month run at the Theatre Building. In recent years Roadworks has followed up on that success with a series of high-profile offerings, including a 1996 staging of filmmaker Mike Leigh’s Ecstasy that went on to a six-month run in Los Angeles....
Fidelio The Enlightenment was an optimistic time, and the men who shaped the age believed that their optimism was justified. They’d thrown off the shackles of superstition-based religious authority and governmental tyranny, and in their vision of the future, humanity would rise from the darkness into the light of reason on a steady upward path. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of the problem lay in the nature of the production....
By Ted Kleine Belizeans began settling in Chicago in the early 1960s, after Hurricane Hattie flattened Belize City. Hoping to earn money to rebuild their families’ homes, thousands left their tropical homeland to find work in the U.S. Many of those who came here found work as domestics in North Shore mansions, which helps explain the large numbers of Belizeans in Rogers Park and Evanston. Today the community numbers almost 10,000, enough to support two restaurants, a travel agency, and a barbershop....
The Magic of Remedios Varo This summer the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum hosts a traveling retrospective, curated in Mexico, of captivating, subversive work by an important 20th-century woman artist, “The Magic of Remedios Varo.” Each of the 77 detailed, meticulous paintings and drawings on display offers a window on the Catalan-born Varo’s complicated vision of an occult world. Her works are an arcane catalog of stairways, hallways, towers, and moats....
Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I thank Jack Clark for renewing my anger regarding the cheating scandal involving the academic decathlon team at Steinmetz High School a few years ago [May 19]. Having worked in college admissions for the better part of the last decade, and having visited both Whitney Young and Steinmetz High School on numerous occasions, I was particularly interested in seeing how HBO would deal with the scandal in the movie Cheaters....
ADALBERTO ALVAREZ Y SU SON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The latest behemoth to jump on the Latin-music bandwagon is Atlantic Records, which next month will begin licensing and distributing releases from Caliente, a New York specialty indie. The second such release, due April 20, will be Jugando con candela, by Cuba’s Adalberto Alvarez y Su Son. Alvarez, although largely unknown in this country, is a towering figure throughout Latin America and Europe, a master who in the late 70s helped revive the sound of classic bands led by Arsenio Rodriguez and Felix Chapotin with his own great group Son 14....
Arto Lindsay On the back cover of his new album, Feelings, David Byrne is portrayed as a computer-generated action figure sporting some dope club-kid duds. Inside the package is a spinner you can use to program the mood of this “whining yuppie,” as Legs McNeil pegged him last year, by changing his facial expression. It seems an odd flash of self-awareness for Byrne, who since leaving the Talking Heads has taken on musical styles like Kate Moss changes clothes....
Chicago Moving Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not every artistic director can step back and say, “You do it this time.” But that’s what Nana Shineflug–who’s powered the Chicago Moving Company since 1972–has done this year for the troupe’s spring concert, offering a place in the choreographic spotlight to two current company members, one former member, and a longtime friend, Brian Jeffery of Xsight!...
Three Days of Rain For better and worse, Greenberg is an old-fashioned playwright, a wit who might have been more at home during Broadway’s heyday, trading gibes with Philip Barry or Cole Porter. His plays–glib, romantic, and balanced–speak with the voice of one weaned on Arthur Miller, Maxwell Anderson, and the New Yorker of long ago. To see a Greenberg play is to be nostalgically transported to a time of opening-night parties in swank Upper East Side apartments where women in sequined gowns sipped martinis while lolling against a grand piano....
By Mike Sula Back home Tell is banned by the military regime. “The government doesn’t want Tell to exist because it is exposing them too much,” says Ajanaku. “Since this magazine started they have been seizing copies. We have lost millions of naira on seizure, but we always find a way of getting it out. If they seize our color copies, we will go to another place and print black-and-white. The way we come out is an act of God....
The Son of Gascogne With Gregoire Colin, Dinara Droukarova, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Laszlo Szabo, Pascal Bonitzer, Otar Iosseliani, Alexandra Stewart, and Jean-Claude Brialy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the question-and-answer session after the screening, I discovered that Pascal Aubier had directed only one other feature between Valparaiso Valparaiso and Le fils de Gascogne–Le chant du depart in 1975–but had meanwhile made 38 short films for French television....
