Cassandra Wilson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Only one song on Cassandra Wilson’s new Traveling Miles (Blue Note), her inventive homage to Miles Davis, actually features the instrument Davis played–“Run the Voodoo Down” incorporates some sweet, blues-imbued toots by trumpeter Olu Dara. But that’s exactly the sort of audacity that’s established the young jazz singer as one of the most creative, popular, and exciting musicians in any genre....
Is this what they mean when they talk about the high price of freedom? Total campaign spending for state legislative seats and statewide offices in 1994, according to the University of Illinois at Springfield’s Sunshine Project: $64.6 million. In 1998: $93.1 million. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I had, I thought, done nothing to prepare me to counsel a national government,” writes Michael Davis in the Illinois Institute of Technology’s “Perspectives on the Professions” (Fall) about World Bank consultant Geoffrey Dubrow’s tapping him to talk with senior Ukrainian officials about controlling corruption....
In the spring of 1992 Michael Benson got a potentially brilliant idea about a mysterious disease known as amniotic fluid embolism. AFE comes out of nowhere to kill women and their babies in the midst of childbirth. According to the medical literature, as many as half the women it strikes are dead within an hour of the first recognized symptom. Many of the rest die the same day or are reduced to a vegetative existence....
Comanche Territory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1997 Spanish film about TV reporters covering the siege of Sarajevo puts a 90s spin on a setup straight out of Howard Hawks, as an arrogant outsider tries to prove himself to a circle of hardened veterans. Yet here the outsider and the tough, smart Hawksian heroine are one: Laura (Cecilia Dopazo), a TV anchor from Madrid, has to win the cooperation of a cynical reporter (Imanol Arias) and his cameraman (Carmelo Gomez), both survivors of other military conflicts....
Dances for a New World Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eduardo Vilaro, artistic director of Chicago’s Luna Negra Dance Theater, says he hopes this program by three companies will “build a platform for Latino dance artists,” taking folkloric forms into new territory and fusing different Latino cultures. It’s a commendable goal, but it hardly suggests the sheer entertainment value of his own works, three of which will be performed by Luna Negra....
Saint Petersburg choreographer Boris Eifman apparently does nothing small, taking the stories and movements of classical ballet, in which he’s obviously well versed, and amplifying them almost beyond recognition. Red Giselle, to be performed as the troupe’s Chicago debut, transports all the pain and passion of the 1841 original into a 20th-century story based on the travails of real-life ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, a famous interpreter of the role of Giselle. A star at the Maryinsky Theatre in the teens and early 20s, she defected in 1923 to dance with the Paris Opera and, on occasion, Diaghilev’s company....
Our mythology claims that we are a nation carved from the wilderness. The pioneers pushed through trackless forests to “people” a continent, facing bears, wolves, mountain lions, and Indians along the way. While the historians chipped away at one aspect of the myth, biologists, anthropologists, and geographers have been attacking it from their perspectives. The historians tell us that the natives were more numerous and much better organized than our mythology allows....
By Ben Joravsky “It’s hard to explain how much confidence and fun we get out of being involved in the Company, and how much we love putting on these plays,” says Vertucci. “This gives us a chance to work together on a real challenge. It’s the best part of our day.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He returned, he says, a little wiser and more jaded....
For several summers I sweated off pounds sitting through the shows at the un-air-conditioned, unventilated MoMing Dance & Arts Center. But no matter how dreadful the work, no matter how high the humidity, I knew I’d be back in a week or two, for MoMing was the center of the Chicago performance universe. International stars would perform one week, your downstairs neighbor the next. Like Randolph Street Gallery and Lower Links, MoMing was a home for dozens of local artists, a place where they could experiment, innovate–and fall flat on their asses, one of the more necessary steps toward artistic growth....
“You had to be tough to have dinner at our house,” Buzz Spector recalls. His Jewish household in Rogers Park “strongly encouraged reading and intellectual arguments.” Respect for books was key. Later, when Spector began making art objects by tearing the pages of found books, it caused “a huge crisis. My mother was strenuously opposed to that work at first.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By 1980, Spector had already been tearing the edges of his prints to imitate fine handmade paper....
The last time I saw Julie Greenberg and Jeff Jenkins, two and a half years ago, they were on the verge of opening their ragtag theater company, the Midnight Circus, in a little storefront theater in Uptown. In true off-off-Loop style, Greenberg and Jenkins, who were engaged, had taken on all the responsibilities–costumes, publicity, business management–as well as writing, directing, and starring. With less than three weeks until the opening, they looked pretty strung out....
By Cara Jepsen Warr had come to Chicago from San Francisco. When he was small his family lived in the Hunters Point projects, and he’d been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. “We were always reading,” he says. “We had home Bible study Monday night, public study Tuesday, home study Wednesday, and theocratic school Thursday, where we were trained in public speaking and how to go from door to door and respond to objections....
By Ben Joravsky In 1967 he moved to Evanston to study at the Garrett Theological Seminary. He supported himself by working as a cafeteria monitor at Chute Middle School, taught Sunday school, and sort of stumbled into his vocation. “I was living in an apartment in southeast Evanston, and my roommate, Jack Morin, and I decided to invite some kids over to find out why they weren’t taking an interest in church....
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, Drury Lane Oakbrook. Two dimensions could barely contain the energy of MGM’s nearly flawless 1952 musical. The one thing it lacked was depth–which this popular 1985 screen-to-stage spin-off provides in the form of a third dimension. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s witty screenplay, about Hollywood’s golden age, and the vintage Jazz Age standards by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed offer a trove of surefire gags and lush ballads, including “You Are My Lucky Star,” “(I Would) Would You,” and “All I Do Is Dream of You....
Several years had passed since I’d driven to South Bend for a minor-league baseball game, and many things had changed–most of them recently–by the time I traveled back last week. Most prominent among the changes, especially for Chicago fans, was the White Sox having abandoned the Silver Hawks as their Class A Midwest League affiliate earlier this year–in fact, they’ve abandoned the Midwest League altogether. The league has a reputation as a relatively inferior A league, so the move might have made strategic sense, but it was nevertheless another Sox public relations disaster....
Many artistic eras are characterized by dominant subjects. Medieval European artists presented Christian themes; Romantics, nature imagery. In recent decades artists have turned increasingly to the artifacts of mass culture. But perhaps more significant than this shift of attention has been a shift in materials: artists don’t try to draw or paint such objects but instead arrange them collagelike. I’ve seen installations of Tupperware; Nathan Mason creates wall pieces of belts, ties, and shoes....
Adapting a beautiful novel by Russell Banks, Atom Egoyan (Exotica) may finally have bitten off a little more than he can chew, but the power and reach of this undertaking are still formidable. At the tragic center of the story are the deaths of many children in a small town when a school bus spins out of control and sinks into a frozen lake (depicted in an extraordinary single shot that calls to mind a Brueghel landscape) and what this threatens to do to the community, especially after a big-city lawyer (a miscast, albeit effective, Ian Holm) turns up and tries to initiate litigation....
Titanic By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To speak about the artistry of Titanic rather than its economics is to assume that the audience’s pleasure counts for more than the investors’ bank accounts–hardly the assumption that rules the current discourse about the movie. The five-page spread in the December 8 issue of Time magazine includes over three pages devoted to hand-wringing in the lead article, which is headlined “Was all the misery worth it?...
Art 1999’s DIY Attitude Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We had some labor problems,” Blackman concedes, “but we got them resolved and got the fair open, though it made for a tense opening….Once I get all my walls and lights back into storage, there are a lot of conversations I need to have and questions I intend to ask.” Frank Libby, business representative for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 10, predicted a smoother setup next year: “If there were hiccups, it had to do with the new design, new walls, new this and that, and the new [contractor]....
“I’ll tell you why I’m not taking my medicines today,” Sonja says, lighting up a Marlboro and settling into one of the few pieces of furniture she owns, a fuzzy green sofa she bought last week at a hotel liquidation sale. “I’m not taking them because a couple of days ago I woke up and saw spiders all over the walls of my apartment. I had to close my eyes and wait for them to disappear....
