By Cate Plys The Apology: “In the past, there was consensual biting. On this particular evening, I did not realize until her testimony that she felt she was harmed. For that I am sorry….I’m sorry if she felt she was harmed.” “As I said to you on the phone yesterday, I believe that the cheer was not racially motivated….In a way, I suppose I wish our investigation would have turned up racial motives....
Wide Horizons Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saturday evening will kick into high gear at 6, when New York’s DLG (Dark Latin Groove)–a vocal trio that really does make pop music for the global age–takes the stage at the Petrillo Music Shell. DLG delivers a slick blend of salsa, hip-hop, funk, and reggae, but the most arresting element is the soulful slow-jam pleading of lead singer Huey Dunbar....
Wits End, Adult Swim Ensemble. A little bit of Christopher Durang’s sitcom absurdism goes a long way, and Adult Swim’s evening of one-acts is an overdose: three different versions apiece of Durang’s One Minute Play and DMV Tyrant and one version of his Funeral Parlor, plus two oft-performed works by other writers, John Guare’s The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year and John Patrick Shanley’s Welcome to the Moon. The brief plays, all dealing with alienation in contemporary New York, are performed here with a scene-study-class theatricality, volume and emotional intensity winning out over credibility....
Bread and Puppet Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Schumann does what most theater artists merely talk about: since the 60s, his Bread and Puppet Theater has brought communities together through parades and circus art, creating a model for arts activism and in the process attacking violence, imperialism, ignorance, and bombast. Bread and Puppet arrived in Chicago last week in their school bus crammed to bursting with props for their “cheap art” events: giant puppets, masks, and musical instruments they used to create circuses in Pilsen and Hyde Park and at the University of Chicago....
Friday 6/4 – Thursday 6/10 Poet Rainer Maria Rilke first tried his hand at playwriting. His 1898 The White Princess is the inaugural production of the Alchymia Theatre, founded by Scott Fielding (who directs) and Kim Snyder-Vine. It opens tonight at 8 at the Alchymia Theatre, 4249 N. Lincoln. Tickets are $10; call 773-755-6843. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests....
There’s a little tunnel, sort of a covered bridge, in the walkway for employees between the main offices and the public area of Six Flags Great America in Gurnee. Filled with the usual notices and legal postings, it also features one sign proclaiming in large letters, “Smile, you’re onstage!” Great America’s International Program swung into high gear in the mid-80s, when Jim Franz joined the human resources department and brought in the first group of “internationals,” a bunch of Irish kids....
Richly textured in its story, visuals, and symbolism, this 1998 Egyptian feature by writer-director Radwan El-Kashef has the emotional directness of a tribal myth and the moral wisdom of a cautionary tale. A village on the southern fringe of a desert is emptied of its men after masked mercenaries falsely promise them lucrative work up north, and the women, left to cope with the daily chores, are aided by an irrepressible teenager named Ahmed (winsome teen heartthrob Sherihan)....
By Phoebe King At the community meeting, set up about two weeks after the rumors started, many people said they felt blindsided. How could an agency plop a residence of this size in their backyard without a word to anyone? Rogers Park resident Rich McMenamin asked Thresholds administrators to postpone the project and give the community time to consider its implications. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thresholds had first contacted 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore back in May 1996, when the agency was thinking about buying the building....
San Francisco filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky’s silent, meditative, and visually lush movies eschew not only plot but other conventional forms of organization as well. No obvious rhythmic or thematic principles link their images; Dorsky strives to release the viewer from tension, expectation, and interpretation. Alaya is a study of sand. In extreme close-up each grain is a light-filled multicolored crystal. The sand is blown by the wind; it makes tiny ridges. Images run together not according to the traditional laws of montage but as water flows, from still pools to rapids to waterfalls....
Kaddisch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Swiss drama of Holocaust survivors, directed by Beatrice Michel and Hans Sturm in collaboration with Villi Hermann, is slow, ponderous, wordy–and very moving. The weight of an unspeakable past makes itself apparent through the oblique dialogue and the gentle transitions from black and white to color, suggesting the characters’ unstable emotional relationship with the real world. Gyuri has survived slave labor in Buchenwald and elsewhere but has been rendered forever rootless, with “a desert inside him”; his story is relayed in flashbacks by those sitting shivah at his funeral, trying to explain him to his grieving daughter....
LARRY CORYELL TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the long and winding career path of guitarist Larry Coryell, there’s still no straightaway in sight. His previous three albums tackled Brazil and smooth jazz; on the recent Spaces Revisited (Shanachie) he reunited with old friend and archetypal jazz-rock drummer Billy Cobham for a return to the big bang of his fusion years. Those were good years for Coryell, who started out as a rocker and worked in the Free Spirits to help pioneer fusion from the rock side; in 1967 he joined vibraphonist Gary Burton’s quartet to record the first true jazz fusion album, Duster, recently released on CD for the first time by Koch....
Brian Eno Bastard Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Eno and Newman have spent a good part of the last few decades broadening the definition of rock, this twin case of tunnel vision is puzzling and a little distressing. After leaving Roxy Music in the early 70s, Eno broke new ground on four influential progressive rock albums, all with vocals. Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science incorporated elements of free jazz and classical minimalism, crafted hooks with percussive instruments and out of nonmusical sounds, made the recording studio serve as an instrument, and highlighted what Eno called “harmonic stacks” of his own overdubbed voice–imagine a one-man Beach Boys....
MICHAEL RABINOWITZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can count on one hand the number of bassoon players to make a name in jazz, and no wonder. Not only does the bassoon, like the oboe, require a fragile, balky double reed, but it was designed by a masochist who assigned no fewer than 14 keys to the thumbs–which on any other woodwind mostly just hold the damn thing up....
THE DREAMER EXAMINES HIS PILLOW, CollaborAction Theatre Company, at Live Bait Theater. The born-in-the-boroughs characters who populate John Patrick Shanley’s plays speak in a scattershot thrift-shop poetry laced with profanity. Presumably the playwright means them to come across as giddily romantic, but the dialogue can easily sound just plain silly. Certainly it seems an inappropriate idiom for the play’s discussion of Jungian anthropology and treatise on gender politics, which goes beyond Mars and Venus to embrace the whole crazy cosmos....
VANDERMARK 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The difference between the Vandermark 5’s debut, Single Piece Flow, and its second album, Target or Flag, was unmistakable: the acclaimed sophomore effort had greater subtlety and compositional variety and made use of an expanded palette of colors. No such dramatic leaps are evident on the group’s recent Simpatico (on Atavistic, like the first two), but that doesn’t mean the band hasn’t grown....
johnson.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem is our winner-take-all voting system, and the solution is to use the race-neutral voting system most of the world’s democracies use: proportional representation. Proportional voting systems give each political group an equal opportunity to elect one of their own by giving representation based on the percentage of the vote earned. If a political minority gets 33 percent of the vote, they would get 33 percent of the representation, not zero; a group with 60 percent of the vote gets 60 percent of the representation, not all of it....
A CHORUS LINE, Drury Lane Theatre Evergreen Park, and WHOSE CHORUS LINE IS IT ANYWAY?, ComedySportz, at the TurnAround Theatre. Who could have guessed that all those 50s and 60s experiments in mixing theater with the frontiers of psychology–group therapy, encounter groups, psychodrama–would have resulted in a show as safe and essentially harmless as the 1975 Broadway hit A Chorus Line? Then again, who could have guessed that a play about a bunch of dancers auditioning for a part in an unnamed musical and talking about their lives would have become a hit musical?...
ÁChe-Che-Che! (A Latin Fugue in 5/8 Time) ÁChe-Che-Che! (A Latin Fugue in 5/8 Time) hangs that Chicago albatross around its neck and drones on for two acts. Ramirez and codirector Meighan Gerachis have managed to highlight most of the flaws and few of the strengths of Cruz’s script by concentrating on her three narrators–Live Che, Dead Che, and Old Che. In this limp cha-cha, the three Ches declaim, mutter, and meander through an assessment of Guevara’s life and politics that ends with Ches imagined burial, as his remains are returned to Cuba and eulogized by a palsied, aged Castro....
By Ben Joravsky Well, 12 years have passed, and guess what? Wolke was right. The miracle tool has become some forever-spreading virus that threatens to turn much of Clark Street, from Montrose to Howard, into one continuous strip mall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city’s official line has not changed since the Organization of the North East (ONE), the group Wolke then worked for, waged its unsuccessful campaign against the Berwyn- Broadway TIF....
An editor at a magazine once asked me to do a calendar on what there is to appreciate in nature each month in the midwest. I started in May, when the issue was coming out, talking about migrating warblers and wild asparagus. I clicked along through each month–sunflowers for August, sandhill cranes for November–until I hit a wall with February. I chewed my pen tip, looked through field guides, and tried to think of something good to say....
