By Kari Lydersen Sheila was 11 when her family moved to Oak Park. “Just a little Southern girl moving North,” she wrote in her diary, and listed the names of the only two girls at school who would play with her. But Oak Park soon became home. During high school she worked part-time at a park district parking lot, and she lived at home for a year and a half while she studied nursing at Triton College....
Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg But it won’t be–because it’s also a magnificent musical performance. In the abstract that shouldn’t be enough: a successful production ought to be equally strong as music and as spectacle. But in the real world, you take what you can get–and as hellish as this thing is on the eyes, it’s glorious in the ears. The cast is uniformly excellent, the Lyric orchestra sounds better than I’ve ever heard it, and the young conductor Christian Thielemann–who’s making his Lyric debut–is clearly a major talent....
John Gossage: There and Gone at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, through October 31 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a 1996 interview, Gossage gave several reasons for his approach (he also gives a lecture here Thursday, October 15, at the museum). His background in street photography caused him to question the way the photographer’s presence often influences supposed documentary pictures, and he didn’t want “to be a presence [or] a factor in the equation....
GREG BROWN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Appropriately, one of the most evocative songs on folksinger Greg Brown’s new Slant 6 Mind (his 13th album for Minnesota’s Red House Records) is about fabled bluesman Robert Johnson: Brown’s ability to mine inspiration from nightmare is reminiscent of our most profound blues poets. His voice, molasses spiked with razor blades, evokes despair, passion, and tenderness with equal ease; his guitar lines hint at the sensual propulsiveness of rock ‘n’ roll as well as the introspective melancholy of folk....
By Tori Marlan The family got into the habit of neglecting other bills, and now they’re behind on the mortgage and utilities. Martin, says Giron, “comes first. I don’t want him to come out crazy or institutionalized, where he’s good for nothing. I don’t want him to wind up like where I work, where you just sit around, watch TV, get your three meals a day.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
JOE & MAT MANERI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story of Boston reedist Joe Maneri is a classic tale of artistic perseverance. In the mid-40s Maneri was playing jazz clarinet in a group that was experimenting with 12-tone improvisation when Josef Schmid–a composer, conductor, violinist, keyboardist, and former student of Alban Berg–walked in on a performance. Schmid would become Maneri’s mentor; from him Maneri learned composition and theory and a lot about the work of Schoenberg, which provided an odd complement to his knowledge of jazz and the Greek folk music he often played to pay the bills....
JOHN PRIMER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When blues guitarist John Primer put out The Real Deal on Atlantic’s Code Blue subsidiary in 1995, it looked like his solo career might finally take off. For decades he’d been mentored by fretboard genius Sammy Lawhorn, who taught him to play slide; then he’d worked alongside luminaries like Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Magic Slim. On the disc he sounded hungry and unstoppable: he fired off subtle but incendiary leads in a piercing tone that recalled Slim’s most house-wrecking turns, stitched up with tight, in-the-pocket rhythms that had roots in the Chicago shuffle Dixon helped pioneer at Chess....
By Ben Joravsky At about five o’clock they got nailed by a trooper somewhere north of Kenosha in Racine County. “I admit I was speeding,” says Keniry. “It had been crowded on the highway, and when we got off on a smaller road I busted loose a bit with the freedom of breaking off from the pack. As soon as I saw the cop on the side of the road, I thought, ‘God, am I stupid!...
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Agence France-Presse news service reported that Al Thawra, the government newspaper of Baghdad, played an April Fools’ Day joke on its readers, announcing: “Good news: from today, bananas (two pounds), Pepsi (a case), and chocolate (50 pieces) to be included in rations.” Elsewhere in the newspaper the editors revealed that the story was a hoax and the monthly government food ration continued to be small amounts of tinned cheese, flour, rice, sugar, tea, cooking oil, powdered milk, and salt....
Whenever anyone asks my opinion on the greatest football player of all time, my answer is always the same and almost always surprising. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This all comes to mind because Butkus has been in town recently promoting his autobiography, Butkus: Flesh and Blood. It’s his second book, but the first, Stop Action, which dates from his playing days, was a sort of week-in-the-life along the lines of Vince Lombardi’s Run to Daylight....
Swan Song Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zhang Zeming is one of the lesser-known talents to emerge from the “Fifth Generation,” the group of filmmakers who revolutionized Chinese cinema in the 80s, but his 1985 debut shows a masterful command of irony and narrative rhythm. The story spans three tumultuous decades in postwar China, as a proud but self-effacing Cantonese opera composer (Kung Zianzhu) loses everything in the Cultural Revolution and his son (Chen Rui), a cynical rebel, comes to appreciate his father’s legacy....
Among the big Chicago locals that were scrutinized by the Independent Review Board under the authority of the consent decree the Teamsters signed with the federal government in 1989 was Local 714. This 10,700-member local covering a wide variety of workers, from law-enforcement officials to metalworkers, had been run by members of the Hogan family since it was founded in 1934. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The IRB recommended that the local be put into a trusteeship, and shortly after, Teamsters president Ron Carey appointed John Metz, a Teamsters leader from Saint Louis, as trustee....
THE GONDOLIERS, OR THE KING OF BARATARIA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Light Opera Works’ new artistic director, Lara Teeter, is a choreographer, and it shows. From the moment the curtain rises on his production of this 1889 Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, the stage is alive with dance–including graceful waltzes, an elegant, stately gavotte, and a high-spirited cachuca. Even when the performers aren’t actually dancing, their actions reflect a choreographer’s attention to precision in gesture and movement....
THE WAR BOYS, East Window Theatre Company. Naomi Wallace’s first play is set on three borders–the border between Mexico and the U.S., the border between adolescence and manhood, and the border between fantasy and reality. It is a violent and often beautifully written story about three young Texan men who have hired themselves out to catch “wetbacks” for $10 a head. In the tedious hours between sightings, they drink beer, tell fantastical and brutal stories, and test the rules of their sadistically militaristic heirarchy....
plous.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The eras and some of the circumstances are different, but the spirit of the resemblance is there. The hero of World of Wonders, Paul Dempster, is born in the tiny southern Ontario village of Deptford in 1910, to the town’s Baptist preacher and his madwoman wife. On August 30, 1918, Paul’s life is changed forever when, in defiance of his father’s orders, he sneaks into the village fair to see the carnival sideshow, becomes fascinated with the performance of the magician Willard the Wizard, only to be sodomized and kidnapped by Willard, a junkie who teaches Paul his entire repertoire of magic before his addiction finally debilitates and kills him....
By Neal Pollack Bynum told everyone to go home, but the workers said they wanted to vote. “You don’t have to vote,” he replied. “You shouldn’t be troubled with this duty.” “He knew we were going to go against the contract,” said Robert Lee Wilson Jr., who’s worked for the last two decades at a laundry seven blocks south of the union’s office. “He knew we didn’t want a 25-cent raise....
Analyzing Monica Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although I enjoy Monica Kendrick’s Spot Check column enough to read it every week and agree with her collection of 50-word band blurbs at least half of the time, there is always something, either relentless PC-isms or general smugness, that creates a fine line between enjoying her often astute observations and an immediate inclination to use Section Three to clean up dog shit....
The eighth annual festival is as vigorous as ever–perhaps even more than ever. This year organizers have brought the Iwisa Music and Dance Company from Zimbabwe to Chicago, where they’ve been in residence for a month, giving free performances that amply demonstrate their vocal and kinetic talents. A group of nine young men–none is older than 22–they started performing together as students at Nkukumane High School in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city....
European Union Film Festival Katja von Garnier directed this 1997 German feature about four music-making female convicts who break out of prison during a policemen’s ball. (6:00) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1998 made-for-TV Italian feature (with English dialogue) focuses on a wealthy British pianist in Rome (David Thewlis) and his attraction to his African housekeeper (Thandie Newton), whose husband is a political prisoner....
Love Songs The current craze to create multimedia work usually results in ambitious jumblings of art forms onstage. That “anything goes” aesthetic used to be the bailiwick of performance art, but dance-theater is perhaps the most inclusive genre these days. It’s not uncommon to find video, sculpture, opera, storytelling, tableaux vivants, and plain old acted scenes tossed in with pure dance in unusual, often arresting combinations. In the hands of a genius like Pina Bausch, the “bastardization” of dance can bring about aesthetic revelations bordering on the sublime....
