Headline Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Are Good Neighbor Committee members fearful and angry? Of course they are. You would be too if you lived near an industrial facility that spews the barrage of chemicals that Clark does into Blue Island’s environment. Are committee members struggling to understand how an oil refinery operates? Of course they are, and it’s not easy. But that’s why CBE is there–to help level the playing field....
LUKAS FOSS AND RICHARD STOLTZMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For much of his career, composer, conductor, pianist, and educator Lukas Foss worked in the shadow of his contemporary Leonard Bernstein, taking assignments in Buffalo and Milwaukee and along the way compiling an impressive, if unclassifiable, body of work. Now 75, Foss is finally being recognized as a true American master, a refugee from Nazi Germany who’s made an indelible mark on the musical culture of his adopted country....
Renee Rohr: Rubber Song By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rohr, a French sculptor living in Belgium and showing in Chicago for the first time, arranges rubber forms on metal frameworks. “The flexibility and the elasticity of the rubber [are] sensually linked to the rigidity and the coldness of the steel,” she writes–but in many of her works both are black, and one can’t tell the rubber from the steel at first....
RAY BROWN TRIO WITH GEOFF KEEZER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bass-playing marvel Ray Brown brought his trio to town just last fall, but I can think of two reasons to recommend him again. First–and despite the word’s devaluation in describing two-hit wonders–he’s a jazz legend, one of the half-dozen most influential postwar bassists and a founding member of both the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Oscar Peterson Trio, two signal groups of the 1950s....
Jour de fete With Jacques Tati, Paul Frankeur, Guy Decomble, Santa Relli, and Maine Vallee. In 1942 Jacques Tati was living in occupied France. The grandson of a Dutch picture framer whose clients included Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, the 34-year-old Tati had played rugby, performed in music halls, and acted in a few short comic films. That year he left Paris with a screenwriter friend named Henri Marquet in search of the remotest part of the country they could find, hoping to escape recruitment as workers in Germany....
I’m sitting in my recliner late on a Sunday night, surrounded by a week’s worth of newspapers, when the phone rings. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” my ex-wife says. “There was something funny in a Bob Greene column.” “But what part?” she asks. It’s hard to believe but it’s obviously true: after all these years the only woman I ever married is still not sure that we share the same sense of humor....
Touch Me Not Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gerardo de Leon’s 1961 historical drama, set in the Philippines during the final days of Spanish rule, burns with the kind of emotional urgency that characterizes The Birth of a Nation, as the scion of a wealthy family returns from his studies in Madrid to find his hometown on the verge of a populist uprising. The film has its share of improbable plot twists and stock characters (especially its villainous priests and colonels, who parallel the ruling elite in the Philippines following the American occupation), and much of its acting and visual vocabulary are deliriously anachronistic, closer to D....
VON FREEMAN QUARTET WITH ROBERT HENRY JOHNSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What becomes a legend most? In the case of Von Freeman, whose reputation began to spread beyond Chicago about 30 years ago and has yet to retreat, it’s a willingness to go beyond the tried-and-true: this performance will place him and his quartet onstage with San Francisco dancer and choreographer Robert Henry Johnson for a unique improvised pas de cinq....
By Michael Miner Just about everybody you employed at Windy City Times has quit to start a newspaper of their own, I said. Feld wasn’t the only one discontented. Most of the Windy City staff had been stewing for a long time and for a lot of reasons, some of them personal, some philosophical. They complained about paychecks that arrived late. They complained that McCourt, the editor and publisher, was marketing his paper for a narrow, upscale gay market when the community it ought to serve was far broader....
[Re: “You Can’t Fool Mrs. Sykes,” September 15] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Car usage, like tobacco usage, is an addiction that once begun is very hard to stop. I didn’t use cars regularly until I married into one when I was 37. By the time I was 40, I was a two-car user. Now, at 54, I will soon be a member of a three-car family....
DR. LONNIE SMITH & RONNIE CUBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The chance to hear either of these guys–the delightfully unorthodox organist Dr. Lonnie Smith or the booting baritone man Ronnie Cuber–would be worth the price of admission. But the chance to hear them together again for the first time in 30 years? Priceless. Smith and Cuber met in 1966, when they both joined George Benson’s first band, and when Smith left a couple years later to form his own group, he took Cuber with him....
JEB LOY NICHOLS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the three albums he made with his group Fellow Travellers, Jeb Loy Nichols–a Missouri native who moved to England in 1983–supported his spare, folky pop songs with the fat bass and lean percussion of dub reggae. The unusual pairing gave an intriguing rhythmic elasticity to his often wispy tunes. His solo debut, Lovers Knot (Capitol), adds a mainstream gloss, but fundamentally nothing has changed....
LONNIE SHIELDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lonnie Shields hails from the blues stronghold of West Helena, Arkansas, but until the late 70s, when he allied himself with sometime Sonny Boy Williamson sideman Sam Carr, he considered himself more of a funk musician. Even nowadays Shields’s style is a custom blend of modern funk, soul, and R & B, as well as more traditional 12-bar blues....
As a small boy in the early 1950s, Lin Hwai-min watched the classic ballet movie The Red Shoes 11 times. “I was very impressed with how high the dancers jumped and how they made those shoes do the monkey business,” he recalls. But his parents, intellectuals from an old, distinguished southern Taiwanese family, frowned on their son going into the arts, let alone something as lowly as dance. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
daruszka.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are a number of good reasons that Chris Cohen’s “modest” proposals are falling on deaf ears at Metra [Neighborhood News, August 15]. In an era of diminishing governmental funding for public transportation, agencies like Metra must put their limited capital funds to the best uses. The equipment and infrastructure of Chicago’s commuter rail system is in serious need of repair or replacement....
ROY CAMPBELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York trumpeter Roy Campbell is no one-trick pony–and if he were he’d almost certainly be more famous. Though he’s best known for his avant-garde work, with Jemeel Moondoc, Cecil Taylor, Ellen Christi, and Sunny Murray, among others, he also happens to be a marvelous straight-ahead player. But since he’s too old to be a young lion, doesn’t favor Armani suits, and refuses to simply rehash postbop platitudes, the jazz establishment has found him easier to ignore than sell....
A few years back I took some snapshots of my wife-to-be. She was naked at the time. This unprocessed roll of film has been sitting in my desk for a while, and I’d like to get the pictures developed. However, I have no intention of going to the supermarket and having the old lady behind the film counter glare at me. Worse yet, I would hate for the pimply-faced boy working the machine to distribute naked pictures of my wife at his high school....
When I watch a movie on television or videotape, there is sometimes a statement that this movie has been formatted to fit my screen. My question is, how do they know what size my screen is? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First some history. Prior to 1953 all movies were shot in 1.33:1, and the infant TV industry adopted the same format. But for just that reason movie moguls decided they needed a different format to parry the perceived threat from the tube....
The Music in My Head (Stern’s Africa) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So I had an Afropop-inspired dream–big deal, right? Well, when’s the last time you had one? Most of this music, if it comes to us at all, comes with a minimum of context, rarely sung in English, so that only the tune makes it through intact. It has a hard enough time insinuating itself into our CD changers, much less our subconscious; most of us who listen do so as contented outsiders, dutiful NPR subscribers, worldly cocktail-party hosts....
ANONYMOUS 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Attending an Anonymous 4 concert is like entering a cloister where disagreeable thoughts are banished and the spirit is cleansed by soothing, unearthly voices. Perhaps that accounts for the a cappella quartet’s rising popularity in these incivil times; perhaps it also explains why the group is warmly embraced by New Agers. But Anonymous 4 is what it has been since its four gifted singers banded together in 1986–a vocal ensemble dedicated to reviving the medieval musical forms of chant and polyphony....
