What’s the scoop on hemp? Is it true that in earlier days of our country over 90 percent of paper was made of hemp? Is it true hemp is one of the strongest fibers known to man? Why is it illegal to grow it, since it is only about 1 percent THC? In fact, it is only a relative of the plant that is cultivated for smoking, is it not? It just seems that cultivation of hemp would be such an easy solution to the deforestation problems we are having....
Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just wanted to thank Dan Savage for writing such a pointed and honest piece about the Columbine tragedy [May 14]. Over the past month, we have all been inundated with the blatherings of Hollywood moguls, the saccharine platitudes of senators, the cold, reptilian disavowals of responsibility of CEOs, and the psychobabble of mental-health “experts.” All in all, it has been an insincere and clumsy tiptoe around the central issues surrounding the tragedy made largely by the people who were themselves tormentors and bullies of high school....
Chicago Symphony Orchestra I was never much of a fan of modernism and certainly not of its ideology. But after hearing a lot of the new stuff I have to say I miss the old doctrinaire passion. The new works–such as John Adams’s recent large-scale atonal pieces Harmonielehre and the Chamber Symphony–sound like they were written mostly for laughs, as a kind of retro-kitsch nostalgia; they make modernism out to be the classical equivalent of Lava lamps or platform shoes....
From the pages of Travelling Shoes ¥ Number One, Summer 1997 (P.O. Box 206653, New Haven, CT 06520-6653; $2) Signs advertising inexpensive prime rib are everywhere in Las Vegas. They’re more ubiquitous than advertisements for Siegfried and Roy; more common than pictures of Wayne Newton. The marquee of every hotel, every casino, and every two-bit juke joint in town touts a low-cost prime rib meal. And, if we can believe those marquees, prime rib isn’t just for dinner anymore....
BUSTA RHYMES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beyond all the moronic, paranoid apocalyptic rigmarole on Busta Rhymes’s latest album, Extinction Level Event–The Final World Front (Elektra), is some of the rapper’s best work. If you can get through the interminable between-song skits (and get past his cartoonish media-whore persona) you’ll find the skittering, stuttering post-Timbaland beat schemes of “Tear da Roof Off” and “Gimme Some More,” the heavy-funk call to party “Do the Bus a Bus,” an overdriven shouting match with Mystikal (“Iz They Wildin Wit Us & Gettin Rowdy Wit Us?...
Dick O’Day might get beaten up on a regular basis if he weren’t so damn funny. O’Day, the host of the Annoyance Theatre’s monthly Big Lovely Bingo, just snatched an audience member’s purse and is busy riffling through the contents. “Nothing embarrassing,” he says with great disappointment, then tosses it back to its owner. She laughs without a hint of resentment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Through it all, the victims smile as though being ridiculed is a privilege....
Incident at Vichy, Writers’ Theatre Chicago. Lately the American theater seems so devoid of a conscience that just hearing Arthur Miller’s voice is refreshing–particularly in this top-notch production of his gripping, underappreciated morality play, written when he was still in his prime, about suspects rounded up by Nazi officers in occupied France. In this almost unbearably tense play, the prisoners await their inevitable fates and plot futilely to escape a rapidly deteriorating society in which only businessmen and aristocrats stand a chance of survival....
By Michael Miner “Is the public fed up? It’s not quite there, but almost,” said Trunzo. “I think the public is saturated with it, and they’ve let the press know from the beginning that they weren’t too overwhelmed with the idea that the president they found satisfactory in many ways had been caught with his knickers down. The public is definitely moving away from it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Lily, Stillpoint Theater Collective, at the Lunar Cabaret, and Evening at Club Means, at the Lunar Cabaret. Playwright-performer Karine Koret interviewed her grandmother Edna about her experiences during the Holocaust in order to create Lily, a one-woman show. Koret notes in the program that she had to let her grandmother tell the story her own way, but the result is a dramatic, sometimes funny piece distinguished by the naturalness of the storytelling....
This program, the last in a series surveying Mexican experimental cinema, deals rather sketchily with Mexico’s national identity, but Ruben Gamez’s dense, subversive essay film La formula secreta (1965) remains a shocking and richly allusive statement. Devoid of narration, set to Vivaldi, Mozart, and Stravinsky, its potent images and visual metaphors attack Yankee consumerism, Mexico’s sacred cows, and the insidious influence of Coca-Cola and other multinationals. Climaxing with a recited text by Juan Rulfo–a prayer of the poor peasants and urban workers–the film exhorts all Mexicans to overcome stoicism, fatalism, and submissiveness, traits they themselves regard as a national curse....
NEOTROPIC/POLE/J-ROCC & RHETTMATIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Billed as “Night of the Round Tables,” this extravaganza ought to paint a pretty convincing picture of just how amazingly diverse turntable-based music making has become in 1999. Mr Brubakers Strawberry Alarm Clock (Ntone), the second album from Londoner Riz Maslen, aka Neotropic, recalls DJ Shadow in terms of density and the use of unobvious sources–like hammer dulcimer runs and operatic singing, in her case–but you’d never mistake one for the other....
Lead Stories Just Can’t Stop Myself Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Norfolk, Virginia, Todd Jacob Sherman, 24, pleaded guilty in March to swindling an elderly woman out of $70,000. According to the prosecutor, not only did the woman fall for Sherman’s initial pitch, in which he told her to wire him “advance taxes” on a $130,000 sweepstakes prize, but she sent him money over 100 times during the next 33 months....
By Carl Kozlowski Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a young boy in the late 30s, Jagiello took the streetcar with his family from their home in Wicker Park to Caldwell Woods, at Devon and Milwaukee, where groups representing different villages in Poland would gather for picnics every weekend, each bringing its own polka band. Jagiello would watch and sing along, and soon a band snagged him to sing at weddings....
Some researcher should do a study of depression among Chicago sports reporters over the next few months. Or, for that matter, among Chicago sports fans. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It wasn’t just me who was falling back into a funk. Although the beat writers and others covering the Bulls on a daily basis are giddy to have actual news to concentrate on (not to mention the month of June suddenly open for vacations), others in the media less involved with the day-to-day operations and more devoted to basketball aesthetics soon became despondent....
BOTTLETONES 7/23, SCHUBAS This is a CD-release party for the Carbondale quintet’s Sheriff of Bottletone Co. (Relay), a dense packet of fuzzed-up, tricked-out, and thoroughly Albinied southern boogiebilly, influenced at least as much by the Cramps and the Flat Duo Jets as by any 40s swing band or 50s rockabilly outfit I can think of. All the tunes are originals except a slightly flattened version of “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” from Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs–a vast, barely tapped source of material for this sort of band, as Waits was writing vaguely retro poetic odes to lowlifes and lounge lizards long before…everyone else was....
JARBOE 12/10, THE NOTE Singer, keyboardist, and performance artist Jarboe took a lot of heat when she joined Swans in 1986 and dared to exert a complicating influence (or “woman’s touch”) on Michael Gira’s most excellent heart-of-darkness grind. In fact her 13-year collaboration with Gira pushed both of them in directions they never could have imagined: his songwriting grew more nuanced and she honed her natural sense of drama to a dangerous edge....
The following appeared in Chuck Shepherd’s “News of the Weird” feature. Can this really be? Fill me in, please! –Suzette, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On first reading this I was as incredulous as the next guy. So I sent my henchman Mike Lenehan to the Paris airport to check things out firsthand. (No big deal, he was in the neighborhood....
It’s a miracle! No, I don’t have stigmata, I haven’t tasted a Circus Peanut and enjoyed it, and I haven’t heard Steve Miller apologize for ripping off other artists. What has happened is that I’ve found relief for my asthma in a medication known as a steroid (Azmacort). I assume it’s not the same kind of steroid that pumps up men and women with low self-esteem or athletes with no conscience....
BERLIN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s the best orchestra in the world? These days just about everybody puts the Berlin Philharmonic at the top of the list, and even those who’d rank it second or third have to admit it’s been consistently excellent for far longer than any of its peers: founded in 1882, the orchestra achieved greatness within the decade under the baton of Hans von Bülow....
[Re: “Das Boot,” August 25] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I represented a disabled veteran recently. His tale of woe was interesting–he bought a used car and had to go out of town right after he bought it. He didn’t have time to take the old plates off it. On his return the car was gone. It had been booted and towed. He was told to go to a pound to get the vehicle....
