From the pages of Bitch ¥ Volume 3, Number 3 (3128 16th Street, Box 143, San Francisco, CA 94103; $3.25) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t start out in the world a hard-ass, I swear. I was the nice girl, Little Mary Sunshine. But you know what finally pushed me over the edge? I’ll sum it up for you in one word: breasts....
Ajax Won’t Quit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since the fall of 1996, Adams has been running the mail-order business out of his home, successfully enough that he didn’t need to take another job. But though Ajax started as a living-room business back in 1989, when Adams was employed as an accountant at Ernst & Young, he says he’s been suffering from cabin fever....
“Nothing has frustrated me in this job. Absolutely nothing,” says Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, interviewed in Illinois Issues (March). “I’m in a great position. I don’t want to be a lifetime school superintendent. I don’t want to be an education consultant when I’m done here. I’m not setting the stage to run for political office. If I physically survive this job and accomplish what I hope to accomplish and what the mayor hopes to accomplish, then my ticket is written: I’m going to heaven....
DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dance Theatre of Harlem, a company of monumental historic importance, is the first and finest among all-black ballet companies, led by Balanchine protege Arthur Mitchell. And its Chicago run features two meaty new works. John Alleyne, artistic director of Ballet British Columbia, is one of the most exciting choreographers on the planet, creating dances in a style increasingly called extreme ballet–dance that pushes physical limits, also produced by choreographers like William Forsythe and Ashley Page....
Rushmore Rating *** A must see Directed by Wes Anderson Written by Anderson and Owen Wilson With Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Seymour Cassel, Brian Cox, Mason Gamble, Sara Tanaka, Stephen McCole, Connie Nielsen, and Luke Wilson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film is a comedy about Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a 15-year-old student at Rushmore Academy, a private school in a small town, who’s too wrapped up in a bevy of extracurricular activities–hilariously cataloged in one extended montage sequence–to finish his schoolwork....
JAY-Z/BIG PUNISHER/NOREAGA/CRUCIAL CONFLICT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For better or worse the three headliners on this bill represent the cream of New York’s mainstream hip-hop crop. What Jay-Z, Big Punisher, and Noreaga have to offer doesn’t have much on gangsta rap–they, too, mostly boast about their street-tempered toughness–but at least the tired west-coast musical tropes have been replaced by lean, mean east-coast beats....
KEN VANDERMARK-GEORG GREWE LARGE BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week, Georg GrŠwe and Ken Vandermark chose an especially ambitious curtain-raiser for the debut of their brand-new octet, an episodic GrŠwe composition that stretched to a set-long 45 minutes and alternated short, spiky solo turns–for bassist Kent Kessler and detail-oriented drummer Tim Mulvenna–with duo and trio sections of escalating complexity. In the second set, composed of five shorter pieces, Vandermark’s music held sway, first with a gothic romance for his own hyperventilated tenor saxophone and later with a swinging south-side jaunt that trombonist Jeb Bishop made his own....
KEVIN COLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the year since Kevin Cole first presented his Gershwin Solo at the Ivanhoe Theater, his singing has gained noticeably in resonance and expressiveness, thanks in part to lessons from veteran songwriter (and sometime coach to Judy Garland) Hugh Martin. Still, Cole’s ace in the hole is his ebullient, dynamic piano playing, which combines brilliant technique, playful wit, and lush but never overstated lyricism....
Dear Albert Williams: Did the fact she was young and beautiful cause you to write about her–if it is you are as bad as all the people you have a problem with. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But, what’s so wrong with B movies? All it means is not as much money, big stars as an A-list movie, plus it is the lower-case, independent part of a double bill or double feature....
MCA: Room at the Top Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consey completed the herculean task of funding, erecting, and opening the MCA’s $50 million new building on East Chicago, but according to art dealer Richard Gray, there was “a certain incompatibility between Kevin and the MCA’s mission. It appeared that the institution under his direction was not able to project and communicate a clear sense of what its mission should be....
NICHOLAS PAYTON QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The modern jazz roster brims with accomplished trumpeters, largely because Wynton Marsalis–the influential progenitor of the 90s’ blast to the past–happens to play that instrument. But the youngest player on the A-list, Nicholas Payton, could well eclipse them all. His first appearances begged comparisons to Louis Armstrong: he, too, hails from New Orleans, and he can effortlessly summon Armstrong’s vulcanized tone and brash strut....
Cheri An interesting web of relationships–and it became more intricate over the years that Colette and Auguste were involved: she divorced her first husband and took up with the man who would become her second, Henry de Jouvenel, editor of the newspaper Le matin (where Colette later served as theater critic). Clearly Colette defied traditional attitudes toward adultery, homosexuality, and May-September relationships. (In a society defined by sexist double standards, it was an extraordinary assertion of female equality and independence for a mature woman to sleep with a younger man–especially if she was the one who decided when the arrangement was over....
Polish Film Festival in America A moderately successful Warsaw lawyer slogs through the petty annoyances and ethical dilemmas of modern Poland in this troubling feature by Jerzy Stuhr. Once a student leader in the anticommunist movement, he’s been ground down by his dead-end job and the stagnant economy; over the course of seven days he struggles to buy a home, adopt a child, and make his dying mother comfortable, yet the more he fights the more the world overwhelms him....
PUBLIC ENEMY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just because Public Enemy are no longer bigger than Jesus doesn’t mean they’ve gone soft. Quite the opposite: the main thing that separates their Clinton-era work from their incredible four-album run out of the gate (including 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, still the greatest hip-hop album of all time) is how brittle it is....
RADIO TARIFA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Romany peoples (aka Gypsies) are thought to have followed one of two routes in their trek from India to Europe aeons ago: the more widely accepted path traverses Asia Minor or Russia, but the other spans the eight miles of water between Morocco and Spain–a journey that would’ve taken the Romany across Africa first. The Madrid-based trio Radio Tarifa, which takes its name from the southernmost Spanish cape on the Strait of Gibraltar, capitalizes on the traffic that’s passed between Europe and Africa since, swirling Moroccan and other north African rhythms together with traditional Spanish sounds and other European folk elements in a trans-Mediterranean melange....
RAFAEL TORAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Portuguese guitarist and sound artist Rafael Toral is quick to thank all the American musicians who’ve opened doors for him–Phill Niblock (whose Guitar Too, for Four Toral has recorded for a forthcoming release), John Zorn, Jim O’Rourke, and John Cage among them–he’s thrived on the intimacy and relative isolation of the experimental music scene, such as it is, of Lisbon, where he’s been free to develop his own unpretentious, lucid aesthetic....
I am an 18-year-old college student. It’s been said that college is the time in your life when you can get the most ass in your life. My question: Where’s mine?!?! I’m not some 300-pound Dungeons & Dragons-playing dork; I’m your average six-foot-two, 135-pound recovering drug addict. There was an article about me in the school paper and my struggle to get clean and how much of a better person I am because of it, but no dates came as a result....
If a sports fan should have a heightened appreciation for the play of a Tiger Woods or a Michael Jordan in today’s unforgiving media spotlight, what’s the proper response to a Frank Thomas? Thomas, like Jordan before him and Woods now, has faced steadily increasing scrutiny and pressure during his career. Unlike those two champions, he seems to have cracked. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It wasn’t all that long ago that the “Big Hurt”–easily the most evocative nickname of the current generation, in which nicknames have for the most part gone out of fashion–was the darling of the south side, a certain Hall of Famer....
KING KONG, UZ JSME DOMA 12/5, LOUNGE AX We here in America tend to equate traditionalism with sincerity and the avant-garde with cold, calculating intellectualism. But for Czech bands like Uz Jsme Doma, subsisting for years on smuggled Frank Zappa and Residents, to break musical taboos is still truly gutsy, even revolutionary. On its Fairy-Tales From Needland, recently reissued in the U.S. by the D.C. label Skoda, the quintet has created a concept album based on, as lyricist Miroslav Wanek explains, “trying to imagine what it would be like 600 or 700 years from now when people would tell fairy tales based on our experience....
STRANGE CASE: JEKYLL & HYDE, Lifeline Theatre. Perhaps what’s most impressive about Lifeline’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ghoulish variation on the doppelganger tale is that it restores the story’s inherent creepiness, rescuing it from the Grand Guignol kitsch of the Broadway musical, more than a dozen films, and one pretty awful early Who song. Steve Totland’s script, apparently set partly in the present day, and Ann Boyd’s impressionistic direction make this an altogether eerie and somber affair with nary a moment of levity–less than appropriate for the children I saw attending a Sunday matinee....
