Liesl Orenic makes roughly $12,000 a year at a job that offers no benefits and no guarantees that the next day won’t be her last. But in the last few years colleges and universities looking to cut back on labor costs have increasingly used part-timers as cheap substitutes for full-time professors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The result is that temporary positions once seen as stepping-stones have become permanent....
Ornate Rituals for Absurd Worlds The title for this evening of dance is a dead giveaway: we’re in the domain of absurdism, a theatrical movement based in existentialism, which holds that we live in an absurd world in which life is meaningless and from which God is absent. The theatrical response to this absurd world is to throw absurdity back in the world’s face, through fantastical plots and impossible characters. Absurdism is in many ways a magical device for keeping absurdity at bay: by reflecting an absurd world back to itself, the artist acts only as a mirror, purging himself of absurdity and making himself whole again....
On the Edge: The Films of Greta Snider Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seen one at a time, Greta Snider’s films might look offhand and oddly incomplete. She eschews technical refinements, seems uninterested in rhythmically precise editing, and often leaves the meanings of her collagelike combinations of material up to the viewer. But the way she partly removes or qualifies her authorial presence has its roots in her feminism....
Sewer Cop Yarnik regularly consults shop vacs in industrial parking lots throughout Chicago and the western suburbs, making a couple hundred site visits a year. The data he collects on industrial wastewater play a big role in his mission, which he describes as “keeping the sewers free of substances having a deleterious effect on the district’s treatment capabilities.” He translates: “If you put something in the sewer that shouldn’t be there, we find you....
The White Sox might at long last have stumbled on the remedy for their attendance woes. Nothing draws a crowd of Chicagoans, especially on the south side, like a fight–and the Sox engaged in a full-scale bench-clearing, blind-punch-throwing, spikes-gouging brouhaha Saturday afternoon against the Detroit Tigers. A crowd of 38,912 had slowly filled Comiskey Park for a rare night-game home opener two weeks ago–but poor weather for the next four games pushed down attendance, which bottomed out at a mere 8,425 for a misty matinee a week ago Wednesday....
The Lion In Winter, Canongate Theatre Company, at Profiles Theatre. Certainly it’s valid for James Goldman to reimagine the struggle for royal succession as an upper-middle-class family squabble tarted up with tunics and grandiloquent speech. But by portraying Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine as the 12th century’s answer to the Bickersons, and their power-thirsty three sons as twits, Goldman has rendered any conflict dramatically uninvolving. In this 1960s version of King Lear, with sons instead of daughters and insults and platitudes instead of poetry, a battle for power carries all the historical weight of children fighting for control of the family landscaping business....
Friday, October 9 On balance, “Dogma 95”–a Danish manifesto signed by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and others that calls for location shooting, handheld cameras, direct sound, and an avoidance of special effects–probably has more significance as a publicity stunt than as an ideological breakthrough, judging from the first two features to emerge under its ground rules, von Trier’s The Idiots and Vinterberg’s The Celebration. Both films are apparent acts of rebellion and daring that are virtually defined by their middle-class assumptions and dogged apoliticism, though von Trier’s movie boasts one good scene surrounded by a lot of ersatz Cassavetes....
Around the turn of the [last] century, Chicago was a brewer’s mecca, home to some 55 breweries,” says Greg Hall, the 33-year-old brewmaster of Goose Island Beer Company. In fact, Chicago was born over beer. The city charter was drafted and signed in a tavern, and several of the founding fathers and earliest officeholders for whom streets are named were brewers or tavern owners–Ogden, Wacker, and Diversey among them. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Captured at www.cybereditions. com/aldaily/bwc.htm “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power....
“When [Henry Chandler] Cowles’ [University of Chicago] dissertation was published in 1899, it attracted national and international attention to the area at a time when many believed the [Indiana] dunes to be a wilderness wasteland full of sand and mosquitoes, ideal for industrial development and sand mining,” writes Kim Holsen in “Singing Sands Almanac” (Spring). The Indiana Dunes are full of sand and mosquitoes, but Cowles pointed out other, subtler attributes....
It’s appropriate that Portuguese choreographer Clara Andermatt’s A Story of Doubt receive its midwest debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art: this strongly visual dance-theater piece relies heavily on architect Carlos Gomes’s ingenious set. A movable platform taller than a man can be used as a bulwark for military defense, a sailing ship, a humble, low-lying hut lit from within. And a burnished metal wall as high as four men beautifully reflects or captures light; outfitted with doors and windows, it also allows for sudden, dramatic entrances....
FRED SIMON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With so many jazz musicians focusing on speed and virtuosity these days, Chicago pianist Fred Simon looks like quite a reactionary. He assiduously avoids technical flash, favoring moderate tempos and uncomplicated rhythms, uncluttered textures and open harmonies. In his compositions, he displays a fondness for arioso melodies that sound a lot like Wayne Shorter’s–and even more like those of another of his idols, singer-songwriter James Taylor....
MISHA MENGELBERG/AB BAARS TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nineteen ninety-eight has been the year of the flying Dutchman in Chicago–in May the Empty Bottle Jazz Festival imported reedists Peter Van Bergen and Ab Baars and the fabulous Clusone Trio, featuring drummer Han Bennink and cellist Ernst Reijseger; now, in conjunction with a Dutch presentation at the Chicago International Film Festival, we get this rare treat....
Sebadoh Sebadoh’s new album, The Sebadoh, opens with a sustained dull electric buzz, like the sound of a cheap guitar amp turned up too loud. It’s a noise many old fans will surely take as a sonic welcome mat. After an unprecedented three-year hiatus, the loss of drummer Bob Fay, and the move to LA by founding member and longtime Massachusetts slacker Lou Barlow, that buzz signals Sebadoh’s continued allegiance to the little grease-stained flag of lo-fi....
NRG ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Under its founder, Hal Russell, the NRG Ensemble planted many of the seeds that eventually bloomed into Chicago’s bustling free-jazz and improvised-music scene, so there’s a certain irony in the fact that the group rarely performs these days. The old NRG combined madcap humor, raucous energy, an inviting informality, and a nonchalant virtuosity into a woolly amalgam that attracted music fans who ordinarily might have had little interest in free jazz....
Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni is a hell of a storyteller. Early last semester an audience of students, faculty, lawyers, and judges packed into a lecture hall at DePaul University to hear him describe his role in digging the foundation for the world’s first permanent international criminal court, an independent judicial body that may one day try the world’s worst criminals. It was standing room only even before he made his entrance and worked his way to the podium, glad-handing friends, colleagues, and the delegation of Egyptian jurists that filled the first three rows....
Jin Soo Kim is thinking hard about Evanston. In her storefront studio, amid the junk that is her raw material–old railroad tracks, ten-watt lightbulbs, an abandoned bathroom sink–she’s been trying to distill the essence of her adopted hometown and put it into a form suitable to adorn the facade of a parking garage. Evanston has an ordinance that says a part of the cost of any new city building (usually about 1 percent) should be earmarked for art to decorate it....
Lungfish Punk’s devotional element is a crucial part of its myth. Hell, it is the myth–after your first punk epiphany, you’re supposed to realize you’ve found the one true Way. Of course, in reality most punk bands can’t deliver three-chord transcendence on a consistent basis. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A veteran of the late-80s and early-90s performance-poetry scene, Higgs is 36 going on infinity....
Films by Rainer Werner As skeptical as I often was in the 70s about Fassbinder as a role model, I’ve been more than a little disconcerted by the speed with which he’s vanished from mainstream consciousness. Having now seen two dozen of his 37 features, one of his four short films, and one of his four TV series–though I haven’t seen many of them since they came out–I find much of his work, for all its deliberate topicality, as fresh now as when it first appeared....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A cochlear implant, not a hearing aid in the traditional sense, is a sort of computerized transmitter placed inside the ear via wiring inserted through a hole drilled in the skull and hooked up to a contraption worn outside the body. The implant doesn’t enable the deaf to hear sounds in the same way that a hearing person does; it converts sound into signals that are transmitted to the brain, which often must relearn how to interpret them....
