FRED VAN HOVE & JOHANNES BAUER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just a few years ago, the leading lights of the European free-music scene appeared in Chicago about as often as the Virgin Mary. There wasn’t much of an audience for their music because their import-only recordings were hard to come by, and not many promoters were willing to fly them over to play for a handful of people....
Since January some 60 foreign human rights activists have been expelled from Chiapas, Mexico, where violence has been escalating between the government and the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army. One of them was Chicagoan Tom Hansen, who was sent back to the U.S. in February. Though the reason for his expulsion is hazy, Hansen claims it’s because of his work as codirector of the Chiapas Media Project, a group that was delivering video cameras, editing equipment, and blank tapes to two villages in the region....
By Timothy Bisig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I exited Lake Shore Drive at LaSalle, wrenching my neck to see why the cars were stopped, I saw a paddy wagon sitting there facing Clark Street. Car after car switched lanes to avoid catastrophe as I slowly approached the scene, and in front of the wagon was a poor man struggling to move along his chain-driven ice cream cart, all the while being prodded by a cop-on-wheels, a bicycle cop doing circles around the man, who was visibly sweating, panting, and struggling to move his heavy old cart along....
By Ben Joravsky There are three current projects: rebuilding the east entrance, adding an “endangered-species carousel,” and building a new large-mammals habitat. Mary Ann Schultz, the zoo’s director of public affairs, says the new east entrance is needed because “right now there’s no real entrance to the zoo there. Our goal is to create an entranceway so there’s a clear arrival gate to the zoo. The new entrance will have a beautiful wrought-iron archway with sculpted animals and metal vines....
Lead Stories In November Paul Z. Singer, head of Singer Financial Corporation in Philadelphia, was sentenced to nine months in prison for a one-night vandalism spree in 1996. Singer claimed tension from business pressures caused him to load cans of spray paint into a backpack and take off in his BMW. When he was arrested, said police, he had written graffiti all over 31 walls, windows, and cars. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Elizabeth Owen was frustrated. Even though she had worked in filmmaking for years, she still felt it was like pulling teeth to find the resources and people needed to produce a film. “Tracking down people was a lot harder than you would think,” says Owen, who owns a production company, Girlie Girl Productions. “I would call one number and it would say to call another number, which would be disconnected.” Then she read an “angry” letter to the editor by filmmaker Chris McKay in New City last August; McKay was urging Chicago’s independent film community to pool its resources, so Owen decided to call him....
I’m on vacation, so here’s one of my “greatest hits” columns. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We get a lot of letters here at Savage Labs. While every letter is unique, and everyone’s dumb-ass problem is compelling in its own very special way, patterns do emerge, and Wet’s letter is a good example of a certain type of letter we get. The kids in the mail room like to call them HTHs, or “How’d That Happen?...
When the Second City cabaret theater was opened by Paul Sills, Bernie Sahlins, and Howard Alk on December 16, 1959, its name was its founders’ way of thumbing their noses at Chicago’s image as a cultural also-ran. That image was soon laid to rest thanks in large part to Second City’s international influence, with its innovative comedy revues developed through improvisation by the performers. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
mier.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For two weeks in a row you’ve printed letters detracting Linda Lutton’s excellent piece, “Will Development Bury the Barrio?” [April 24]. I’m sick of hearing these morons with their oversimplified, jingoistic, conservative arguments. Is protesting a $500 million taxpayer subsidy of yuppie development at the expense of longtime city residents really getting in the way of “free enterprise”?...
A watershed in Iranian cinema, Dariush Mehrjui’s 1969 second feature follows the example of the Italian neorealists with its stark, sympathetic depiction of an impoverished village that’s suspicious of outsiders but glued together by kinship, religion, and compassion. Based on a short story that was first adapted into a TV play, it has the simplicity of a parable: the people of the village are thrown into chaos when a prize cow is found dead and its owner gradually develops bovine behavior....
After reading your April 14th cover story in Section Three I was left feeling that some very consequential information was missing. Though WBEZ does not include local or avant-garde jazz programming on their jazz show, this music does have a home in the Chicago area. WNUR’s jazz program runs weekday mornings and has a focus on local and avant-garde musicians. This fact may not have been applicable to the slant of your article but I think it is still worthy of some exposure....
By Erika Erhart “I can’t believe the lead singer killed himself,” Sara laments when she returns. “That sucked. I haven’t gone to cardio since.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Come meet Jake–the fitness god,” she whispers, pulling me into a small room next to the tennis courts to introduce me to my personal trainer. “Hey,” says Jake, looking up from a copy of Muscle & Fitness....
By Ted Shen After feeding the animals, Sonia makes her rounds, checking in with her lieutenants and peering into the station’s large, dusty record and CD library. “To tell you the truth, the station pretty much runs itself,” she says with a cheerful smile. But she insists that it gives her enormous pleasure just to come to work, putting in long hours and only rarely taking a vacation. Minkow says the act opened the floodgates for buyouts and megamergers, because companies could now own as many stations as they wanted nationwide....
On the day after Thanksgiving, Marin Goldstein and Han Shan climbed to the top of the Mall of America outside Minneapolis and unfurled a 600-square-foot cartoon that depicted the earth falling through a broken shopping bag. They wanted the mall visitors to ditch their purchases, go home, and observe Thanksgiving Friday as Buy Nothing Day. “Our consumption,” said Shan, “is the mother of all environmental problems.” If you take the manifesto for Buy Nothing Day literally, it’s just plain false....
Friday 3/17 – Thursday 3/23 The World Health Organization says that facial palsy in its early stages is among the 30-plus disorders that are particularly receptive to treatment by the manipulation of needles to regulate the flow of ch’i. Acupuncturist Alex Tiberi of the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine touts needlework in a free lecture titled Chinese Medicine in America 2000, after which he’ll entertain questions about the college’s master’s degree program....
Sharon Evans, cofounder and artistic director of Live Bait Theater, was talking to friends after a performance of her play The Tall Ships when the fire department made a surprise visit. The city denies this, insisting that building inspections are almost entirely complaint driven. Yet in the past two years, established small theaters have received an alarming number of surprise inspections, and many of them–Stage Left, Factory Theater, Annoyance Theatre, Neo-Futurarium, Shattered Globe Theatre–must either pay for expensive renovations or go out of business....
By Andrew Santella But his talent for draftsmanship and design were matched by his contempt for his superiors. “Why should a man have to stand such bastards just for the sake of doing a little work?” he asked his mentor, the pioneering landscape architect Jens Jensen, in a 1938 letter. Caldwell never could stand them for long. He was fired from the Park District in 1939 and again in 1940, after a brief return....
Paula Buchwald grew up in Vienna between the wars. Her father worked for the government but was an artist at heart–and more than an amateur, Buchwald says. “He studied art privately but was very good: lovely landscapes.” When he went into the Vienna Woods with his watercolors, he took her with him. “Vienna is a picturesque city, especially the suburbs. We had a good life there,” Buchwald recalls. “And my father’s brother, Joseph, who lived in Italy, was a well-known painter, so art was very much a part of it....
passage.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pivot Point International, Inc. is more than just a “hairdressing school.” We are a hair and beauty education company that has a network of 2,000 member schools in 42 countries and has an extensive publishing division that produces educational material for the industry on a worldwide basis. Our headquarters and original campus happen to be at the corner of Howard and Clark streets in Rogers Park....
By Ben Joravsky “We’re carting some very important cargo with these children, and yet with the money they pay us a lot of drivers live on the edge of poverty,” says Shirley Jones, a veteran driver for the Robinson Bus Service. “It’s time the industry changes its attitude toward drivers.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1979, drivers at Robinson, one of the largest companies in the system, voted against unionizing....
