The merchants along Milwaukee between Armitage and Diversey remember Stanley Wissner well because he often came into their stores, beginning in the early 90s. He was a shambling figure with yellowed teeth and worn clothes who gave off a strong odor. In winter he favored a face mask, a long coat, one pair of pants pulled over another, and an old pair of galoshes. For a time he was accompanied by an Airedale, to which he appeared devoted....
This comedy about an Anglo-Indian girl who wants to play professional soccer has been a crowd pleaser in the UK, Australia, and South Africa–all places where soccer is a national religion–but the crowd I saw it with seemed more delighted by its affectionate satire of tradition-minded Indians living in Britain, a subculture well known to writer-director Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach). Newcomer Parminder Nagra is sweet and sincere as the aspiring jock, whose parents would prefer her to become a solicitor and marry a nice Indian man; Keira Knightley is tartly sexy as her supportive teammate....
BILL BRUFORD’S EARTHWORKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the drummer for Yes and later King Crimson, Bill Bruford plied fusion from the wild side, so when he took a few steps away from their extravagant prog and formed his jazz-rock group Earthworks in 1986, it represented a shift in balance rather than a sea change in the substance of his music. Comprising fellow Brits about half their leader’s age, the first incarnation of Earthworks was distinguished by Bruford’s energetic, Chick Corea-influenced compositions and inventive, tasteful use of drum electronics–it was the last noteworthy fusion band, and perhaps the most thoughtful in a decade....
Chicago’s Next Dance Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Independent choreographer Paula Frasz has a flair for the double-edged dance, funny but with a serious side. Her new quartet for the sixth annual Next Dance Festival, American Girl, is made up of four solos that explore various identities women in our society have taken on: working girl, thuggish slacker, dreamy small-town soul, and suburban power mom....
One Wednesday last month more than 500 people streamed into the main auditorium of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to watch the company’s sold-out performance of Julius Caesar. Audiences had been filling the Navy Pier house for almost two months, but this one was different–it was made up of high school students from several local public schools. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Halperin estimates that since the program started ten years ago it’s brought Shakespeare to more than half a million students....
About Face Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art team up for a showcase of new gay- and lesbian-themed works in various stages of development. Offerings range from workshop productions to readings and discussions, as shown in the schedule below. The festival runs February 22-March 6 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Ticket prices for individual programs are given below; all-access passes cost $35. For more information and reservations, call 312-397-4010....
The flexible and adventurous chamber troupe Fulcrum Point does its best to keep up with the times–its slogan is “Where classical music meets popular culture.” And in fact the timing of the group’s current project–a three-concert survey of music written in response to the oppression of post-Mao China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany–couldn’t be more appropriate. Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8 is a fitting centerpiece for this Tuesday’s Russian concert, as perhaps no 20th-century composer was as aware of the challenges of coping with the shifting ideological winds of a totalitarian regime....
It was common knowledge in early Victorian England that ether vapors and nitrous oxide dulled pain–for decades both chemicals figured in comical stage acts in which people under their influence suffered abuses with giddy oblivion. So why did it take nearly half a century for doctors to adopt these anesthetics in the operating theater? Alison Winter, a historian of science at the University of Chicago, traces this mystery to the concurrent popularity of mesmerism, a practice of inducing trance by supposedly manipulating invisible magnetic fluids in a person’s body....
Art history is precisely what I would like to leave behind in today’s discussion,” announced Hamza Walker, education director of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. “The museum and gallery must forgo its claims to ‘legitimate’ culture, as the goods can only be deemed legit by members of that culture.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Walker was introducing the latest installation at the society’s art gallery, nestled among the classrooms at Cobb Hall....
The Believer, an independent feature, premiered on cable nearly three months ago, after failing to get a distributor. But it was recently picked up and is opening this week at Landmark’s Century Centre. It’s already created a good deal of buzz, most of it justified. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bean’s published screenplay describes him as “a successful screenwriter whose credits include such major motion pictures as Internal Affairs…and Enemy of the State....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September in Pinson, Alabama, 46-year-old Joseph Logan was arrested for attempted murder shortly after watching Alabama’s 34-31 double-overtime loss to Arkansas on TV. Logan, apparently distraught over the football game, had been tossing boxes, slamming doors, and throwing dishes into the sink, and at that point his son, Seth, interrupted to ask for his father’s help buying a car....
The sign in the window says “Open,” but on this cold, rainy Thursday the dusty interior of A. Wall Florist at 3115 N. Greenview gives little clue as to what’s happening in back. There, the old greenhouse is bright and cozy, and the air smells of coffee. Chairs, stools, and benches are scattered around the large table once used to prepare corsages and bouquets. In a seat next to the phone, Pearl Wall, the shop’s spry 95-year-old owner, sips coffee and shoots the breeze with the parade of neighbors, friends, police officers, crossing guards, and shopowners who come to visit each day....
When Laud “Nick” Pace died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Melrose Park six years ago, his notoriety had long since subsided, but Bob Spiel remembers him well. Back in December 1978 three Cezanne canvases disappeared from the Art Institute for a loss of $4.3 million, then the biggest art theft in U.S. history. Spiel, an FBI agent specializing in art-related crimes, focused his investigation on a shipping clerk at the museum: Nick Pace had asked a curator about the value of the paintings, a janitor had spotted him carrying a package out of the storage room, and when agents searched Pace’s house near Western and Diversey they found a short story he’d written about an art theft....
The premise of Sharon Solwitz’s first novel, Bloody Mary (after the children’s game), is familiar: a middle-aged wife and mother wonders if this is all there is while her pubescent daughter confronts issues of self-identity. It would be a disservice to dismiss this effort as chick lit or mommy lit–it’s a little less blithe and a little more tragic than most contenders in those categories. But I didn’t feel much sympathy for the characters most of the time....
M.O.T.O. 6/6, BEAT KITCHEN No disrespect to the Beat Kitchen, but after more than ten years as a Chicago institution, M.O.T.O. deserves to hold a release party for its 17th album, Kill M.O.T.O. (Criminal I.Q.), in a much bigger venue. Sometimes when I’m making coffee or cleaning up something the cats knocked over, I think of the guitar crumple on “Never Been to Me in a Riot” or the brilliant opening lines of “The Chicks Can Tell” (“Well I just had sex and I’m walking down the street / And the chicks can tell, the chicks can tell”), and for a sec I’m just innocently happy, grinning like a fool, thinking, Damn, I love rock ‘n’ roll....
ELF POWER, ARCHER PREWITT 5/24, ABBEY PUB On their new Creatures (Spinart), Elephant 6 darlings Elf Power sound as if they might be coasting just a tiny bit–or maybe the near perfection of their trippy pop and the fact that it bears so many repeated listenings just aren’t shocking anymore. Either way, though, I hate that “Let the Serpent Sleep” will never be a Top Ten hit in this world. Sea and Cake guitarist Archer Prewitt’s third solo album, Three (Thrill Jockey), is a leap forward; his first couple outings under his own name struck me as overly polite, as if he were afraid that putting forth something as obnoxious and manipulative as a melody or chorus would turn him into a strutting cock rocker....
Jazz demands (or at least requests) that its practitioners come to the stage with a storehouse of musical knowledge–a solid foundation for the improvising that defines the idiom. So the steady parade of jazz prodigies remains surprising: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Barron, and Wynton Marsalis are among those who made a serious impression before their 20th birthdays. I hesitate to put pianist Taylor Eigsti in their company; no 18-year-old should have to brook such a comparison....
This new play by Yasmina Reza, who also wrote Art, is so slight that if not anchored by substantial performances it will simply float away. Fortunately, William Brown and Peggy Roeder as its two characters–a midlist author and his biggest fan, who happen to share a train compartment–touchingly reveal all the ways we project our fantasies and hopes onto other people. While the unnamed man frets over the minutiae of his life–his daughter’s much older boyfriend, others’ reservations about his new book, his digestion–the woman engages in an imaginary conversation with him about the meaning of life as expressed in that book, which she doesn’t quite have the nerve to read in the author’s elevated presence....
Carlos Murillo and Lisa Portes didn’t quite get off on the right foot. “We disliked each other intensely,” says Murillo, a playwright, “for no reason other than we’d heard so many things through mutual friends and the New York theater grapevine and each assumed the other was the most unbearable, pretentious ass on earth.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then in his mid-20s, Murillo, the 1996 winner of the National Latino Playwrighting Award, had just been commissioned by the Joseph Papp Public Theater and New York Shakespeare Festival to write a new play....
Rock, Pop, Etc. BARENAKED LADIES, LIZ PHAIR, JASON MRAZ perform at “Miracle on State Street V” (a portion of proceeds benefits La Rabida Children’s Hospital & Research Center). Sold out. Sat 12/6, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-263-1138 or 312-902-1500. CATHERINE AVE. Free in-store performances. Sat 11/29, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park. 708-386-6927. Fri 12/5, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 15160 S. La Grange Rd....
