Back in 1968 Aurie Pennick was a married teenage mom living in her mother’s south-side apartment. Today she’s finishing her tenth year as head of the largest and most influential open-housing organization in the metropolitan area. “My own life experience is testimony to the need to have access to opportunity,” says Pennick, president and CEO of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. “It’s all about access. Just give someone a chance....
The Palmer Raids: A Theatrical Construction For all of the 20th century and a good part of the 19th it was assumed that radical theater served subversive ends. Think of Bertolt Brecht, breaching the fourth wall in order to get his hands on the capitalist state. Or Julian Beck and Judith Malina, putting their bodies on the line for free love. Or little Alfred Jarry, inventing absurdism basically just to piss off his schoolmaster....
Guess who audits the Chicago Public Schools? “A request for copies of all audits performed by [Arthur] Andersen since 1995 has been made under the Freedom of Information Act and ignored this year, as it has been for the past five years,” writes Tom Sharp in Substance (February). Sleep well. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eeeyuuuuukkkk! How does University of Chicago professor and Bush National Bioethics Commission chairman Leon Kass defend his hostility toward stem-cell research and cloning?...
Response to “Jazz in Bloom” by Jeffrey Felshman, published 26 January, 2001, by Chicago Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyone who has come up against academic committees that are more interested in your resumé than your sound can appreciate Bloom’s achievement. Music is still, by and large, the last profession where demonstrative skill wins out over academic record, but often at the cost of ostracism, rancor, and the jealousy of the PhD Mafia....
MARCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Studs Terkel’s 1999 book American Dreams: Lost and Found examines the lives and aspirations of a wide range of Americans, from a Boston Brahmin to a disillusioned former Miss U.S.A. The NYC-based Acting Company will present a theatrical adaptation of the book tonight as part of its “American Century” series, which has also featured productions of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!...
Ensembles from Spain and Mexico join local troupes in the Goodman Theatre’s first-ever showcase of Latino theater. Coordinated by actor-director Henry Godinez, the fest features readings, performances, and discussions in both Spanish and English. Participants include Chicago’s Teatro Vista, Aguijon Theater Company, and Teatro Luna as well as Mexico’s Certain Inhabitants’ Theatre and Spain’s Compania Marta Carrasco. The Goodman Latino Theater Festival runs through July 20 at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N....
Just before the Illinois corn and soybean harvest begins, it’s customary to tell farm-injury stories. These grim encounters between man and mechanical parts are usually recounted while the poker-faced storyteller is engaged in the very activity that led a neighbor to lose a knuckle, his face, or a testicle. “Caught his shirt sleeve in the grain auger,” the farmer might say, loading grain into an auger. “Ripped off all his clothes and broke about every bone in his body before it spit him out....
Six of the 15 films on this program are by Hy Hirsh, who worked in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1930 until 1955, when he moved to Europe (he died in Paris in 1961). A still photographer and former Hollywood cameraman, Hirsh was fascinated by technology; he also loved jazz, which not only provided the sound track for most of his work but also seems to have influenced its form....
Considering a couple bucks will rent you Frank Capra’s nearly perfect 1946 film–complete with Jimmy Stewart’s pitch-perfect performance–why would any theater imagine that actors standing at microphones and reading would be worth ten times that? Yet this “radio” version of the screenplay by adapter Joe Landry, director Marty Higginbotham, and a crafty cast is well worth the money. The show may have a patina of cuteness: every sound effect is produced live, and actors in 1940s costumes play plucky aw-shucks characters in quirky voices....
Jeff Carter’s graceful Scaffold/Landscape is intended to evoke Indonesian rice fields. But the six particle-board terraces–edged in green carpet and supported by lengths of bamboo–are saved from being either campy or didactic by their size and placement. Rising from floor to ceiling in the corner of a room just off the main gallery at Vedanta, the piece appears to be both a theatrical set and a set of bleachers, making us both actors and audience members....
The last three programs in this excellent series at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, room 307, 5811 S. Ellis, show that identity loss is a more frequent theme in Japanese avant-garde work than the celebration of individualistic moods or visions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the best of the 14 films and videos in the strongest program, Expanded Visions (119 min....
For nearly a decade Chicago artist Michael Paxton has made paintings and drawings that refer to people, animals, and objects in Appalachia, where he grew up. These images, with their sepia-toned backgrounds and clouded, sketchlike quality, suggest ephemeral memories and open-ended narratives. Last summer Paxton went back to West Virginia to stay with his ailing mother. He says he was overcome by the “remnants of what used to be”–of his family home, the local power industry, the labor force, the towns....
Nolan Struck’s upper-register moan is one of the eeriest and most riveting sounds in contemporary soul blues: it stunned a beer-soaked crowd into silence at the 1993 Chicago Blues Festival, but it gets just the opposite reaction from the women at the chitlin’-circuit clubs he usually plays. Born Nolton Antoine in Duson, Louisiana, in 1940, Struck started out as a professional dancer. His flamboyant stagecraft caught the eye of Lonnie Brooks, who taught him to play bass and put him in his band....
Playboy of the Eastern World Actually it’s easy to believe. Playboy grew fat and rich by whispering in the ear of frat boys. Whatever language frat boys speak now Playboy had better learn. “Playboy’s trying very hard in a Dorian Gray-like effort to stay young,” Fitzpatrick muses. By Playboy he means Hugh Hefner, who’s in his 70s and lives in LA but has never let go of the magazine. “Part of it goes to Hefner’s insanity about appearing young and vital....
McSweeney’s vs. They Might Be Giants Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The show itself was less stimulating than all that. Readings by Dave Eggers and other authors published in his independent literary journal, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, alternated with songs from the companion CD that John Linnell and John Flansburgh–they who be Giants–recorded for the sixth issue of the mag. Unfortunately the contest was unfair from the start....
Behind her booth at the Custer Street fair in Evanston a potter had set three bushel baskets full of pots she’d marked down. “There’s nothing wrong with them,” she said. “I just need to make space.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two boys, maybe seven or eight years old, walked up and started picking through the pots. Suddenly one of them dropped the lid of a small jar, and it smashed on the sidewalk....
Tasteful humor is hardly Sweetback Productions’ stock-in-trade. But this time around its annual holiday revue (made up of selections from 12 sketches, monologues, and songs), created jointly with Chemically Imbalanced Comedy, is noticeably smarter. Oh, adolescent sniggers could still be heard on the night I attended, and Paul Baio’s dirty old Santa, Greg Landgraf’s homeland-security Santa, and Chris Churchill’s space-age Santa are generic parodies. But Sweetback founder Kelly Anchors tells a wistful tale about Barbie and the Lockerbie airline disaster, Jill Erickson makes Paige McLemore’s parable about getting what you wish for poignant, and Angela McMahon’s advice guru doggedly extends gentle comfort to the audience–even the two beer-swilling grinches bereft of seasonal cheer though December had yet to begin....
Presented by the Chicago-based documentary production and distribution company Terra Nova Films, the eighth annual Silver Images Film Festival continues Friday, May 11, through Friday, May 18, at Atlas Senior Center, 1767 E. 79th; Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Gerber/Hart Library, 1127 W. Granville; Hinsdale Unitarian Church, 11 Maple, Hinsdale; Maravilla Independent and Assisted Senior Living, 145 N. Milwaukee, Vernon Hills; Trinity Hospital, 2320 E. 93rd; and Trinity United Church of Christ, 532 W....
Lloyd Cole The Negatives (March) This spring, releases and tours by the two songwriters crisscross at interesting junctures. While the ex-Pavement leader is taking a star turn on his eponymously titled solo debut, using a portrait of his sun-kissed face and overgrown hairdo as cover art and his girlfriend as a percussionist, Cole has assembled his first credited band since the Commotions. He uses the lyrics on The Negatives to reflect on the 90s, and specifically on the era of his own eponymously titled debut, during which he grew a greasy sheet of hair, posed for an Amaretto print ad, and, in his words, “tried to rock” a la his teen heroes, David Bowie and T....
It’s been a lackluster primary season, with front-runners in both parties apparently headed toward victory. But a 32-year-old lawyer from Pilsen named Frank Avila has made it the occasion of the opening shots in his war on the Hispanic wing of Mayor Daley’s machine. He isn’t running for office, though his father is, and he promises to keep fighting after March 19: “I’m not in this for the short run.”...
