“Don’t listen to your children,” advises Catherine Wallace of Skokie in U.S. Catholic (January). “Let them be in their own worlds, undisturbed. It is not healthy for persons the age of parents to get involved in arguments about what kind of birthday cake the Care Bears should make for He-Man.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » News you won’t hear from environmentalists. Are we wearing out the earth?...
Cubs MVPs: The Tribune Team Readers deserve to know the facts and decide for themselves if they trust the coverage. To be sure, plenty of readers already know the facts and wouldn’t trust the coverage if God himself had the byline, but coming clean helps spare the papers these readers’ insufferable righteousness. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the columnists’ failure to properly scorn this display of corporate perversity suggests that a brethrenly defensiveness slipped into the Tribune’s pages, I’d attribute the lapse to the gleeful ridicule from the Sun-Times, which Zorn pointed out this Tuesday has had a lockstep quality of its own....
Night Battles Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is based on Catholic archives he discovered in northern Italy in the 1960s. These capture a fascinating, otherwise overlooked aspect of the Inquisition: its investigation in the late 1500s of the benandanti (literally, “good doers” or “good walkers”), a group of peasants near Venice who believed they were called by God to do battle against witches in order to protect the community’s crops and livestock....
In the Mexican pastry shop Bombon, on 18th Street just east of Ashland, delicate sweets and extravagantly decorated cakes fill a curved, sleek display case. Brightly painted walls alternate with stretches of exposed brick, hung with photos of more pastry, photos of Mexican markets, and specialized kitchen utensils like a molinillo, the wooden dowel used to make the foam on top of Mexican hot chocolate. The elegant offerings and upscale decor might seem out of place on a stretch of 18th Street that’s in need of a face-lift....
Jerry Herman traces his infatuation with the Broadway musical back to 1946 and Annie Get Your Gun: after seeing the show as a kid, he plunked out “They Say It’s Wonderful” on the piano by ear. A master tunesmith in the Irving Berlin tradition, the 68-year-old Herman has been retro from the start: his Hello, Dolly! sounded almost as old-fashioned in 1964 as it does today. But Herman’s songs from Dolly, Mame, Mack & Mabel, and La Cage aux Folles have a durability that the work of a more adventurous or trendy writer couldn’t match, and by tailoring material to the talents of such stars as Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury, and Tallulah Bankhead he’s become an especially insightful analyst of the art of performing....
Holes With Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson, Shia LaBeouf, Khleo Thomas, Dule Hill, Henry Winkler, and Eartha Kitt. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I asked my sister, who has a graduate degree in children’s literature, what she made of the current trend of kid lit being consumed by adults, and the best explanation she could offer was “the erosion of childhood as a protected sphere in our culture, kids no longer allowed to be kids, adults no longer willing to be adults,” blah de blah....
In One Room, Bailiwick Repertory. Young people’s observations generally make up in freshness what they lack in sophistication. But the high school- and college-age characters in Jimmy Maize’s docudrama about queer youth all seem to be reciting from the same tired phrase book. Maybe the national conversation about what it means to come out has gone on long enough to produce a set of tropes that people automatically use. More likely, the reason the voices of gay adolescents from Chicago, Seattle, and semirural Georgia can barely be distinguished is Maize’s failure as an interviewer....
This year’s Asian American Jazz Festival brings in several San Francisco-based players with a deep interest in the Chicago jazz tradition. The first of the event’s two nights stars Jeff Chan, whose most recent album, In Chicago (Asian Improv), was recorded here in the summer of ’02 with local bassist Tatsu Aoki (the festival’s founder) and drummer Chad Taylor; it’s an excellent disc that gains extra punch from the presence of larger-than-life trumpeter Ameen Muhammad, who died shortly before its release....
Stephanie Sack is big, stylish, and single-minded. “I just want clothes,” she says. “Clothes fat chicks can wear. I can’t wear dental floss around my titties and call it fashion.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We don’t cover anything at this store, my darling. We accentuate,” Sack said firmly. “Will you wear leopard?” “Well, I don’t have any,” the shopper replied, but in ten minutes she was gaping at herself in the mirror....
On Object 3, the latest in the local Locust Music label’s “Object Series,” tenor saxophonist Matt Bauder and bassist Jason Ajemian venture into a hall of mirrors. The album-length piece “Normal” begins as a composition of wavering long tones in which not a lot really happens. Bauder’s sound is beautifully striated and bathed in shadows, and his intonation is meticulous: the sustained notes rise and fall slowly and precisely. Bowed lines from Ajemian, ranging from low-end rumbles to upper-register swirls, combine with the saxophone in glacial, funereal harmonies....
No surprises here: Dan Goggin’s new “Nunsense” musical features groaner puns and silly songs (“Matzo, matzo man”). The Little Sisters of Hoboken are taking an ecumenical cruise when the entire cast of Fiddler on the Roof–except the guy playing Tevye–gets sick, so he and the nuns put on a show (but not that show). Goggin’s amateur theatricals can be charming when Chicago Jewish Theatre embraces its own limitations, as in “Das Boat,” a ridiculous take on shipboard dramas that features a stuffed octopus and waves painted on fabric....
Pita (aka Peter Rehberg), the Vienna-based co-owner of the influential electronic-music label Mego, is a pioneer of laptop music–he released Seven Tons for Free, with its glitches and its serene yet clipped synthetic melodies, back in 1996. Since then his music has grown darker, louder, and more violent, and his sense of scale and dynamics has become even sharper; he sets moods and textures against one another to create a single masterful picture....
As a producer, Robert Diggs has secured his place in the hip-hop pantheon–the melodramatic strings and dense beats he engineered for the Wu-Tang Clan spawned legions of imitators (including, on occasion, Diggs himself). As a rapper, he’s added a husky voice of paranoia to the Wu-Tang lineup. But his solo work has made Puffy sound as quick-witted as Biggie. On both RZA as Bobby Digital in Stereo and Digital Bullet he assumed the alter ego Bobby Digital, the sort of slobbery, foulmouthed lothario that gives misogyny a bad name....
SONGS: OHIA 4/12, SCHUBAS Jason Molina, who’s left Ohio for Chicago since naming his band, is its only consistent member. His modus operandi of collaborating with a different set of musicians for each record (and sometimes each show) gives each release its own distinct flavor: what the project might lack in stability it gains in the wonder of hearing the old vision interpreted by new people. The latest Songs: Ohia release, Didn’t It Rain (Secretly Canadian), enlists Jennie Bedford and Jim Krewson of the old-timey bluegrass outfit Jim and Jennie & the Pinetops, among others, but it’s by no means a bluegrass record....
The other day while I was filling my car with gas, my daughter noticed one of those missing-children posters plastered above the pumps. She commented that she sees so many advertisements for missing kids, if she ever came across such children she’d never be able to associate their faces with the posters. I replied that it would be more likely she would recognize a missing child as a schoolmate or neighbor rather than someone encountered by pure chance on the street....
Rock, Pop, etc. PAUL BESSENBACHER, BEN MIRANDA, JAMES SCOTT, JASON TOTH & DAVID YUN perform during Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. Sat 8/4, 9 PM, and Mon 8/6 and Thu 8/9, 8 PM, Arena Theater, University & Howard, Wheaton. 630-653-2794. BOMB-ITTY OF ERRORS Free concert. Fri 8/3, noon, Chicago Music Mart, DePaul Center, 333 S. State. 312-362-6700. CHICAGO ROSE Fri 8/3, 4 PM, Starbucks in Dominick’s, 3141 N. Thatcher, River Grove. 708-453-2896....
The rumors began in early June. WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio behemoth, was negotiating a takeover of WLUW, the small but popular station owned by Loyola University. Many WLUW supporters feared the worst; it was widely assumed that WBEZ would implement broad changes at the smaller station, perhaps replacing program director Shawn Campbell and station manager Craig Kois. WLUW enthusiastically supported local indie rock, provided alternative news sources, and reached out to specific ethnic communities–how much of its eclectic programming would survive?...
It’s disconcerting to be appalled and even slightly nauseated by a masterpiece. But Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans is a documentary, and so it’s disconcerting largely because of its subject matter—it shocks us with the truth. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can at least say that Friedman, who privately owned up to pedophiliac urges but initially pleaded not guilty to any assaults, wound up going to prison for the remainder of his life; that his wife divorced him, while his three sons continued to defend him; and that his youngest son, Jesse, who helped his father give computer lessons, went to prison at age 19 for sexual assault (he too initially pleaded not guilty) and served 13 years....
Southwest Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Southwest Wisconsin took advantage of the rails-to-trails conversion craze of the 70s. As a result, the lush countryside is crosshatched with bike paths well suited for touring. Amenity-rich Sparta forms the hub of three good routes: the Elroy-Sparta Trail, the La Crosse River Trail, and the Great River Trail. Maps are available from the Elroy-Sparta State Trail Headquarters (PO Box 297, Kendall, WI 54638, 608-463-7109) or at the La Crosse River Trail, Sparta Depot (111 Milwaukee, Sparta, 608-269-4123)....
The members of this Bay Area duo–MC, DJ, and producer Chief Xcel (Xavier Mosley) and full-time MC Gift of Gab (Tim Parker)–became friends in high school in 1987 and have been playing together under the name Blackalicious since 1991, so they undoubtedly felt some pressure when it finally came time to put together their debut full-length, Nia, two years ago. In the early 90s they’d cut a handful of stylish 12-inches, both individually (Xcel’s “Fully Charged on Planet X,” Gab’s “Rhyme Like a Nut!...
