New customers at Southport Grocery and Cafe often can’t resist leaning over the counter and whispering, “So, you know what this place used to be?” Looking around the modern, airy store and restaurant, with its beech floors and a subdued color scheme of chocolate brown, pale blue, and white, you’ll find no evidence of its prior incarnation. But residents of the Lakeview neighborhood remember the business that occupied this address for several decades: Cooney Funeral Home....
The Chicago Chamber Musicians initially favored music by dead Europeans, but the Millennium Project–an impressive three-year exploration of 20th-century classics and new commissions undertaken in the late 90s–transformed them into avid champions of modernism. They’ve continued in that spirit with Composers Perspective, a set of three concerts this spring, each paying tribute to a living composer. Past recipients of the ensemble’s attention have included establishment figures such as Pierre Boulez, John Corigliano, and Ellen Zwilich; this year the similarly pedigreed honorees are Gunther Schuller (this week), William Bolcom (May 30), and Bright Sheng (June 8)....
AUGUST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lives of the leads in the two films that kick off the Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video tonight revolve around food, drink, and romance. Short on Sugar stars Lynn A. Henderson (who also wrote and produced the ten-minute short) as the shy owner of a cafe who’s out to hook the man of her dreams....
Adeniyi Isiaka staggered out of O’Hare airport into a chilly, rainy afternoon. He had just landed at O’Hare after a 25-hour series of flights that originated in Nigeria, where he’d been visiting his family. He was exhausted, and he just wanted a cab to take him to his home in Chicago Heights. Idling by the curb was a car marked Midwest Taxi. “I only have $100,” Isiaka replied. “Just drop me at the Blue Line....
ERNST REIJSEGER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like many of his fellow Dutch jazz players, cellist Ernst Reijseger has a trick bag a mile deep. He can play anything from dolorous bowed lines to jaunty plucked melodies that reflect a long interest in South African kwela music (his recently reissued 1979 debut album, Mistakes, with South African expat reedist Sean Bergin, is full of them)....
Atena Danner sat on the lip of a white plywood booth in the Chicago Cultural Center’s GAR Rotunda, explaining to a young ponytailed woman that it really is possible to have an orgasm while giving birth. “You’re basically working with the same equipment under not dissimilar circumstances,” said the 23-year-old labor assistant and health educator, who had decorated the frame of her booth with a swatch of pink fabric and a sign that said “Doulas Rule....
Jody Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago blues guitarist Jody Williams’s return to music after a hiatus of over 30 years has already created an international buzz: in November, after less than six months on the comeback trail, he played a triumphant set at the Blues Estafette festival in the Netherlands. Born in Alabama in 1935, Williams moved to Chicago as a child and began playing local clubs as a teenager, developing a guitar style that balanced sophistication–an ear for melody, an easy, polished swing, and an urgent, string-bending soulfulness reminiscent of B....
Red Cross Disaster Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ad had been placed by Jeannett Walczak, owner of Jettsett Gallery at 3350 N. Paulina, for the “911 Show: Artists Respond to September 11, 2001.” When Keller’s framed painting, priced at $500, was accepted for the exhibit, she understood that Jettsett would get 40 percent of the proceeds if it sold but would donate 20 percent of that to the Red Cross....
Let’s say that someone (for the sake of argument, me) had been engaging in sex with a set of identical male twins. And let’s say I suddenly found myself quite unexpectedly pregnant. If I decided to have the baby, would there be any way to tell which of the twins was the father? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nancy’s company–believe it or not–has handled cases exactly like the one you’ve described, TL....
In::FORMATION: Work by Sine::apsis Experiments It is therefore a delight to report that there’s now a wonderful exhibit of works involving motors and computers and video and microprocessors and all the other things many have come to regard with suspicion. The eight installations–plus two more that were used as part of opening-night performances–at Betty Rymer are by the members of a Chicago-based collective, Sine::apsis Experiments, plus a few invited associates. Formed only two years ago and made up of recent School of the Art Institute graduates, the group has mounted a show that addresses most of the potential objections to such work....
Twenty minutes after last Friday’s naked poetry reading was slated to begin, the event’s emcee, Aurora Donovan Danai, walked onstage wearing a sweater and striped jeans. “It’s going to be a while before we start, because we’re like that,” she announced. “Everyone is encouraged to be naked. So you can get yourself ready for that. Or think about it. There are too many people here with their coats on.” The Naked Poetry Anti-Slam, as this event was officially called, was Danai’s brainchild....
Maurice Wiggins didn’t look imposing on the baseball field in the early 1930s. But one of his friends knew the five-foot-six 137-pounder could play shortstop and invited him to practice with Gilkerson’s Union Giants, a semiprofessional team based in Bronzeville. The Giants’ manager was so impressed he moved the regular shortstop to the outfield and replaced him with Wiggins. His mother died when he was ten, and he went to live with an older sister and started washing dishes part-time in a hotel....
From the 1940s through the ’70s Riccardo’s restaurant, at the corner of Rush and Hubbard, was one of the liveliest joints in town–it was once called the “Montmartre of the midwest.” On any given day the Italian eatery, tavern, and exhibition gallery hosted an eclectic group of regulars–celebrities, artists, and writers, from the raffish to the respectable–who sipped drinks in the sidewalk cafe, were served lasagna inside by singing waiters, and convened in the “Padded Cell,” a private room where journalists talked shop....
This first feature by Chicagoan Jennifer Reeder, best known for her “White Trash Girl” videos, is a study in anomie in which a group of emotionally detached characters (among them a therapist, a private detective, and a claims adjuster) somnambulate through a nameless city, only dimly and intermittently aware of one another’s presence. Reeder’s long takes and isolating compositions evoke profound alienation, but she leavens her dystopian theme with oblique absurdist humor....
ROCK, POP, ETC. includes hip-hop, dance music and electronica, funk, Rock, Pop, etc. BANJO FACULTY OF THE OLD TOWN SCHOOL OF FOLK MUSIC Free performance. Fri 4/6, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. RIPLEY CAINE Free in-store performance. Fri 4/6, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park. 708-386-6927. FORTY PIECE CHOIR Sat 3/31, 7 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212....
Friday 8/9 – Thursday 8/15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 10 SATURDAY The Chinese Dragon Boat Festival commemorates the death of poet Ch’u Yuan, a patriot from the state of Ch’u who, for political reasons, was expelled from his homeland 2,300 years ago. The exiled poet, still loyal to the king who’d betrayed him, drowned himself when he learned the state was about to fall into enemy hands....
Friday 12/6 – Thursday 12/12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 7 SATURDAY “Johnny Maier, my enamorata of last night, is a character in truth. Soon after he got up ‘to get a drink of water,’ I followed, and found him playing billiards and going on a [spree]. Went to-bed at the Aveline, forfeiting my $2.” So wrote polyamorous cub reporter and avid book collector John “Hapless Jack” Wing in his diary on October 5, 1865....
Now in its seventh year, this festival has ballooned into the city’s most wide-ranging showcase for local talent, from Hubbard Street and the Joffrey Ballet to Glass House Dance (I’ve never heard of ’em). Presenting more than 200 companies and choreographers on eight programs over about four weeks, festival founders Fred Solari and John Leonard Schmitz pretty much cover the gamut of Chicago dance. One of the most exciting programs, started last year, is “Dance R/Evolution” (see listing), made up of revivals of works by Chicago choreographers, from Ruth St....
In a recent New York Times piece lamenting our curiously joyless summer blockbusters, Neal Gabler reminded us that the purpose of films is to give pleasure, whether they take the form of comedy or tragedy, inspire amusement or reflection. Hollywood may have forgotten this principle, but the production numbers in this 2002 Indian musical take an extravagant and irresistible delight in color, movement, rhythm, and geometric design. The title character (Shah Rukh Khan), born into a wealthy family, returns home after a decade in the UK and reignites a childhood romance with the lovely Parvati (Aishwarya Rai), whose parents are of a lower caste....
Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read your story “Easy Target” [January 5]. It made me so angry that the Mayor King Richard will not stop until he finishes what his father started. The residents of the west side are right when they say they are not being told the truth, and any politician that has dared to disagree with the mayor will pay a price....
