Keith G. Stras is on a mission to save polka, which is to say he has his work cut out for him. The demographic outlook for the music is bleak: young people are not embracing polka, and as for the old guard, Stras doesn’t mince words. “You go to a local affair in Chicago,” he says, “and you look around the room, you ask yourself, ‘What’s gonna happen in five years?...
The continuing crisis? The minimum level of funding the state of Illinois currently guarantees to all school districts: $4,560 per pupil per year. Amount recommended by the Ikenberry Commission in 1996: $4,225. Amount recently recommended by the Center for the Study of Educational Policy at Illinois State University: $4,946. Amount recommended in a recent study by Augenblick & Meyers: between $5,000 and $5,500. (Figures are from the Metropolitan Planning Council’s September issue of “Issue Brief....
02/06/2001 01:29AM KINKO’S PAGE 1 OF 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, the King Speedy Printing spirit we displayed in last week’s 14-3 drubbing of the Zen Nudists remains ready, willing, and able to promote the benefits of high-speed duplication, full-color copying on demand, and free “velobinding” with a $300 minimum order. Several of us have taken marketing classes and, as such, understand that the benefits of sponsorship to King Speedy extend beyond the actual arena of play (let’s be honest, we weren’t exactly packing the bleachers at the Disney Magnet School gym)....
Sometime in the next year Chicago’s biggest environmental coalition, Chicago Wilderness, may ask that the southern rim of Lake Michigan, including Chicago, be named a United Nations biosphere reserve. No, the city wouldn’t be turned into a national park. But having the biosphere-reserve label would make it easier for local agencies and organizations to publicize the region’s many little-known natural areas. More important, it would encourage people to use all the area’s resources in more nature-friendly ways–mowing less, paving less, and preserving more land....
Chicago house producer Roy Davis Jr. makes no bones about his belief in the afterlife–it’s been a theme in his music since 1995, and last week he informed me that “what’s important to me is getting to the kingdom.” Musically speaking, though, Davis has already led several lives in the last decade and a half–few dance music figures have been able to reinvent themselves as often or as successfully as he has....
The fourth annual Irish Film Festival runs Friday through Sunday, February 28 through March 2, at the Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $10; a $40 pass covers all screenings and the opening reception. For more information call 773-445-3838. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set in the uneasy aftermath of the civil conflict that divided Ireland in the early 20th century, this absorbing drama (2001) stars Colm Meaney as the title character, a belligerent cabbage farmer who tries to draw his son, the son’s young bride, and the rest of the town of Skillet into his long-standing feud with a local pub owner (Adrian Dunbar)....
Order seems to be disintegrating in the face of threatening apocalypse in Julie Comnick’s seven paintings and six large charcoal drawings at Zg Gallery. She writes in her statement, “Alert to the variety of signs and symbols in their surroundings, animals are inherently prepared for impending change,” yet in Habitat I the rodent that tries to find shelter in a messily coiled orange electrical cord hardly seems prepared for anything. Belching smokestacks loom in the distance behind the rodent, but no details connect foreground to background, as if objects have lost their connection to one another....
We didn’t want to have a party in the first place. We were going to stay open until 2 AM, sell the book, and go out to the Green Mill afterward. We weren’t going to have a party, but we had to compete. Every bookstore in the known world was having a party. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About three weeks before the book’s release date, the acronym FHP (and the F doesn’t stand for “fifth”) became the preferred referent for everything concerning our favorite young wizard....
Lead Stories A sheriff’s official in Arapahoe County, Colorado, admitted last month that deputies had inadvertently placed a 16-year-old girl in a holding cell with a 34-year-old man being held for sexual assault. The incident came to light after the girl reported to her lawyer that the man had molested her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Tallahassee, Florida, police arrested 30-year-old Carl Franklin after they caught him with his pants down in public, apparently preparing to urinate....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also reported in the LA Times, the ex-wife of casino mogul Kirk Kerkorian has asked a judge to increase child support for their three-year-old daughter from $50,000 a month to $320,000 a month. Her petition claims that little Kira Kerkorian needs $144,000 a month for travel, $14,000 for parties (her first birthday party cost $70,000), $10,200 for food (about $340 per meal), and $7,000 for charitable donations....
Many electronic musicians decorate their compositions with digital splutters or create tension between glitches and fixed rhythmic elements. But Radian finds music within the harsh clicks and stutters that Stefan Nemeth generates from his synthesizers and computers, developing an idea advanced several decades ago by the remarkably prescient British outfit This Heat. John Norman doesn’t play traditional bass lines, instead creating swells of sound, using a volume pedal to control his attack; and drummer Martin Brandlmayr’s off-kilter rhythms aren’t particularly danceable....
Same Old Song Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To preserve and present the best world cinema, France has the Cinematheque Francaise and England has the British Film Institute; we’ve got the American Film Institute, which doesn’t even have a clue about the best Hollywood movies. Consequently most younger American viewers have never seen a film by Alain Resnais, probably the greatest living French filmmaker, who’s never made an indifferent or unadventurous film and who’s much more talented and innovative than Francois Truffaut....
Your response to Sick and Tired of Being Used, who complained about women who accept his “friendly back rubs” but aren’t interested in sex, was not the best answer. Mind if I give it a shot? Thanks for sharing, OAWISL, but I stand by my original advice: Men should give back rubs only to women they’re already having sex with, and vice versa. I also believe that back rubs should be outsourced as soon as possible, i....
Aaron Freeman’s one-man show begins slowly with fresh but not always finely honed material in a stand-up consideration of national and international news. He’s sharper in more fully developed observations on the war in Iraq and the Palestinian conflict, which force the audience to consider top political stories from a new, often whimsical angle. Freeman also gains confidence in the latter half of his intermissionless 90-minute monologue; personal riffs on his heritage, cycling, and Italian beef are detailed and rich with visual imagery....
Dressing in the morning, Nelda Brickhouse would go to a closet off the bedroom of her spacious wood-and-stone house on Locust Road in Wilmette. The broad back lawn visible from the windows, she’d pull out one of her many three-button pullover blouses in white and primary colors, most of them by sportswear designer Leon Levin. Donning the blouse and a pair of knit slacks–her uniform–she’d walk downstairs to face the day....
One positive result of the increased influence of popular culture on fine art is exhibits that are just fun. Three School of the Art Institute graduates calling themselves “The Triumvirate of Ass”–Meg Duguid, Meredith Grover, and Jessica Peterson–are showing six works geared to Dogmatic Gallery’s “aesthetics,” which, they write in their statement, include “crooked walls and the slow earthy smell of the dirt floor in the basement.” The best work, the collectively made Track With Asstastic Hamsters 1-12, has an appealing low-tech goofiness....
To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tori Marlan is courageous indeed for daring to write about the notoriously vindictive “church” of Scientology [“Death of a Scientologist,” August 16]. For all the pains Scientology defenders take to compare themselves to other faiths like Judaism, Catholicism, etc, there is one major difference. At least Catholics will cop to believing certain aspects of the faith that are difficult for nonbelievers to accept, such as the corporeal presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist....
Gandhi India Restaurant, 2601 W. Devon, 773-761-8714. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Besserat de Bellefon Cuvee des Moines Brut Rose (Champagne, France), $34.99. This is a cremant-style wine, subject to half the pressure used in traditional champagne fermentation and a lower dose of sugar, which gives it only moderate effervescence. The low sugar also lets more of the crisp green apple and citrus flavors come through (with hints of strawberries and Bing cherries on the nose), while a higher-than-normal proportion of pinot noir gives it the blush color and a fuller-bodied flavor....
When husband and wife Daniel Kelch and Laura Van Dorf launched LULU’S DIM SUM & THEN SOME in 1992 they were ahead of their time, serving an Americanized version of Asian cuisine–bigger flavors, bigger portions–that’s since become ubiquitous. A decade later they’re picking up steam rather than losing it, as evidenced by their move a few months ago to a larger space. Just down Davis Street from its old location, the new Lulu’s is twice the size, located in a street-level storefront in one of Evanston’s newly constructed condo buildings....
Behind the Times “Every story we decide to do, we’re deciding to do,” says Wilgoren, speaking for the Times’s national staff. “We’re not doing it out of obligation.” She says Times correspondents ask themselves, “‘What’s the bigger thought here? What’s the point?’ We refer to it as the ‘page-one thought’ a lot of the time.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Times signed off after a paragraph; all it wanted to do at this stage was get on the record....
