Gentle Readers: If there’s ever been any doubt about how seriously I take my responsibilities, this column should lay ’em to rest. Last year I agreed to auction off a chance to give advice in Savage Love. What can I say? I’m a sucker for charity, and the auction raised money to feed the hungry. Eleven months after the auction, I finally met up with the winner, Jill, a lovely Cuban-American lesbian from San Francisco....
BLACK HALOS 3/23, EMPTY BOTTLE Like Frank Meyer of the Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs, Black Halos front man Billy Hopeless has been known to drop trou onstage; unlike Meyer, he’s foxy enough to get away with it. (Who said rock ‘n’ roll was fair?) In addition to their prurient appeal, these pouty boys from Vancouver do the proto-punk thing (Dead Boys, New York Dolls) at least as well as D Generation–and probably a lot louder....
The Magic Touch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s too modest. There’s a way of telling Kokoris’s story that makes it sound like one of those fluky overnight successes: 40-year-old businessman enrolls in a four-day novel-writing seminar and lands a contract with a major publisher, a best-first-novel award, and a film option. But that version is misleading. Kokoris, who grew up on the city’s southwest side and now lives in La Grange, says he always felt he was meant to write....
Jewish women in 17th-century Europe were doubly silenced–once for their gender and again for their religious beliefs. Which is what made Gluckel of Hameln so remarkable. Married off at 14 and widowed at 44, when she had 12 children, she took the helm of her husband’s importing business and managed to prosper during one of the most turbulent periods of European history, the Thirty Years’ War. That alone would have made her worthy of note....
“Newtopia was born because there are no other publications like it,” says Charles Shaw, editor in chief of the six-month-old Web zine. Shaw has supported himself for years as a freelance copywriter and as a writer and editor for publications such as UR Chicago and Punk Planet and Web sites like 3 AM Magazine and Web Del Sol. Newtopia grew out of his frustration with the leftist rhetoric he feels is standard to magazines like the Nation or the Progressive....
The Stockyards Theatre Project, which calls itself “the only theatre company in Chicago dedicated exclusively to feminist/femaleist theatre and performance art,” presents its second annual showcase of woman-centered drama, storytelling, dance, improv, stand-up comedy, and other performance genres. Topics addressed range from rape, pregnancy, and madness to lesbianism, the beauty industry, and multiple orgasms. Running November 30 through December 2, the event features three evenings consisting of five to eight presentations each....
Jan Cicero fell under the spell of abstract art as a teenager in La Grange in the 1950s, when she was introduced to the work of trailblazers like Jackson Pollock by an enthusiastic high school art teacher. This kind of painting–work that grabbed the viewer on a level deeper than the surface image and revealed itself at its own slow pace–was more mysterious and powerful than any other art she knew....
Indian Ink Passion is not an attribute normally associated with Stoppard. Even when he tackles the subject of romantic and sexual desire overtly, as in The Invention of Love, he tends to handle the messy realm of the human heart rather gingerly, as if embarrassed that an astonishingly smart fellow like himself could be caught up in such mundane concerns. Surprisingly, though The Invention of Love (1997) is rife with arcane discursive lectures on Greek and Latin roots by closeted poet A....
On a recent Friday morning just past 11, Myung Paul Lee wheeled the House of Brightness Free Acu-Clinic for Homeless People into the parking lot of the McDonald’s at Sheridan and Wilson. He parked in the far northeast corner of the lot, got out, and threw open the back and side doors of the late-model Dodge panel van. He was removing a tenor saxophone from its case when Chuckie Schenkel arrived and greeted him warmly....
Of the two local bar groups that have been doing judicial evaluations the longest–the 22,000-member Chicago Bar Association and the 1,200-member Chicago Council of Lawyers–the CCL is more demanding. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The only problem with the CCL’s ratings is that voters don’t heed them–or not enough voters anyway. This isn’t just a recent phenomenon. In 1984, amid almost daily headlines about judicial corruption in Cook County stemming from the federal Greylord probe, the CCL saw a golden opportunity to slice some rotten wood off the county bench....
Before he turned five, guitarist Lucky Peterson had made his stage debut, playing his father James’s nightclub in Buffalo; in 1971, at age six, he charted with “1-2-3-4,” one of the last hit singles Willie Dixon produced. By his teens he was touring with some of the biggest names in contemporary blues, and in 1984 he recorded his debut LP, Ridin’, during a break from his European travels with Bobby “Blue” Bland....
For people who hear the word “rumba” and think of Ricky Ricardo leading his dinner-jacketed orchestra at the Copacabana on I Love Lucy, the music of Los Munequitos de Matanzas is likely to be either a disappointment or a wake-up call, if not both at once. Los Munequitos play the original rumba, an Afro-Cuban roots music for voice and percussion–no horn or guitar or piano–that in one form or another has accompanied the folk dance of the same name since the 16th century....
MONOLAKE, DETTINGER, TUJIKO NORIKO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Electronic dance music offers more shadings than a Pantone booklet, and few are more subtle than the German and Austrian variant often called minimal techno. Artists like Mike Ink, Thomas Brinkmann, Reinhard Voigt, and Jonas Bering rarely abandon the pulsebeat, but you’d never mistake their work for Chicago’s anthemic house sounds; their rhythms tend to twitch rather than pound, and they’re often bathed in a murky signal that ranges from dubby ether to ambient fluff....
The woman behind Monotrona is best known as Jodie Mecanic, a key figure in the early-90s Wicker Park no-wave scene. She and Quintron founded the underground art-damage venue Milk of Burgundy in the Flat Iron Building in 1990, and the two of them were core members of the junk-contraption band Math. When Math broke up in 1994, Mecanic and Michigander Rikkeh Suhtn (now of X27) got together as Duotron, a spastic duo (duh) that combined unstable rhythms and guitar racket....
Moises Kaufman’s adaptation of an unproduced Tennessee Williams screenplay (based on Williams’s 1945 short story) is the offbeat tale of a one-armed hustler prowling the sexual underworlds of New Orleans and New York in the years before Pearl Harbor. Forced into gay prostitution because he can’t find a regular job, Ollie–brilliantly played by Reynaldo Rosales in this world premiere–is a “broken Apollo” whose closeted customers are as turned on by his mutilation as his muscles....
One Year Later The banner headline on page one of that edition of the Herald-American screamed “JAPS RIOT IN U.S. CAMP.” The camp wasn’t an Al Qaeda-in-Guantanamo type of situation. It was a relocation camp, and most of the “Japs” held there were American citizens by birth. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times put out a special section last Sunday jammed with solid and wide-ranging stuff: “We can never say ‘never again’” by Lynn Sweet, “Why America?...
Young Playwrights Festival Teenage troubles are in perpetuity redundant, which can make for painfully universal theater. How many times can you hear about hating your parents’ divorce, or being too fat or thin, or waiting for your first kiss, or how your best friend died too young? But the works chosen for this year’s festival demonstrate a keen, wonderfully mature understanding of history, language, and relationships. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
So Much for Retirement This forlorn situation was one of the reasons sports editor John Cherwa lost his job a year ago. His number two, Dan McGrath, moved into the top spot and offered a column to S.L. Price of Sports Illustrated. Price turned him down. Then he turned to Mike Wise of the New York Times. “I asked him, ‘What would it take to make it happen?’” says McGrath. “He said, ‘You know, I really like my life....
For at least one night–at most, one week–the Cubs’ season was as it was supposed to be, full of hopes rewarded and dreams fulfilled. The night was May 22, when pitching phenom Mark Prior went up against the Pittsburgh Pirates in front of 40,138 anxious fans at Wrigley Field. The Pirates, whom Prior would face in his first two games, were an inspired choice of opponent: last in the National League in batting average and walks, they wouldn’t be much of a threat to hurt him at the plate or make him work too hard throwing strikes....
The Hot L Baltimore, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company, and Empty Bottles, Broken Hearts, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company. Thanks to director David Cromer and an unimprovable ensemble, it’s difficult to imagine a more authentic world than Lanford Wilson’s transient hotel, complete with rusty water, fickle heat, and fluorescent-lit ambience. A time warp in every grungy detail, Robert G. Smith’s battered lobby fuses with Joseph Fosco’s period sound design and Sarah Pace’s archaeologically accurate costumes to immerse audiences in the world of a dozen hard-boiled residents facing eviction on Memorial Day 1973....
