I made a nun cry the other day. I felt bad. Then I felt an evil flash of vindication for all the times nuns had made me cry as a boy in school. Then I felt bad again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You had a whole week,” I said. “You erase the answers now, or you march upstairs to the bookstore and buy a new workbook....
My exposure to Stan Brakhage’s massive oeuvre has been somewhat limited, but these four works made in 1998 are among the most exciting and ravishing I’ve seen, rivaling even Scenes From Under Childhood (1970). Aptly described by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice as “scratch-and-stain films,” these mainly nonphotographic works “are, among other things, a visual analogue to abstract expressionism.” Reel 1 (22 min.) registers as visual music in its development of motifs and its use of rests to divide the work into discrete sections–a music that pulses, throbs, and sometimes winks on and off like a strobe light....
Eloise & Ray, Roadworks Productions, at the Chopin Theatre. Is there a more powerful metaphor for the longings and frustrations of adolescence than the big skies and desolate beauty of the American west? And if so, could someone please share it with Stephanie Fleischmann? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In her torturously wordy, ponderously symbolic exploration of a teenage girl’s coming-of-age, Fleischmann misses no opportunity to flog every last cliche about the west....
In one of my favorite jokes connecting Russian pessimism with a failure of imagination, two Russian fishermen catch a golden fish. It offers them three wishes if they’ll spare its life. The first fisherman says, “I wish that the hold of the boat be filled with cases of vodka,” and his wish is granted. The second says, “I wish that the entire ocean be turned into vodka,” and they lower a bucket and start drinking....
When Barbara Ransby started as executive director of the Center for Public Intellec-tuals last month, one of the first things she did was rename the group, which had been struggling with its moniker since its inception in 1999. “There seemed to be confusion in some circles as to what it means,” Ransby says. “And some people thought it was elitist.” The organization’s new name, the Public Square, “echoes back to a place where people can come to debate ideas and really hash it out....
The Mikvah Project “The Mikvah Project”–a traveling collection that originated in Houston in 2000–is centered around the Jewish ritual of the mikvah: renewal through total immersion in “living water.” Photographer Janice Rubin depicts men and women, young and old, Orthodox and nontraditional; Leah Lax’s wall texts (based on interviews) give the reasons behind the practice. Historically it’s been a ritual imposed on women to cleanse themselves after menses; some have called it regressive, repressive, or flat-out misogynistic....
Paaven Thaker, a 17-year old junior at Whitney Young Magnet High School, is just the sort of high achiever school administrators like to brag about. Thaker is on Young’s debate team, participates in theater productions, and gets straight As. She’s also copresident of the Environmental Alliance, a student club. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thaker says that as they talked with Kenner it became obvious that a comprehensive recycling effort would need the backing of the central office....
For the inaugural production in its new space last summer, Raven Theatre staged Chicago playwright Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room. Extended once again, this wonderful comedy drama celebrates life and love while confronting serious illness with humor, honesty, and an eye for human frailty. A wounded family beset by illness is brought together by yet another member’s medical emergency. It’s not easy for sisters Bessie and Lee to forgive each other, much less bond, after almost two decades of estrangement....
Poor Recall The New York Times published a half page of excerpts from the Ninth Circuit opinion and focused on what the appellate judges had gleaned from Bush v. Gore. The Tribune did not. Its “legal analysis” sidebar by Jan Crawford Greenburg was heavy on what “legal observers” had to say about the opinion and featherlight on the opinion itself. Greenburg’s observers disagreed on whether the Ninth Circuit had produced a “clearly erroneous” interpretation or a “plausible extension” of Bush v....
Although rai is undeniably a product of Algeria, for nearly 20 years Paris has been the principal incubator of this evolving strain of propulsive Arab rebel music. In France there are greater technological, cultural, and financial resources, and rai singers aren’t under such constant pressure from Islamic fundamentalists, who see the music’s frank, even profane lyrics as heretical–it’s well established that the assassination of rai idol Cheb Hasni in 1994 was religiously motivated....
DAVE EDMUNDS, MARSHALL CRENSHAW 6/7 & 6/8, ABBEY PUB Neither one of these guys deserved to fade away with new wave: Marshall Crenshaw hasn’t released an album of new material since 1999, but he’s at work on one with members of Sex Mob and the Jazz Passengers. In 2000 Rhino reissued his first album and compiled This Is Easy! The Best of Marshall Crenshaw, and last year the King Biscuit folks released the live album I’ve Suffered for My Art…Now It’s Your Turn....
Just like a scene out of the movie Chocolat, two elderly gray-haired women gaze, wide-eyed, through the window at a three-tiered marble-topped table full of chocolates. They’re residents at a retirement home next to Marly, a new chocolate shop in Evanston. “I can imagine what’ll be going on in that home once we open our doors,” says owner Gail Robinson, who recently took her two-year-old mail-order and corporate-gift company, Marly Fine Chocolates of Historic Distinction, from a production basement to this Davis Street storefront....
The Altruists, Boxer Rebellion Theater, and The Altruists, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company. Nicky Silver’s satirical look at the subculture of professional activism, now being offered in two productions, seems especially painful in light of recent political developments. Just what we need: a play that sets up a clique of crypto-rich kids as poster children for the American left, then exposes them for the hypocrites they are. As with the election, I still can’t decide what’s worse–the implicit affirmation of conservative cant, or that it’s all for the sake of a glorified sitcom....
Was Einstein a plagiarist? Several articles have been written saying he was. What do you think? –mcsage1, via e-mail Patience. We shall address both matters. Plagiarism first. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Questions of priority have long swirled around the theories of relativity, both special and general. Though no one thinks Einstein confected special relativity out of thin air, his 1905 paper had no notes or references, which was odd even for the times....
Friday26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » TOM JONES Confronted with the chains, chest hair, and trouser bulge, most are ready to dismiss Tom Jones as the leather-lunged embodiment of Vegas kitsch. Yet Jones’s deep and varied catalog argues for his gifts as an interpretive singer, from the tortured soul of 1964’s “Chills and Fever” to the lusty swagger of 1999’s “Sex Bomb.” Highlights and missteps alike (see the inexplicable “The Young New Mexican Puppeteer”) are collected on last year’s fine four-disc overview The Definitive Tom Jones: 1964-2002....
Rock, Pop, etc. BLESSID UNION OF SOULS, WOOLWORTHY Sat 3/16, 8 PM, Lund Auditorium, Dominican University, 7900 W. Division, River Forest. 708-524-6942. CHICAGO A CAPPELLA performs American popular songs in a program called “Stormy Weather.” Sat 3/9, 8 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton. Sun 3/10, 7:30 PM, Lutkin Hall, Northwestern University, 700 University, Evanston. 773-755-1628 or 800-746-4969. DREAM THEATER Sold out. Fri 3/15 and Sat 3/16, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N....
Trib’s Business Blunder But last week O’Shea said it wasn’t so. “Basically,” he told me, “what it came down to was that David was doing a very good job of executing a bad idea. The bad idea was mine.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune put a high value on visual uniformity when it redesigned itself two years ago. A key element that Metro, Sports, Business, and many lesser sections shared was a column running down the left side of page one, a head shot of the author at the top....
When art preservationist Heather Becker placed a call to Tilton Elementary in 1995, she was looking for three lunette murals above the auditorium doors, painted in 1910-’11 by Janet Laura Scott. Becker was researching murals painted in Chicago public schools between the turn of the century and the New Deal, with the eventual aim of restoring them, and Scott’s works at the west-side school–depicting Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, and William Penn–were among the oldest Becker had heard about....
Jerry Malik and I are sitting at his computer one recent afternoon, looking at digital images of women in various stages of undress. He points his cursor to a softly lit photo he took of a svelte naked woman. She’s leaning on her elbows against the arm of a couch, her back slightly arched and her eyes lightly shut. Just as I’m thinking that the woman looks like she’s about to fake an orgasm, Malik says, “I don’t see why every woman on the planet wouldn’t want at least one picture like that of herself....
The fourth annual Chicago Anarchist Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, May 2 through 4. Screenings will be at Buddy, 1542 N. Milwaukee, second floor. Suggested donation is $5, and all films will be shown by video projection; for more information call 773-862-1011. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four documentaries: Coleman Romalis’s Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Guest (2000, 42 min.), a Canadian profile of the legendary activist; Hope Tucker’s Queen of the Loop (2000, 30 min....
