It’s difficult to describe what this iconic husband-and-wife team, natives of Japan but based in New York for almost 30 years, actually does onstage. Eiko comes close, however, in her online description of their “Delicious Movement” workshops: “Our class looks like a bunch of amoebas or maggots moving dreamingly and urgently. . . . Our intention is to counteract conventional education by bringing back the spontaneity and ‘active passivity’ of sleep into our waking hours....
The year 2001 marked the final destruction of the economic engine that wouldn’t quit: the Maxwell Street shopping district. Though plenty of arguments were made for preserving it–on cultural, historical, financial, and architectural grounds–no one doubted that the outcome would be its demise, squashed by the combined clout of the city, real estate millionaires, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The university could have built its dorms and high-class housing development immediately to the west or east, in areas that once had public housing and a Chernin’s shoe store....
“I think my wisdom teeth are loose,” Julio says as he leans back in the dentist’s chair. “The teeth aren’t really hurting me or nothing. I just don’t want to wait a few months and have to get them taken out in the emergency room.” The clinic’s story began in 1985, when patients started trickling into the UIC dental school with a mysterious immune disease that nobody was sure how to handle....
By Dennis Rodkin The rec room at the Blackhawk Hills complex was built ten years ago, when Ross had just left a high-end interior architecture firm to start his own company, but he’s still exploring ways to bring the outdoors in, to make nature part of our living spaces. In his buildings nature isn’t just something to look at through picture windows; it’s an essential force to live with and respond to....
Is James Ellroy the greatest white-knuckle-drunk writer since Eugene O’Neill? Is he a frightful braggart and a publicity whore of the first order? Didn’t he revamp detective novels from tough guy whodunits into sprawling postwar dramas with real psychological immediacy? Do I dig him, and does he worry me? Yes to all the above. Ellroy’s sleazy and sad life story as a dope fiend and pervert is familiar to anyone who read his riveting 1996 memoir, My Dark Places, but he includes a couple of autobiographical essays in his latest collection, Destination: Morgue!...
Arthur Sullivan had high aspirations for himself as a composer of symphonies and grand opera, but his fate will be linked forever to that of his witty librettist, William Gilbert. Gilbert and Sullivan, one of the most successful musical teams in history, created comic works that are hard to classify. They’re not exactly classical–though they parody the operettas of Offenbach and Strauss and are usually sung more in a classical than a musical theater style–and they have speaking parts....
Lyric Opera’s fourth annual gift to the city, an end-of-summer free concert in Grant Park showcasing marquee singers from its upcoming productions, is, of course, also a high-profile advertisement for the company–an especially appropriate tactic after last season’s alarming drop in attendance. As usual, it’s gone all out, corralling three of the four principals from this fall’s opener, a revival of The Marriage of Figaro: lyric soprano Ruth Ann Swenson (who’ll be singing Countess Almaviva for the first time), soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian (Susanna), and bass-baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo (Figaro), all repeat performers at Lyric and in the prime of their careers....
Every once in a while a choreographer bursts onto the scene with a single dance and wows everyone. Paul Christiano, a member of Melissa Thodos & Dancers, developed a piece as part of the company’s incubator project, won a Ruth Page award for the choreography, and had it performed by the Joffrey in its hometown engagement last fall. Miracle, Interrupted is a dance for ten divided into sections that look different yet all convey a sense of energy maintained and transformed....
Back in 2000, Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) released versions of two Michael Hurley songs on her Covers Album, but even today few people know enough about the man to realize just how hip her selections were. Hurley’s a genuine 1960s outsider and cult hero, one of the only fabulous grizzled freaks with a flag still flying–the most eccentric exponent of the most eccentric wing of eccentric folk music. As a teenager in the late 50s Hurley began what has turned out to be a lifetime of itinerancy, living out of vans or sleeping on floors, stopping in Greenwich Village, Mexico, or New Orleans, and all the while writing weird little ditties about protein monsters, English gentlemen, and a mysterious creature called “the Hog of the Forsaken....
The stewardship of Northwestern University’s annual NU Music Marathon has passed to faculty composers Jay Alan Yim and Amy Williams, whose interests differ slightly from those of founder Amnon Wolman, who left the university last fall. Yim has roots in east-coast academia and lives in the Netherlands part of the year, while Williams has a doctorate from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where the improv tradition developed by Morton Feldman still flourishes....
“Do you find fat women attractive?” asks a calm, disembodied voice at the beginning of Big Girls: Big Beautiful Women in the Adult Entertainment Industry. “No,” “not really,” “not generally”–the answers come back quickly as the camera cuts from one man on the street to the next, culminating with one guy’s declaration that “big women suck!” At that, Sara McCool turns the camera on herself and flips it the bird....
Dear Readers: A few weeks back I printed a letter from Mutilated and Comeless, a 24-year-old who lost the head of his penis–the glans–in a botched circumcision. MAC hasn’t had an orgasm since he was 16, and the few women he’s slept with as an adult either failed to notice his condition–and the fact that he didn’t climax–or ran screaming once they got a look at his cock. Ironically enough, he thought getting head might help him get off, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask anyone to suck what was left of his dick....
Bartleby With David Paymer, Crispin Glover, Glenne Headly, Joe Piscopo, Maury Chaykin, and Seymour Cassel. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The nameless narrator of the original is a lawyer on the verge of retirement looking back on the events he describes from a distance of many years. (The opening sentence is “I am a rather elderly man.”) He recalls his small legal firm on Wall Street, whose business was mainly “rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title deeds,” where he employed two copyists and an office boy with the Dickensian names of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nuts, each briefly profiled in Dickensian fashion....
A friend and I were playing Nintendo, the original eight-bit system, and we played Duck Hunt, a game that requires a “light gun.” I was wondering: How exactly does the Nintendo game “know” where you are pointing the gun on the screen when you shoot ducks?!? Very mind-boggling! –Matt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here’s what happens. You shoot at a duck, which appears on an ordinary TV screen....
It’s tough to review Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) in a few hundred words: the depth and breadth of the work don’t allow for blithe summary. The fourth in Cahill’s popular “Hinges of History” series, following How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Gifts of the Jews, and Desire of the Everlasting Hills (with three volumes in the series yet to come), Sailing is written in Cahill’s typically avuncular style (though his examinations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, a vital early part of the book, are quite scholarly) and gives equal credit to the Greeks for their innovative (language, literature, architecture, democracy) and perhaps not-so-welcome (militarism, patriarchy) contributions to Western civilization....
Shockheaded Peter These dark tales are made even darker by a production in which all the actors wear funereal black and whiteface and accent every moment of horror and cruelty. In the thumb-sucking story, the boy is represented by a rather sweet-faced life-size marionette with oversize thumbs. The cute, guileless puppet easily wins our hearts, yet it’s easier–and funnier–to do cruel things to him than to a live actor, like snip off his thumbs while he opens his eyes wide and wails....
The first thing visitors saw when they walked into the consumer bike show at Navy Pier last weekend was a display of three gleaming 2003 Subarus. The automaker has been the title sponsor of the annual event–formally known as the Subaru Chicago Bike Show and Family Fitness Expo–for the last two years. On Saturday afternoon a smattering of people were checking out the vehicles, which included a bright yellow Baja with a bike rack built into its rear bed....
CHICAGO STRING QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One test of a chamber ensemble’s strength is how quickly the new lineup jells after a change in personnel. Founded in 1995, the Chicago String Quartet has undergone two such transformations–and first violinist Joseph Genualdi, like former Juilliard leader Robert Mann, has used these infusions of new blood to fine-tune his group. Three years ago, after Christopher Costanza replaced the CSQ’s founding cellist, the ensemble was invigorated, expanding its repertoire to include more modern works while maintaining the high standards that had already earned it a place alongside the Vermeer as one of the finest string quartets in Chicago....
By Nick Green By the mid-70s, when Raeburn entered elementary school, Wertham’s suggestion in a 1954 Reader’s Digest article that comic books would result in the delinquency of America’s youth had been largely dismissed as overzealous crackpot theorizing. But if Raeburn had been born a generation earlier, he might well have suffered the fate of thousands of kids no different from himself: comics collections were burned, ripped apart, and destroyed before children’s very eyes in the cold war era’s second biggest witch-hunt....
By Linda Lutton But the numbers on my screen got me wondering what this letter from the IRS was going to say. The Democrats tried to stop the letters from going out on the grounds that–besides being a waste of $33.9 million in taxpayer money (more now, since the government messed up on its calculations and told a half million mostly lower-income people they were getting more than they are–gotta send those folks another letter with the bad news)–they were partisan and promotional, to wit: “Thanks to the Congress of the United States and President George W....
