Friday 11/23 – Thursday 11/29
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24 SATURDAY This weekend the Museum of Contemporary Art will unveil Adam Siegel’s Path of Remembrance, a community art project in memory of the victims of September 11, and waive its usual admission fees. Siegel is inviting the public to help him draw 4,000 flowers in chalk–each representing a lost life–to create a sidewalk path around the MCA, past a fire station to the lake, and back to Michigan Avenue. Other highlights of the museum’s current displays include Felix, sculptor-prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s giant cat skeleton–his answer to the Field Museum’s Sue–and the exhibit “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994.” The MCA is at 220 E. Chicago and is open today from 10 to 5 (312-280-2660).
The recent film The Deep End was based on Max Ophuls’s 1949 thriller The Reckless Moment, which was in turn based on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1947 novel The Blank Wall. In Ophuls’s version–which is still not available on video or DVD–a housewife (Joan Bennett) tries to protect her daughter from being arrested for murdering her lover and winds up being blackmailed (and romanced) by a lusty Irishman played by James Mason. Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the original “a much better film in almost every respect.” It shows today and tomorrow at 11:30 AM at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport (773-871-6604). Tickets are $6.50.
28 WEDNESDAY “The fetal monitor, which was strapped around my belly, became the center of activity in the birthing room. My well-meaning midwives were primarily focused on monitoring the continual readout from the machine at my side. The baby and I seemed less real in that room than did the machine. At that point the birthing process was so technologized that the notion that ‘I’ was there to give ‘birth’ seemed like sort of a virtual aside.” So writes Naomi Wolf in her recent book, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, which details her experience of pregnancy and childbirth. Wolf, best known for 1991’s The Beauty Myth, will read from and discuss her new work tonight at 7:30 at Women & Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark. It’s free; call 773-769-9299.
