When WorldCom went broke over the summer, it was the biggest bankruptcy in the history of money. WorldCom isn’t just any company. It’s a phone company. It owns MCI, the second largest long-distance carrier. But now it’s so poor it owes $300 million to SBC Communications, $183 million to Verizon Communications, and $20,000 to its janitorial service. “My son was very sick,” Monroe says. “The TV was on, I had the diaper in my hand, and I got a call....
Gary Stochl was walking down Milwaukee Avenue east of Halsted in January 2003 when he saw a funky storefront gallery that had an exhibit of street photography. He pushed through the rusted security grating and went inside. Stochl’s only formal training in photography was a class he took in high school. “The instructor left me on my own to do my own thing,” he says. So that’s what he did. And he kept doing it while he was in the army in the 60s and during the years that followed....
If Ronald and Ernie Isley are less visible on the oldies circuit than their 60s and 70s contemporaries, it’s because they’re still right up there on the R & B chart. With a discography that includes early rock ‘n’ roll (“Twist and Shout”), Motown (“This Old Heart of Mine”), psychedelic soul (“That Lady”), and seminal slow jams (“Don’t Say Goodnight”), the Isleys have been reinventing themselves for over 40 years. In May they released Body Kiss (Dreamworks), written and produced (with the exception of one song) by R....
Sally Gall: Subterranea North American landscape painters of the 19th century, working at a time when our wilderness was first being destroyed, created sweeping mountain views that configured nature as a cathedral. Now two photo shows at galleries just across the street from each other offer implied commentaries on today’s landscapes. Sally Gall’s 16 black-and-white pictures at Catherine Edelman, images also collected in her book Subterranea, find in underground caverns some of the majesty of earlier landscape paintings....
ORANGE PEELS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Orange Peels want it understood that they’re from California: According to the Web site for this Bay Area pop quartet, when they delivered their first album to Chicago’s Minty Fresh label in 1997 and label honcho Jim Powers complained about the heavy reverb, front man Allen Clapp replied, “What did you expect when you signed a band from California?...
As Ravinia’s first composer in residence, Osvaldo Golijov is getting the royal treatment. Over the next two weeks the festival will present three of his works–a trio of art songs written for soprano Dawn Upshaw, the string quartet Yiddishbbuk, and the monumental mass La pasion segun San Marcos (“The Passion According to Saint Mark”)–at three separate concerts. Now 41 and based in Massachusetts, the Argentinean native is a vital member of a nascent American movement that’s transforming Eurocentric conventions by drawing from indigenous Asian and Latin American sources....
Homebody/Kabul The nameless homebody, a sequestered, fortysomething British wife and mother whose life consists almost entirely of reading books, is charming, self-effacing, and so lonely in her incommunicative marriage that, given a receptive audience, she chatters on and on. Director Frank Galati places Morton far downstage in a comfy chair, a sampling of her copious library stacked gracefully around her. With her precious books at her fingertips, she’s the picture of domestic tranquility, although the enormous black void that surrounds her suggests something more ominous....
Ladies and gentlemen: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was a managing editor in Pioneer’s North group from 1979 to 1990 for the Evanston Review, Glencoe News, Deerfield Review, and Northbrook Star. During those 12 years I garnered a number of honors, including a Peter Lisagor award, Best Columnist by Suburban Newspapers of America, and several first places for features by Northern Illinois University....
Sterling Plumpp, poet and professor, is sitting in a room halfway up the not-quite-ivory tower of University Hall on the campus of UIC, a million-dollar grin playing across his face. After 30 years in the departments of English and African-American studies, Plumpp, 61, will retire at the end of this semester. But that’s not why he’s grinning. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He usually plays the Lotto or the Big Game, putting all his money on a single number, but that day he bought $20 worth of Vegas Instant Game tickets....
David Wain and Michael Showalter’s film Wet Hot American Summer–an extended goof on Meatballs set at a Jewish summer camp–ran roughshod over 80s teen sex-comedy cliches with a quasi-graphic depiction of gay sex, a falling chunk of Skylab, a shot-by-shot homage to Animal House, and a talking can of vegetables. This perversely funny 2001 film was a natural outgrowth of Stella, the anything-goes weekly cabaret Wain, Showalter, and Michael Ian Black began hosting at New York’s Fez Cafe in 1997....
Pianist Steve Million has played long enough and in enough different settings–from Jeff Newell’s New-Trad Octet to his own odd little two-keyboard band Monk’s Dream–to qualify as a genuine fixture on the Chicago scene. And his three albums for Palmetto, recorded with a quintet featuring top-notch New Yorkers Chris Potter and Randy Brecker, have plenty to recommend them, including a chance to hear those name musicians interpret Million’s inventive tunes. But like most good pianists, Million sounds best in the stripped-down context of a trio–it’s the ideal setting for his soft touch and nuanced attack, and allows him to imbue his solos with more energy and focus....
An exhilarating and terrifying journey through youth-culture hell. Video maker Helen Stickler devoted six years to this swift and compact documentary, which uses the tale of Mark “Gator” Rogowski to chronicle the marketing of skateboard fashion in the 80s. Raised in a broken home in southern California, the teenage Rogowski astonished fans with his stylish moves on the vertical ramp and pocketed $20,000 a month as the flamboyant pitchman for Vision Skateboards....
The Taxman Cometh Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Contemporary Art Workshop was founded in 1949 by Kearney’s husband, sculptor John Kearney, a World War II vet who’d gone from the Pacific front to the Cranbrook Academy. His cofounders were painter Leon Golub, sculptors Cosmo Campoli and Ray Fink, and ceramist Al Kwitz. Lynn entered the scene a few months after they’d opened, as a Northwestern University art history graduate looking for instruction in silversmithing....
Where There’s Hope There’s Fire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The band had just released its fourth and strongest album, People People Why Are We Fighting? (Flydaddy), and Cohen was pleased with their reception on the road. But as the tour was winding down, guitarist Patrick O’Connell announced that he was leaving to focus on acoustic music, and Lenzi said he wanted to switch from drums to guitar....
Vocalist Willie Buck was a mainstay in Chicago clubs from the late 60s until the early 90s, when his friend and closest stage partner, the late keyboardist Johnny “Big Moose” Walker, suffered a stroke and stopped playing out. Buck all but quit performing too, but recently he’s been gigging again with increasing frequency, appearing at the Checkerboard and a few other local venues; on Thursday, May 30, he has a set at the Chicago Blues Festival (see sidebar)....
Thirty years ago, Devon Avenue was a bazaar of kosher delis, synagogues, and bagel shops. Today, businesses like Gitel’s Kosher Pastry Shop share the street with Bombay Video, Islamic Books & Things, Sona Chandi Boutique, and Taj Sari Palace. What hasn’t changed are the names of the local politicians. Devon Avenue is still represented by an all-Jewish cast: Alderman Berny Stone, Representative Lou Lang, Senator Ira Silverstein, and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky....
Times change, and George Liako-poulos is a college man, with a degree in business administration from Loyola University. But he’s still in the diner business. From 1983 to 1999 he operated the Golden Apple at Lincoln and Wellington, across the street from Saint Alphonsus Church (he still owns the building, though he’s given up the diner). He and his father owned the building at North and Ashland where Arthur Bookman ran a Huddle House Grill, and after Bookman’s lease expired in 1995 he turned the place over to Liakopoulos....
Friday 3/28 – Thursday 4/3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 29 SATURDAY Joe Louis’s boxing gloves, Steve Dahl’s helmet from Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, and a photograph of Hull House’s 1909 women’s basketball team–stiffly posed in bloomers and black stockings, their shirts buttoned to their chins–are just a few of the bits of memorabilia on display in the Chicago Historical Society’s new exhibit Chicago Sports!...
Friday 10/31 – Thursday 11/6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You could spend Halloween getting shit faced at a club. Again. But why spend ghouldom’s night of nights too numb to feel a shiver? (Anyway, bars are nicer on All Souls’ Day, when the other drunks are in bed sleeping it off.) Instead you could wallow in the roar and creep of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, and Bach’s Toccato in D Minor, all played on the Music Institute of Chicago’s 1913 Skinner organ....
CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a long time now I’ve wished Chicago’s Symphony Center would establish resident jazz and classical chamber ensembles–and every time I listen to the groups based at New York’s Lincoln Center, that desire gets stronger. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center was founded over three decades ago by composer William Schuman, pianist Charles Wadsworth, and patron Alice Tully, and has since become one of New York’s premier musical attractions....
