With its plain cream brick facade and run-down interior visible through a large display window, the Ford Motor Company showroom at 1444 S. Michigan doesn’t look like a landmark. But the utilitarian building has a revolutionary past–legend has it that while Henry Ford was here in 1905 to oversee the construction of his first showroom outside of Detroit he took a break to watch meat being processed at the nearby stockyards and hit on the idea of the auto assembly line....
I am a 21-year-old girl who is very much in love with a 24-year-old boy. When we first met, he was very sexual and easy to please. We had a lot of fun back in the day. But now, almost two years later, he is seriously lacking lust. I have to beg him for sex. I am a very young, attractive girl. I love to try new things! I love to suck cock and I have very big, perky breasts....
Richard Cook, director of the University of Chicago’s Cognitive Technologies Laboratory, is an anesthesiologist by training. But he’s best known for his work on spectacular accidents outside of health care–Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster–which concludes that such accidents are caused not by human error but by flaws in systems. His lab’s mission is to study “safety culture” and devise training methods that treat human judgment as a resource rather than an obstacle....
For the last several months, Rafael Chagin has dreamed of running for mayor, if only to tell anyone who would listen how the city made it almost impossible for him to operate his cardboard box factory. But he’ll probably never make that run, thanks to a law requiring 25,000 voter signatures to get on the ballot. “And how can an ordinary citizen possibly get 25,000 signatures?” says Chagin. “The law is antidemocratic....
Is the grass always greener on the other side of the fence? –Gigi Reece, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First let’s clear up the ecological angle. The professor writes: “The ecological optics of the viewing conditions shown in figure 1 provide a simple explanation” of the proverb. Figure 1 depicts a man looking at the grass. Parsing things out as best I can, I’m guessing that the grass is ecological, whereas looking at it involves optics....
Rock, Pop, Etc. BIG HEAD TODD & THE MONSTERS, JANAH, CECILIA Fri 8/22, 6 PM, Lincoln Park Zoo, 2200 N. Cannon. 312-742-2000. LUCHO CASTILLO, ZEN-SVEN HANSON, SHERILLE LAMB, ELLEN ROSNER, MANINDER SINGH, FULL BODY POETRY ENSEMBLE & others perform as part of “A Spiritual Banquet of Poetry & Music III,” hosted by Richard Fammeree; free admission. Sat 8/23, 6:30 PM, Transitions Bookplace, 1000 W. North. 312-951-7323. CITY LIGHTS ORCHESTRA performs at Chicago SummerDance, preceded by dance lessons with Jill DeMarlo & Quinton MacAdam at 4 PM....
If, as Run-D.M.C. first said, a DJ can be a band, then you might expect music made by a group of DJs to sound a bit cluttered. But the three members of Triple Threat–onetime International Turntablist Federation World Champion Vinroc and former Invizibl Skratch Piklz members Apollo and Shortkut–know how to stay out of each other’s way. The most effective moments on Many Styles (Fat Beats), the trio’s first album, are the most minimal: “Hit ‘Em Off” manipulates an itchy rhythm guitar, and not much else, over a busy beat....
Franz Geiger Harold Henderson: Why “surface science”? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » FG: We start out with the most abundant mineral, silica, found in sand. We set up an interface where water meets the silica. That’s a platform we can control and make more complex, one step at a time. Instead of starting with a real soil, which has who knows how many different things in it and is hard to generalize from, we start with a simplified soil and see how each new addition affects it....
La Cazuela $2.75 Camarones (Shrimp) en Salsa Picante 5 $2.95 2000 Archery Summit Vireton (Oregon), $27.99. This white blend (mainly pinot gris, with small amounts of chardonnay and pinot blanc) has an oaky richness imparted by the chardonnay and a crispness on the finish from the pinot blanc. Its floral quality, along with the fullness of the fruit–hints of golden delicious apples and pears on the palate and litchi, kiwi, and tangerines on the nose–make it a nice match to the lime marinade in the seviche....
Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000) **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Lewis Klahr. Klahr’s superb visual sense is very much in evidence here, where his seductive environments–sensuous interiors, suggestive objects–threaten to overwhelm his people, who are even more passive than the characters in 50s melodramas. Drifting through a pop-culture fever dream of hypnotic music and entranced spaces, a kind of inventory of wonders, a comic book cutout can take on the powers of a magician even as he fails to understand what’s happening to him or why....
The 12 oil paintings by Ann Worthing at Aron Packer Gallery set a single animal against a softly colored background, but most of their titles–Monkey Business, Squirrely–are words humans use to judge one another. Yet Worthing undercuts any judgment. The open eyes and dead-on gaze of the sheep in Sheepish contradict the title; the mug-shot profile and closed eyes of the goat in Scapegoat suggest a victim–though its raised head adds a hint of pride....
Matthew Noel-Tod acknowledges that his 2003 video Atomic, the centerpiece of his current exhibit at Unit B Gallery, is not particularly aesthetically pleasing. A shot-by-shot re-creation of the 1980 Blondie video of the same name, it’s colorful and rhythmic but visually disjointed. What’s most fascinating about the video is the weird lifelessness of the performers (all recent graduates of an art school in Norwich, England, where Noel-Tod lives) and the odd disconnect between the rapid-fire imagery and the slower tempo of the accompanying music: instead of the Blondie song, the four-minute video repeats to a 90-minute score composed for F....
Chicago keyboardist Bob Long has no fear of commitment, musically speaking: when he enters a relationship, he’s in it for the long haul. In the late 80s he formed a quartet with saxist Brian Gephart that, though performing only sporadically, has maintained its aesthetic and built its repertoire over the course of three self-released CDs. (The latest, Corners, arrived in 2000.) And way back in 1973, Long helped start a brash, fitfully ambitious fusion quartet called Streetdancer, which at one time grew to include Chico Freeman on saxes; nearly 30 years later, when the disc Secrets announced Streetdancer’s reemergence from some extended dormancy, there was Long, smoothly connecting the band’s funky beginnings with a subsequent heightened interest in Eastern European roots....
Bridge Work Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bridge grew out of java-fueled conversations that sprang up in the late Wicker Park bookstore and a ready supply of unpublished material. “Friends would come by to look at the books and discuss what they were reading and writing,” Workman says. “We started talking about putting together a publication that would recognize the connections between disciplines.” Then an undergraduate English major at Northwestern, he was inspired by visiting philosopher Charles Taylor; when he also scored an interview with Kurt Vonnegut in the summer of 2000 and couldn’t sell it, he got serious about starting a journal....
Why does an exotic dancer need clothes? When Evola started her business it was a nail salon with a small sideline in clothing. “My taste in clothing is probably a little bit more east or west coast, but not midwest,” she says. “I love sexy clothes.” In search of the right stuff, she traveled to garment shows in California and Florida, but she wasn’t moving much of this merchandise until a substantial number of dancers began patronizing her shop....
FARIDA & THE IRAQI MAQAM ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Farida Mohammed Ali is one of Iraq’s most prominent female practitioners of Arabic classical music, which is based on an ancient and complex system of maqam, or melodic modes, each of which has its own distinctive scale, rules, and mood. In fact, the organizers of the tour claim that Farida is the first woman to teach this tradition in Iraq, and that she is now the first Iraqi woman to perform it in the States....
Sociologist David Grazian became interested in urban blues clubs soon after arriving here to pursue his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1995. New in town and needing a break from academia, Grazian was drawn out of Hyde Park to the north side by the “nighttime distractions” of clubs like B.L.U.E.S. and Kingston Mines. But even there he couldn’t entirely escape his studies. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
On Friday, June 29, a memo delivered to the cells in the condemned unit at Pontiac commanded all inmates to turn over all art supplies to the guards by July 6. No riot broke out, but as soon as the prisoners were let out of their cells for their daily constitutional, several lined up to use the phone. Some called their attorneys, a couple of the attorneys called the press....
Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city of Chicago and the state of Illinois have teamed up in recent years to attract new business to the state, and especially to the Chicago metropolitan region. Mayor Daley and Governor Ryan formed a strong partnership that aggressively sought out new economic development opportunities. We have continued that productive partnership with Governor Blagojevich. While the article uses Site Selection magazine as a source, it failed to note that the publication ranked Illinois and the Chicago metro region as the number one places in the country for corporate relocation and expansion–two years in a row....
Never underestimate the power of context. Watching Report on Body, the evening-length dance-theater work by this group from Beijing, I felt I was trying to decipher something written in a language I barely understood. Did I know enough about the history and culture of mainland China to have any real sense of the piece? Devised by choreographer-director Wen Hui and filmmaker-actor Wu Wenguang, Report on Body deals with the roles assigned women–and clothes play a huge part in transforming them....
