Without a Net Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On November 17 he called 911 again. This time paramedics delivered him to Our Lady of the Resurrection, where he was admitted–dehydrated and with a raging infection in the surgical wound. Doris Beamish was relieved: “My last words to him were, ‘You’re in safe hands now. They’ll take care of you.’” By early the next morning he was dead....
Every night at Fogo de Chao–the 350-seat restaurant on LaSalle specializing in spit-roasted meat–a highly orchestrated ballet takes place. Brazilian servers sporting pleated pants and boots circle the tables, carrying skewers of grilled steak, pork, and lamb. When diners show green cardboard disks indicating they’re ready to eat, a flurry of “gauchos” approaches, slicing portions to order. Guests who’ve had enough flip their table markers to the red side, and the servers back off....
Gerhard Richter: I can communicate nothing…there is nothing to communicate…painting can never be communication. –Gerhard Richter, 1977 Richter’s rejection of an obvious signature, while perhaps stemming from his experience of a totalitarian approach to style, goes against the ethos of much Western art history. By the Renaissance, one painter’s style could be differentiated from another’s; by the time of pioneering abstractionists Mondrian and Malevich, artists were seeking unique shapes that would express the unseen essence of things, hoping to replace religious images with their own icons....
On a Sunday night a few months ago, my girlfriend and I took a moonlit stroll down Hutchinson Street just north of Irving Park and off Marine Drive. The street’s mansions and Prairie-style homes were built in the late 1800s, during that era’s version of suburban expansion. The area was already wealthy. The summer home of S.H. Kerfoot occupied 11 acres of plush gardens and abutted James Waller’s 60-acre estate known as “Buena....
“This is the introduction to the world of birds,” Aurora University biologist David Horn says of the six-session class he begins teaching this week at the Morton Arboretum. “We’ll go from their ancestry from dinosaurs to extreme living examples,” such as hummingbirds, whose wings beat 50 times a second, and penguins, who’ve adapted to “fly” in the water. Birds have been around for at least 150 million years, their closest living relatives are crocodiles, and their lineage goes back to primitive reptiles....
Keith G. Stras is on a mission to save polka, which is to say he has his work cut out for him. The demographic outlook for the music is bleak: young people are not embracing polka, and as for the old guard, Stras doesn’t mince words. “You go to a local affair in Chicago,” he says, “and you look around the room, you ask yourself, ‘What’s gonna happen in five years?...
It wasn’t until long after I’d watched this movie about a 30-man choir in a Norwegian fishing village with an “uninterrupted view to the north pole” that it occurred to me it might not be a documentary. I did notice that parts of it were unabashedly staged, as when the group is shown performing outdoors, braving severe winter weather in picturesque images that fade to white, and I did think it a bit strange that some teenage girls began to pester the singers–mostly old men–for autographs after a concert in Russia that brought down the house....
Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What really grates, however, is Bonesteel’s absurdly elevated comparisons to artists such as Joseph Cornell and Picasso. Cornell was an eccentric in some respects (not socially dysfunctional however), but he did not possess the tunnel vision obsessiveness that starts to become so wearisome with Darger. Cornell had a sublime poetic sense that combined with a highly sophisticated and varied group of ideas that worked on many levels....
The sound of the organ trio–Hammond B-3, drums, and either sax or guitar out front–was a staple of Chicago jazz for years after the format emerged in the mid-50s. Sadly, there are exactly three such bands now appearing regularly in the city, and two of them feature the same organist, Chris Foreman. (While Chicago currently boasts several other top-notch organ players, none works in a traditional trio.) In Deep Blue, Foreman teams up with drummer Greg Rockingham and the brainy and soulful guitarist Bobby Broom; the partnership began in the early 90s, surviving long periods of inactivity before the group assumed a weekly slot at the Green Mill this spring....
Los Angeles Plays Itself I think there’s this weird thing at work now with the way people relate to, specifically, mainstream cinema. When they watch those movies they like to be on the receiving end. . . . The sound is so loud, and the images are so powerful, they want to be totally passive. But then, a few months later, the same film is on DVD, and they can watch it and they own it....
We always try to find reasons to come here because the turtle sundae is the best. I like how they have those jukeboxes on the tables that are all broken–they’ve been like that since the 80s. It’s very cluttered in here and the booths have all these papers and things on them. We celebrated my birthday here one night. We happened to be sitting in a booth that had the office phone right next to us....
Last summer my friends Mara, Tim, and I were out on Lake Michigan on his boat, the Sweet Marie. It was such a beautiful night that by the time we decided to come back to the harbor, around 2 AM, there wasn’t a dinghy to bring us back to the dock. So we unloaded some of our items on the dock and then took the boat to its anchoring place. Our plan was to get the tubing raft and lay across it and paddle back to our belongings....
On his first junket to the United States in 2002, Joseph Ole Koyei, cultural ambassador for the Masai people, raised $7,000, enough to build two classrooms for a village school. So when he left his home in the grassy pastures of the Great Rift Valley again this April, this time to raise money for a new well (the women in his village haul drinking water from several miles away), he was given a hero’s send-off....
Loosely structured on the utopia/dystopia dichotomy, this may be Chicago Filmmakers curator Patrick Friel’s strongest group show so far: more than half of the 15 films and videos are superb. Luis Recoder’s Interlace (2002) seeks heaven with its cloudlike shapes and wispy, sweeping lines that invoke the infinite. Robert Mead’s haikulike Night Wake (2002) offers a humorous transition from mystery to banality as white dots on black lead to a green inflatable life preserver on water....
Knowing Junnie Putman “brought out a side of me that was walled up my whole life,” says Richard Younker. Putman was one of the last commercial fishermen on the upper Mississippi River, and Younker, a photojournalist, visited him 55 times over nine years, photographing him with his fishing gear, listening to his stories, and mingling with his friends and family. Younker would pay room and board to the townspeople of Bellevue, Iowa, who’d put him up for days and weeks at a time in their homes....
I conducted due diligence at your Web site, but found no reference to a delicate but vital question that has been nagging me for some time now. Can you please tell me whether it is more sanitary to aim directly for the back wall of a urinal or to splash into the water? Which minimizes splashback? Do urinal designers consider this in the same way that, say, auto designers use wind tunnels to minimize air resistance?...
I need to know why the women in my office always seem cold while the men are warm. The women are always wearing light sweaters (even in summer) and complaining about the air conditioning. Last summer I called maintenance to have them adjust the temperature, which was 25 degrees Celsius (or 77 degrees Fahrenheit), down to 21 (room temperature), only to be confronted by several cold women. Why are they always so cold?...
In this new musical, “Tumpie” is the nickname of the young Josephine Baker, daughter of a Saint Louis laundress who became the toast of 1920s Paris by importing “le jazz hot.” Performed for the first time as the opening attraction of the “Stages 2002” festival, this work in progress focuses on Baker’s relationship with her domineering mother. Broadway star Lillias White (Dreamgirls, The Life) plays mama and doubles as Big Bertha, the vaudeville producer who helps Baker get to Europe; Roosevelt University alum Angela Grovey makes her Chicago debut as Baker....
Unfriendly Competition Wheels spun in Mariotti’s head. Wood had assailed the very drift and ennui that were the topic of tomorrow morning’s column. The sports final deadline was long gone, but it wasn’t too late to add Wood to the late sports final. Mariotti called Chicago. “I’d have been negligent not to do that,” he says. “All I did was top it out as I should and put my spin on it....
Wayne Wonder didn’t lead the recent charge of dancehall artists crossing over on the American charts–Shaggy, Beenie Man, Elephant Man, and most notably Sean Paul have been battering the gates for a while now. But this 18-year veteran of the Jamaican music scene scored one of the biggest hits of the current wave this spring when “No Letting Go” reached number 11 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and resurfaced as a radio remix costarring LL Cool J....
