Posts

Progress has seldom been presented as ironically as it is in David Mamet’s early, arch one-act. Here the Depression-fed hopes and dreams of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition contrast with the sordid cautionary tale of Charles Lang, a maverick inventor whose water engine proves too great a threat to the titans of industry–who decide just what form progress will take. To this tight hour-long murder mystery Mamet adds two alienating elements: he gives his piece the format of a radio play, scripting everything down to the last sound effect, and the concept of a chain letter, touted in “commercials....

British saxophonist Trevor Watts was a cofounder of the revolutionary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the 60s, a charter member of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra in the 70s, and guiding light of the bands Moire Music and Moire Music Drum Orchestra in the 80s. Like Moire (which played the World Music Festival here three years ago), Watts’s new project draws inspiration from Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, a London group formed in the mid-60s around a racially mixed core of South African emigres....

Rock, Pop, etc. BLINK 182, GREEN DAY Sat 6/15, 6:30 PM, Tweeter Center, I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park. 708-614-1616 or 312-559-1212. THE BUZZ Free concert. Sat 6/15, 5 PM, Hamlin Park, 3035 N. Hoyne. 312-742-7529. ELBOW Free in-store performance. Fri 6/14, 7 PM, Tower Records, 2301 N. Clark. 773-477-5994. JAZZYFATNASTEES perform as part of the Neo Soul Explosion series. Wed 6/19, 7 PM, Skyline Stage, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. 312-595-7437 or 312-559-1212....

Big dreams are brewing–along with nearly 100 varieties of tea–at My Place for Tea, the tiny shop Enrico and Minerva Zamora opened on Belmont in January. There’s full-bodied mango black from Ceylon, an Indian Darjeeling dressed up with rose petals, and a pale, tropical pineapple-scented green variety. South American yerba mate is for sale, as are its traditional drinking gourd and metal straw. There is Japanese hojicha, made from twigs, Korean barley tea, which tastes like coffee, and marzipan tea laced with rum....

Tensions have been building in Albany Park over what to do with the old CTA bus turnaround on Pulaski just south of Foster, a parcel owned by the Park District where 100 or so day laborers congregate in hopes of finding work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last winter the local alderman, Danny Solis of the 25th Ward, agreed to hold a public hearing on the issue with state senator Miguel del Valle and the Latino Union, a Pilsen-based workers’ advocacy group headed by the Reverend Jose Landaverde....

Women on the Edge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The financial squeeze has already been felt. Artemisia’s gallery coordinator, Tricia Alexander, was presented with a three-month contract instead of a yearlong one when her term recently came up for renewal. Alexander handles all day-to-day operations, from PR and billing to manning the front desk. “She’s a treasure. It would be really tough if we were to lose her,” Brotman says, but Jahn Foundation money funded the position....

Young bicoastal bassist Adam Lane has been collaborating with his mentors since he first worked with the great Danish saxophonist John Tchicai in the latter’s California-based quartet Infinitesimal Flash two years ago. With his new album, Fo(u)r Being(s) (CIMP), Lane can put two more notches in his fiddle–trumpeter Paul Smoker and drummer Barry Altschul join him and Tchicai. The bassist is a fine player and even better composer; his long-form postbop melodies suggest the contrapuntal gusto of Charles Mingus and provide space for extended improvisation....

In 1999 director Kirby Dick (Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist) began a documentary project at the ethnically diverse John Marshall High School just east of Hollywood, in which individual students were given video cameras and asked to record their lives for a week without any restrictions. By the end of the school year Dick had amassed over 700 hours of footage by more than 500 students, and working with editor Matt Clarke he created five-minute segments for 16 of the participants....

Moises Kaufman, the Venezuelan-born artistic director and founder of the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project, is the writer and director behind Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, about the killing of Matthew Shepard. He also directed Doug Wright’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play I Am My Own Wife, which was workshopped by About Face Theatre at the Museum of Contemporary Art before heading for Broadway last year; it comes to the Goodman in January....

Run for Your Wife In farce as in life, we find comfort in the familiar. Of course writers of farce inflate everyday human interactions to impossible levels: doors slam and telephones ring more frequently than in any sane household. But actions and motives pushed to their most illogical heights become logical once again, and identities crossed enough times make the truth more engaging than any lie. Farce challenges us to cast far-fetched situations in ordinary human terms–no matter how ridiculous things get, there’s always something at the core that audiences can connect with....

This summer the Chicago Housing Authority–the people who brought the city the minimalist monotony of Cabrini-Green–seems to have been infiltrated by a band of eager design students. Click on the CHA’s Web page (www.thecha.org), follow the “Design Competition” link, and you’ll be presented with the sans serif fonts and single-word slogans that are the graphic hallmarks of the MTV era. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The agency’s sweeping “Plan for Transformation” calls for the demolition of 18,000 units of mostly high-rise housing and the construction of 25,000 units of mixed-income housing....

The former garage at 6100 S. Blackstone was already home to a community of artists, artisans, and activists when Dan Peterman took over the title in 1996. The Resource Center–which had owned the ramshackle brick building before Peterman–pioneered recycling programs and neighborhood projects in Woodlawn beginning in the early 70s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the time Woodlawn was dealing with the legacy of more than 20 years of depopulation and disinvestment....

HOW THE COOKIES CRUMBLED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When we talked with underground cartoonist Stuart Helm last May, he was getting ready to fight a temporary injunction that would force him to wipe his professional name, King VelVeeda, from his Web site (cheesygraphics.com) and stop signing it on his art. The injunction was sought by Kraft Foods, which was suing Helm for infringing on their Velveeta trademark, claiming “pornography, bestiality, and negative attitudes toward women” in his work were damaging their product’s image....

Lead Story Throwing the Book at ‘Em Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Jesse Huffman, 19, used the men’s room at the Port of Sweet Grass–north of Shelby, Montana, on the U.S. side of the Canadian border–in August, officers accused him of deliberately clogging the toilet. Although Huffman told them he suffers from irritable bowel syndrome and offered to plunge the toilet, he was arrested for misdemeanor criminal mischief and driven 38 miles to Shelby to be photographed and fingerprinted, spending six hours in custody....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mandl constantly allows his opinions to get in the way of the facts. By claiming that “the big-name prog bands tended to prefer the work of 19th-century romantic composers and middlebrow household names like Mussorgsky and Brahms,” he typically paints an entire musical genre with too broad a brush. This is like saying that because the Beatles listened to a little Stockhausen, all of the British Invasion bands (from Gerry & the Pacemakers to Herman’s Hermits) were influenced by electronic music....

With sites like Match.com and Yahoo! Personals offering pages of photos of attractive women and buff guys bragging about their cooking skills, online dating long ago shed its stigma as a refuge for the horny but socially challenged. So how’s a poor geek supposed to get a date? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gk2gk.com, which he runs out of his River North condo, went up in April....

Although he never invites them inside, Baki Dazdarevic enjoys the steady stream of visitors who come to get a look at his front yard. They come day and night, he says, “sometimes 10, 11 o’clock in the evening. Two ladies, they visited from Arizona and wrote to ask me for pictures of the house. Another lady, she brought two vans of her friends. They want to see the house. They ring the bell to say hello....

Mike Nussbaum first heard of Donald Waldman about a year ago, though he says he feels he’s known him all his life. Waldman is the fictional 78-year-old World War II veteran at the center of Hearts: The Forward Observer, playing at the Northlight Theatre. Nussbaum is the 78-year-old veteran of more than 40 years of theater productions who’s playing Waldman. “My father didn’t have a lot to say about the war, and back then I didn’t really ask a lot of questions,” says Willy Holtzman....

Perhaps it was inevitable: the Three Irish Tenors, the Three Russian Tenors, Three Mo’ Tenors, and now the Three Jewish Tenors. But marketing gimmicks aside, these singers–like the other Tenors–are serious musicians with years of classical training and concert experience. (The Jewish Tenors are also all cantors.) Alberto Mizrahi, the longtime hazan at Lakeview’s Anshe Emet Synagogue, focused on opera earlier in his career, but for the last decade or so he’s carved a niche as a specialist in Jewish vocal music....

I was looking forward all week to seeing the letters to the editor in the Reader following the very excellent article on Scott Portman [“War: What It’s Good For,” March 7]. The letter by Chris Onser [March 14] is, in my view, typical of many of the antiwar people we’ve been hearing from as of late. In response to the article’s assertion that “Saddam Hussein is torturing and killing his own people,” Onser dismisses this statement as “absurd” without offering any evidence to support why it is “absurd,” although knowledgeable people, Portman included, have witnessed Saddam’s atrocities....