On a cool, almost rainy morning the Sunday before Memorial Day weekend, a motley flotilla of 730 canoes and kayaks gets launched ten at a time into the Des Plaines River at Oak Spring Road in Libertyville. Paddled by one-, two-, and three-member crews, the boats head south between muddy forested banks, past golf courses and country houses. Their goal is Dam Number Two in Prospect Heights, the finish line of the 19....
Is nymphomania a recognized medical condition, and if so, what is its definition? –J., via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although wacky theories about female sexuality have circulated since ancient times, as a medical diagnosis nymphomania is only a couple centuries old. According to Carol Groneman, author of Nymphomania: A History (2000), the concept of nymphomania was first laid out by the French physician Bienville in his 1771 treatise Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus....
Rock, Pop, etc. ANNE-MARIE AKIN Free in-store performance. Fri 5/17, 7:30 PM, Women & Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark. 773-769-9299. CALIFONE, ALAN SPARHAWK & MIMI PARKER, JON LANGFORD, REBECCA GATES, SINISTER LUCK ENSEMBLE, PAULINA HOLLERS, DEVIL IN A WOODPILE Benefit for the Chicago Waldorf School. Sat 5/18, 6 PM, Chicago Waldorf School, 1300 W. Loyola. 773-381-1327. FOURTH ROTOR, TOM SAWYER, HANDMADE perform at “Movieside 11.” Sat 5/25, 8 PM, Hotel Kafka, 2736 W....
I only recently caught up with Jaromil Jires’s overripe 1970 exercise in Prague School surrealism, now that it’s become available again, and I’m miffed that I had to wait so long. The 13-year-old title heroine, who’s just had her first period, traipses through a shifting landscape of sensuous, anticlerical, and vaguely medieval fantasy-horror enchantments that register more as a collection of dream adventures, spurred by guiltless and polysexual eroticism, than as a conventional narrative....
Was It Something He Said? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Berns has produced over 400 episodes and featured more than 1,000 local performers. He’s built an audience, he says, mostly by catching channel surfers on their way to something else. He claims Songsation is the station’s most popular program and the most watched noncommercial TV variety show in the country. So he was taken by surprise two days before Christmas, when he got a call from CAN TV program director Lesley Johnson informing him that he was being booted into a late-night slot because of his show’s “mature content....
Films by Gregory J. Markopoulos Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Twice a Man contains no synchronized dialogue–only fragments of speech along with music–and the film’s rapid editing conjoins different time periods. As scholar P. Adams Sitney wrote in 1970: “Past, present, and future, dream and waking, are so fused that they dissolve as distinct categories.” Early in the film Paul (Paul Kilb), a handsome young man clearly alienated from the heterosexuality represented by dancing couples, stands on the roof of a Manhattan building as if contemplating suicide, his foot a bit over the edge....
By Deanna Isaacs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I looked at the illustration again. At the tip of the pen was a shiny little translucent purple nipple. “Polymerase Chain Reaction, the Nobel Prize winning discovery, has enabled us to exactly replicate Abraham Lincoln’s DNA,” the blurb continued. The name and address of the pen’s manufacturer, the Krone company, appeared at the bottom of the ad....
There were 21 shopping days until Christmas. On State Street, Marshall Field’s was offering crocheted suede jackets for 30 percent off. In Niles, Streamwood, and a dozen other Chicagoland locations, Value City was having a sale on tree skirts. On the corner of Roosevelt Road and Union Street, sock vendor Willie Barnes was hawking his holiday line. The man squeezed the bundles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The driver pulled out a fin....
A radical idea–a city should look like a city. From the Metropolitan Planning Council’s recommendations for the new Chicago zoning code (“Issue Brief,” February): “MPC proposes that areas within a quarter mile of transit hubs (rail stations and intersections of high-ridership bus routes) be designated transit-oriented development districts. Such districts would: require ground-floor commercial uses along major streets; encourage mixed uses (from residential to office) on upper floors; prohibit auto-oriented uses like repair shops and drive-through businesses; require parking lots to be concealed from the street; and encourage higher densities....
MAY Last year about 40 people tried their hands at rowing, canoeing, and kayaking at the local edition of National Learn to Row Day. The free annual event is hosted by the Chicago River Rowing and Paddling Center, which is hidden away in the old coast guard boathouse at the mouth of the Chicago River, just south of Navy Pier. Because they share the space with the marine and conservation police, “we haven’t really been able to put a sign up,” explains CRRC president Susan Urbas; the group plans to move to a new, more visible boathouse at soon-to-be-developed DuSable Park....
From Contemporary Authors: POLITICS: Democrat. SIDELIGHTS: A poet and polemicist, Mall did not pursue a writing career until his early 60s. By training, he is an artist; by profession, an antiques dealer. But in early 2001, he found himself fuming whenever he saw George W. Bush on the evening news, and decided he needed a productive outlet for his anger. “I was really upset about the whole election,” Mall says. “I think it stirred me up emotionally to a point where I had to get rid of it....
ESG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few bands have a back story as improbable as ESG’s. The 20-year-old minimalist funk group originally consisted of four Puerto Rican girls from the Bronx, the Scroggins sisters, and one of their neighbors, percussionist Tito Libran. When the Scrogginses were teenagers, their mother bought them instruments–a guitar for Renee, a drum set for Valerie, a bass for Deborah, and congas for Marie–hoping they would develop a hobby to keep them off the streets; within a few years their stripped-down, intuitive music would find a home at the nexus of punk, funk, hip-hop, and house....
The fourth annual European Union Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, February 9 through 15, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Admission is $7, $3 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-443-3737. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended. Don’t Cry Germaine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on a French-Canadian novel by Claude Jasmin, this 2000 Belgian film concerns a family whose father and mother have drifted apart....
“Forget re-creating the past,” says historical archaeologist Robert Mazrim. “You can’t do it. But what you can do is build a time machine that will take you back in time for, say, fifteen seconds.” Mazrim plans to open his time machine in late June, 180 miles southwest of Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whenever the government builds a highway or an airport, it has to hire archaeologists to check out the ground first, a process institutionalized through the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program (ITARP)....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, some of the estimated 65,000 delegates (from more than 170 countries) not only luxuriated in five-star accommodations but enjoyed an elegant spread of food and drink that included literally tons of lobster, oysters, filet mignon, salmon, caviar, and pate de foie gras, as well as champagne, fine wines, and mineral water....
A middle child of four, photographer Ben Gest says, “We used to joke about how I kind of fell through the cracks. I think I always felt conscious of how people dealt with each other.” Growing up with three siblings and an attentive mother–“She was happiest when we were all together in the house, and my older brother and I were always out doing something”–gave Gest a keen sense of how the people one loves can impinge on one’s freedom....
Lots of jazz musicians learn to play by listening to other folks’ records. Pat Martino is one of the few to do it by listening to his own. In 1980 he was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, and after corrective surgery woke up with no memory of what his guitar playing sounded like. Fortunately he had plenty of reference material to sift through, having recorded a slew of albums going back to 1967....
Einstein’s Dreams To say that Albert Einstein was a dreamer is a monumental understatement. After all, the prep school dropout and lowly patent clerk reinvented the universe just by musing over it. “I built a mathematical laboratory, set myself in it as if I were sitting in a car, and moved along with a beam of light,” he said of the nine-year quest to perfect his special theory of relativity. His imaginary travels enabled him to dream up a cosmos where time and space–previously the two absolutes of scientific inquiry, not to mention human experience–shrink and expand depending on the observer’s state of motion....
The Complete Okeh and Brunswick Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden Sessions (1924-36) In the 1920s jazz was still new, and barely recorded until mid-decade; it wasn’t always easy for musicians and listeners to tell exactly what the music was. It was built on the already thoroughly intertwined strands of black and white American music: ragtime and marches, blues and spirituals, vaudeville and pop songs, rickety community bands and leviathan concert outfits like John Philip Sousa’s, with their virtuoso cornet and saxophone soloists and contrasting sweet and hot stylists....
Kandahar “Shall I recite the Koran for the dead?” Started in 2000 in Iran near the Afghan border, shot in haphazard and difficult conditions, and completed the following year in time for the Cannes film festival in May, Kandahar has taken on a prominence unforeseen by Makhmalbaf thanks to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The film has stimulated so much buzz over the past four months that I was one of the suckers who fell for the false rumor flying around last fall that George W....
