[snip] Things the appellate court has to tell immigration judges these days. On November 1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed the decision of an immigration judge who’d denied the request for asylum from the Mamedovs, a family from Turkmenistan. Ahmed Mamedov claimed he’d been fired whenever an employer found out he was Jewish; his wife, a Muslim, claimed she was fired because she was married to a Jew....
When children take on adult personas, the result is generally either way too cute (Bugsy Malone) or hilarious (The Daily Show’s occasional segment in which kids read transcripts from the world of talking-head punditry). In uBung (Practice), Belgian multidisciplinary production company Victoria does something more adventurous. Young actors age 10 to 14 deliver the dialogue for a silent black-and-white film of an adult dinner party in a sumptuous home, expertly synchronizing their lines with the on-screen motions of their grown-up counterparts....
He stood, his back straight, his brown eyes clear, his white hair neat, and looked out on the undulating surf of Lake Michigan. “Yes I was,” Richard Hall said quietly. The brig consisted of seven cells and at the moment held four prisoners, all of them sailors. Three were confined for relatively minor violations, and one was awaiting transfer to the navy prison at Portsmouth, Virginia. What he’d been charged with, when you got down to it, was homosexuality....
News you won’t read in the dailies, which appear to be systematically forgetting about public housing (“The View From the Ground,” March 4): “Soon after the city launched the ‘Plan for Transformation’ [of the Chicago Housing Authority] in 1999, it summarily disbanded the 270- member CHA police force. At that time, city officials reassured CHA residents that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) had adequate resources to provide full police services to public housing communities....
Armageddon looms–but no need to miss work. “Warlord Bush has declared war on the entire world,” reads a widely circulated E-mail about a May Day planning meeting. “The attempt to take control of the world economically using the World Trade Organization has stalled. Now they are turning to guns and police state tactics.” And by the way, “May Day 2002 festivities probably will take place on Saturday, May 4th, so there will be no need to miss work in order to attend this special world-wide celebration....
First, that nickname: it goes back more than 50 years, to when saxophonist David Newman botched some ill-remembered riff in high school band and his exasperated music director started calling names. But the epithet has stuck, for the same reason that big guys get called “Pee Wee”: it conveys the real quality by pointing to its opposite. In fact, Newman’s former boss Ray Charles, who in the 50s and 60s had firsthand knowledge of his strengths, preferred to call him “Brains,” referring to his nervy, bluesy technique on tenor, alto, baritone, and flute; perhaps Charles also had in mind the Dallas-raised Newman’s clever, cool, and subtle take on the burly “Texas tenor” sound made famous by such predecessors as Buddy Tate and Illinois Jacquet....
Pere Ubu If I had to choose any three minutes of my life to live over and over forever, this snippet would definitely be in the running. I’ve forgotten the faces of people I thought I was in love with then, but I remember the song that was playing: “Roadrunner,” by the Modern Lovers. What that moment, and that song, were telling me was not only that my greenhorny teenage sense of wonder was nothing to be ashamed of, but that it would serve me well for all my life....
The first-floor hallway snaking around the edge of Ravenswood Medical Center’s Building Two is lined with desks, filing cabinets, book-cases, tables, and storage lockers–all for sale. Among waiting-room chairs and wire shelving are a washing machine and two dryers, a Wurlitzer organ, and two shelves of LPs (Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits, Semper Fidelis: The Marches of John Philip Sousa, Cabaret) for a buck apiece. A room off the hallway is filled with Magnavox TVs ($25-$40) set at a fixed volume–loud....
Guitarist Bobby Broom played his first paying jazz gig at age 16–with saxophonist Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall. “Isn’t that sick?” asks Broom, now 40, with a laugh. “Where do you go from there?” He spent the next couple decades trying to figure that out, but he says it wasn’t until the late 90s, at the end of a long stint with New Orleans R & B man Dr. John, that he realized he was “really a jazz musician....
In 20 years of fighting to save historically valuable buildings on the Near North Side, Barton Faist thought he’d seen everything. Then he discovered that a developer, the Fordham Company, had started promoting the 12-block area bounded by Chicago, Ontario, Michigan, and State as the “Cathedral District,” a label it said celebrated the area’s “spirituality, beauty, history, community.” Faist saw the new label as a gimmick, one that could serve to distract local residents from the developer’s plan to tear down some of the last remaining vintage town houses in the area in order to construct a 50-story condo complex....
Looney Tunes: Back in Action With Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin, Timothy Dalton, Joan Cusack, Heather Locklear, and the voice of Joe Alaskey. I don’t know who controlled the final cut on Looney Tunes: Back in Action–which seems even more personal than Small Soldiers–and the screen credits don’t tell us much. Dante also avoids taking any writing credit on his movies. According to a New York Times story Best of Chicago voting is live now....
JOHNNY DRUMMER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the stage name he chose, inspired by the classic western Johnny Guitar, Johnny Drummer rarely plays the drums these days: on soul-blues numbers he accompanies his mellow croon with atmospheric organ, and on more traditional blues he adds spice with down-home harmonica. He cut a handful of sides on local labels in the 60s and 70s, and in 1975 turned up on a live album–along with Bobby King, Joe Carter, and the Aces–recorded at the south-side club Ma Bea’s and released on the French imprint MCM....
KASEY CHAMBERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kasey Chambers wrote some of the material on her recent debut album, The Captain (Asylum), almost a decade ago, when she was just 15, and it shows. Her mundane stories and complaints are populated by lots of unspecified yous, and she abuses the placeholder well, using it to kick off a total of 13 verses on half of the album’s dozen songs....
When the Museum of Contemporary Art was mounting its “Art in Chicago, 1945-1995” exhibit in 1996, there was one artist the curators couldn’t track down. Konstantin Milonadis, according to the catalog, taught sculpture at the University of Notre Dame until the early 70s, but the “subsequent whereabouts and activities of the artist” were “unknown.” Milonadis–“Mickey” to his American friends–was born in a “small town of no significance” on the Dnieper River in central Ukraine, and as a schoolkid he used to draw in his textbooks because “you couldn’t go out and buy a fancy type of paper,” he says....
April is turning out to be a terrific month for piano music. At DePaul, a concert series that runs into May is celebrating keyboard works by American composers–Wednesday’s program features solos and duos from the likes of Ives, Gershwin, Copland, Charles Griffes, and Edward MacDowell played by locals such as Eteri Andjaparidze, Dmitry Rachmanov, and George Oakley. It’s a big month for pianists at Symphony Center as well: powerhouses Alfred Brendel and Evgeny Kissin appeared last week, Yefim Bronfman performs on the 20th, and Maurizio Pollini takes the stage the following weekend....
Wit Playwright Margaret Edson constructed Wit, her first play, with every tool in the ironist’s shed. Protagonist Vivian Bearing, a Donne scholar stricken with ovarian cancer, repeatedly steps outside the narrative to make snappy comments to the audience. Her monologues positively groan with literary references, as if to remind us that this is after all only a play, a text, “black marks on white paper.” The unity of time is completely abandoned as the days expand but the months contract....
Entering Cafe Jumping Bean Coffee House and Gallery is like walking into a Diego Rivera mural. The brilliantly painted cafe located in the heart of Pilsen brings together an equally colorful mix of artists, workers, families, cops, and students, all there to enjoy the specialties of the house: coffee, conversation, and art. And that’s just what owner Eleazar Delgado intended. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he told his family about his plan, his brother Guillermo, a visual artist who specializes in painting and printmaking, piped up with the perfect location–a turn-of-the-century photo studio on 18th Street, close to the Little Village neighborhood where they grew up....
Three cheers for Gwen Stefani: in 15 years as front woman for No Doubt, she’s unabashedly sported extra pounds, bad hair, zits, braces, and small boobs and aired her dirty laundry over the radio waves–and her public still adores her. No Doubt have no shame when it comes to image overhaul; they’ve got genre wanderlust, blending ska, cruise-ship funk, cabaret kitsch, techno rap, and melancholy rock. The popularity of 1995’s Tragic Kingdom turned tomboy Stefani into a svelte pinup girl, and 2000’s more mellow Return of Saturn transformed the whole band into a candy-coated glam outfit....
Writer Judy Veramendi first heard about Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini in 1972, when Veramendi was an exchange student in Pamplona. “I was sitting in class and my Latin American literature professor said, ‘Today we’re going to read the poetry of the first woman to write like a woman in the Spanish language,’” says Veramendi, who grew up in Park Forest. “I thought it sounded chauvinistic and started laughing at him. He said, ‘Don’t laugh, senorita, it’s true....
Bob Bulmash hates telemarketers–he calls them “the most annoying pest since the invention of the housefly.” But he’s getting back at them. But getting an unlisted number cost $12.50 a year, and Bulmash didn’t see why he should have to pay money so telemarketers couldn’t call him. “If you’re walking down the street and you don’t have a sign on your head saying ‘Do not pour water on me,’ then somebody walking down the street with a bucket of water can pour water on you lawfully?...
