Did you use the Illinois tuition tax credit to send your kid to private school? Don’t forget to thank the cleaning lady for helping you pay for it. In a September 24 report based on Illinois Department of Revenue figures for the year 2000 (“Misplaying the Angles”), People for the American Way found that the state’s new tuition-tax-credit law cost the state budget $61 million. Of that, $28 million went to families earning more than $80,000, and just $1....
And if we legalize private ownership of tanks and guided missiles, maybe we can slash the Pentagon budget. From the fall issue of the National Taxpayers United of Illinois’ “Taxnews”: “Cal Skinner’s Personal Security Act, which would allow a trained, law-abiding citizen to use a gun in self-defense, would save millions of taxpayers dollars by making it possible to reduce the number of police and supporting bureaucracy.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Formed in the Motor City in 1995, the Detroit Cobras can claim they were garage back when garage wasn’t cool–when, of course, it was actually coolest. And they’ve wavered little from their original formula, building a catalog that’s mostly covers of 50s and 60s R & B, rock, and girl-group obscurities. Rachel Nagy’s husky, molasses-thick voice pools around the bone-simple tracks, and the band’s two guitarists are more enamored with the shapes of a few clear notes than with razzle-dazzle runs....
Doug Lofstrom Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like William Russo, his boss in the music department at Columbia College, Doug Lofstrom straddles too many categories to be easily classified: he plays the contrabass but has doubled on bamboo flute and percussion; he’s composed a clutch of string quartets and concertos within the confines of classical music, but as a performer he’s ventured into free jazz (most notably on the self-released CD Spontaneous Composition, with reedist Rich Corpolongo and drummer Paul Wertico)....
Words failed and images overwhelmed many witnesses of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But organizers expect many of the 300-odd authors and artists scheduled to speak at this year’s “Words & Pictures”-themed Chicago Humanities Festival to try to respond to the attacks and their aftermath. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On that morning Spiegelman and his wife, Francoise Mouly, left their Tribeca apartment and were on their way to vote....
In a private room above Blackbird restaurant at noon on a recent weekday, the French Government Tourist Office regaled a group of American freelance writers, French diplomats, and travel professionals with lamb vol-au-vent, pinot blanc, and a TV ad that featured a string of celebrities squawking “J’aime la France!”–the office’s catchphrase for 2002. Between courses, while presenters from Rail Europe and Maison de la France gave their pitches, the only sounds from the attendees were the clinks of forks and the stage whispers of Shirley Higgins, an award-winning travel writer from Wilmette....
JOANNE BRACKEEN & RAY DRUMMOND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know whether pianist Joanne Brackeen snickers at all the latest punditry about “women in jazz,” but she’s certainly earned the right to–she’s been crashing one boys’ club after another since the late 60s. With a quirky musical intellect and oceanic command of the keyboard she’s persuaded some of jazz’s great chauvinists to overlook her gender, much as Mary Lou Williams did in the 30s and 40s: Brackeen is the only woman ever to play either in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers or in Stan Getz’s quartet, and in the 70s she graced Joe Henderson’s band, opening the door for several jazzwomen to follow....
John Wenner owns a company that does custom metalwork, producing smooth surfaces in stainless steel and other metals for architects and high-end interior designers. But his two dozen works at Drive-Thru Studios are rough and imprecise, carefully made with flaking paint and hints of rust to resemble bits of industrial junk–as if to critique sleekness. That theme is expanded in his four “Plumb Paintings.” In each a plumb bob is suspended from the center of a target painting on the wall and aimed at a smaller, roughly painted target set on the floor....
As a founder of the English free-improv group AMM, Keith Rowe blazed a new trail for guitarists in the 60s, laying his instrument down flat and coaxing nontraditional sounds from it by rubbing, thwacking, scraping, and scrambling its strings with mundane objects like clips and files. But even more influential was his and his bandmates’ approach to improvisation: as he told the Wire in 2001, AMM has “always been about searching for the sound in the performance, as opposed to conceiving and then producing the sound in performance....
If the nursery rhyme obscenity of The Moldy Peaches, the 2001 tag-team assault of lo-fi absurdism from Kimya Dawson and Adam Green, made you sick, you probably won’t believe me when I tell you that Dawson’s solo output is more likely to enrich your life than gross you out. Dawson’s two new discs, Knock-Knock Who? and My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess (Important Records), are her most painstaking excavations to date of the childhood anxieties beneath our grown-up lusts....
Adapted by Steve Lawson from The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 1920-1945, this solo piece debuted in 2001 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where it was performed by Robert Sean Leonard. Now the Goodman Theatre complements its stirring revival of Williams’s 1950 The Rose Tattoo by treating audiences to local actor Guy Adkins’s one-night rendition of Lawson’s script. Letters From Tennessee illuminates the evolution of Thomas Lanier Williams from eager, idealistic teenager to struggling young poet to “the gentile Clifford Odets,” poised for greatness....
Market Pressures: WIDC Wobbles “It’s March, 2003, and we are tense,” read the introduction to the schedule for the 22nd annual Women in the Director’s Chair Film and Video Festival. The reference was to the threat of war hanging in the air as the program went to press, but for the WIDC staff there was another source of strain closer to home. Since 9/11, the organization had been in a financial crunch....
When Abel Faidy and Julius Floto designed the Meyercord Company building at 5323 W. Lake in the late 30s, the Swiss-born Faidy already had a reputation for creativity and originality in furniture and interior design. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tall glass-block windows, rounded corners, and a central bay of glass bricks stretching three stories from sidewalk to roof give the 1938 building some of the hallmarks of art moderne, but as Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson says, “There’s nothing quite like it…really it has a style and flair that is all its own....
Like its title, Haven’t Heard From You, Shirley Mordine’s new dance is deceptively casual. Set to unusually slow and expressive music by Mozart, it features five women often widely scattered in the deep Ruth Page Center space, which includes a second stage at the rear draped for this piece with ballooning sheets of fabric like droopy sails. The choreography juxtaposes extroversion and introversion; when two dancers echo each other’s poses, one opens her chest and looks up while the other rounds her shoulders and looks down....
November 3, 10:17 AM, 100 block of North Morgan. Theft. Victim observed 39-year-old male offender enter parked tractor trailer, break open crate, and remove cheese. Victim closed trailer door, locking offender inside until police arrived. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » November 4, 5:30 AM, 3500 block of North Broadway. Theft. Jewel security guard observed 35-year-old male offender stow 14 sticks of Secret deodorant in plastic bag and attempt to leave....
REDWOOD LANDING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1971, when a north-shore folk trio called Triad added an electric bassist, changed its name to Redwood Landing, and began to pepper its sets with folk rock, American popular music hadn’t developed the many polarizing categories that would define the 80s and 90s. The founding members wrote songs that ranged from blue-eyed soul to calypso to white-boy funk, and by the time they graduated from Lake Forest College in ’73 (skipping the ceremony to play a gig at Evanston’s legendary liquorless nightclub, Amazingrace), original material made up more than half their act....
As U.S. military action in the Middle East appears increasingly likely, vocalist Rita Warford and flutist Janice Misurell-Mitchell have decided to come together for a program called “Music, Women & War.” (Given the state of the world with the boys running it, I for one am more than happy to consider other perspectives.) Joined by versatile new-jazz reedman Mwata Bowden and percussionist Dane Richeson, they will present original compositions concerned with resistance, social change, and feminism, as well as a larger Misurell-Mitchell piece, A Silent Woman, that adds clarinet and piano to the mix....
I tried to ask this question of Van, the porn star who sells his dirty underwear via his website, www.vanhotman.com. I wrote to him via his website and asked him to call me, but I never heard back. Perhaps you could have him contact me? You see, I’m a 40-year-old gay man living in Manhattan having a fling with an underwear “pig,” as he styles himself. He’s into spanking and stuffing my mouth with his dirty underwear....
The CollaborAction showcase of 20 short plays (each under seven minutes long) includes world premieres by Warren Leight, Beth Henley, Wendy MacLeod, and others. The festival also features environmental design by Wesley Kimler and DJs between plays. “Summer Sketchbook” takes place nightly through June 16 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Showtimes are Mondays-Thursdays, 8 PM; Fridays-Saturdays, 7 and 9 PM; Sunday, June 9, 7 PM; and Sunday, June 16, 5 PM....
It’s the old story: boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy and girl move to Chicago and open up a French restaurant. OK, so maybe that’s not the old story–but it is the story of La Creperie, the Lincoln Park restaurant that this year celebrates its 30th anniversary. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Germain waited on Sara and her friend that night. “She knew about two words in French,” recalls Germain....
