Friday 9/20 – Thursday 9/26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Railway enthusiast Ray DeGroote took his first trip to Cuba in 1956. He vowed to return, but not until it was again legal to do so. That was in April of this year, when he and a group from the Central Electric Railfans Association were granted permission to go there and track down old American steam engines....
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra generally takes it easy over its summers at Ravinia, rehashing familiar classics that don’t require too much rehearsal. But in each of this Saturday and Sunday’s concerts the orchestra will perform a work new to it–though admittedly, neither piece is a heavyweight on the order of those the CSO premiered in its spring season. Instead both aim to please–an idea that seems to be catching on with composers these days....
The members of CUBE have good reason to smile these days. First, the spunky new-music collective is turning 15, a milestone for any chamber group operating on a microbudget. Second, its artistic directors, oboist Patricia Morehead and flutist Janice Misurell-Mitchell, were named among the “Chicagoans of the Year in the Arts” by the Tribune, a recognition that may translate into more grants and higher attendance. Over the course of more than 70 concerts, the group (flutist Caroline Pittman, clarinetist Christie Vohs, percussionist Dane Richeson, and pianist-conductor Philip Morehead round out the current roster) has introduced hundreds of post-1950 compositions by relatively unsung composers, especially women, minorities, and Chicagoans....
When Ron Offen retired from his job as a school librarian in California two years ago and moved back to Illinois, where he grew up, he brought Free Lunch, his twice-yearly poetry journal, with him. Offen has edited and published Free Lunch since 1989, and now he’s running it out of his Glenview home. The 32-page journal puts the work of luminaries like Billy Collins and Liesel Mueller next to newcomers you may never have heard of....
There are no safe harbors in the stormy world of dance. But those who survive are plenty tough. Yuri Grigorovich, now 75, was head of the world’s most famous ballet company, the Bolshoi, from 1964 until he was ousted in 1995. By all accounts dictatorial and artistically conservative, he inspired this observation from British critic Judith Mackrel in a 1999 Guardian review of the Bolshoi: “The long rule of Yuri Grigorovich has divided the ranks into bloody factions....
Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sigh. Yes, Mike, there are a few scientists who don’t think global warming is a reality, or who think that, if it is, it’s not caused by human interference with the atmosphere–and when you sneeringly refer to the “tiny number of 17,000 scientists” who signed a petition disputing the existence of global warming, you just look stupid. In fact, 17,000 is a tiny number, compared with the vast numbers of scientists who disagree with them....
Andreas Jauss: As Things Are Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not easy, or common, to withdraw emotion from what we see. Bad paintings are often drenched in sentiment, telegraphing a mood and nothing else. But the theme of Jauss’s images seems to be undercutting their potential for feeling, partly by withholding information. The works have numeric titles reflecting their chronology: first the year, then the number within the year they were made....
Lead Stories In April the IRS admitted to a Washington Post reporter that it had paid out $30 million in fraudulent refunds over the past two years, allowing black taxpayers (including 12 IRS employees) to claim the nonexistent slavery reparations credit and collect about $40,000. The agency did catch $2.4 billion in slavery claims before checks were sent out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weird Science...
Gary Wick always wanted to be an architect, but worked as an architectural draftsman for 35 years, with a little time off for a tour of duty in Vietnam. All those years with somebody else’s blueprints were enough to change his ambition: when he quit his job in 1996, he decided to be a painter. In fact, he’d been painting for a long time, mostly oils, and mostly portraits, including the three he has hanging in Chicago’s National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum....
This time I was leaving for good. No more classifying people by race and gender. No more watching people smile as they told me lies. No more being the bad guy. I’d rehearsed my B-movie exit speech at least a dozen times in the past eight years, but this time I planned to let my boss hear it. I began packing up the evidence of my life in this foreign land, hoping I had something to show for the journey....
My boyfriend looks at porn, and it freaks me out. It’s not because I’m jealous but because I’m insecure: I’m sure many of those girls are more attractive than me. In general, Dan, you’ve been really insensitive toward people (girls, I guess) who feel strange about porn. I think that was unnecessary, because you have to see, even if it is flawed, where we are coming from. Any words illuminating this interest in porn would be helpful in my getting past this....
Paying tribute to the Bard and Bad Company, writer-director Billy Morrissette enfolds the Shakespeare illiterate in an embrace usually reserved for connoisseurs. In this comically persuasive fable about the origins of the fast-food industry, the McBeths–loving, lusting young marrieds frustrated in their dead-end jobs at a conventional diner in rural Pennsylvania–scheme to take over the restaurant and innovate. But after committing murder most foul, the couple (James LeGros and Maura Tierney) can’t allay the suspicions of offended coworker Kevin Corrigan or cagey detective Christopher Walken, nor can they quiet their own guilty consciences....
Before the Food Network, before salsa could be found in diners and Krispy Kremes north of the Mason-Dixon Line, before Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain, Big Night and Babette’s Feast, nouvelle cuisine and organic produce, the Silver Palate and the Moosewood, and long, long before America discovered it wasn’t supposed to like Wonder Bread, writer M.F.K. Fisher published her first book praising the pleasures of the table. Before any of us lived in an America that took food seriously, Fisher wrote fierce, brilliant prose about the dignity and importance of human hungers....
Like many another White Sox fan, I circled September 20 on my wallet schedule back in March. The day would bring the Minnesota Twins to Comiskey Park for the first of six games against the Sox over the last ten days of the regular season. The young and hungry Twins had led the American League Central Division for much of last summer before surrendering to the Cleveland Indians. With the Indians rebuilding this year (that much was clear even before they wrote the season off with a rash of trades that dealt high-priced talent for prospects), the final Sox-Twins games figured to determine the division championship–unless, of course, the Sox had it wrapped up by then....
On a wall opposite the front door in Paul Belker’s north-side home hangs a painting of a girl sliding backward down a banister. But maybe sliding isn’t quite right. “Impaled, sliding, you tell me,” Belker says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A self-described pack rat, Belker grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, collecting at various times bumper stickers, buttons, and beer cans. As a teenager he frequented thrift stores, often gravitating toward the knickknack section....
I’ve never walked into Hawthorne Race Course without pitching a quarter to the blind beggar who sits outside the grandstand. As they hunch toward the gate, most horseplayers ignore the clatter of coins in his tin cup, his long woodwind cry of “Please help the bliiiind!” I think he brings good luck. The first time I tipped him, I had a winning day, so I’ve been doing it since. “I’d like to interview you for my newspaper,” I said....
What’s the story with the cocaine mummies? Researchers have evidently established the presence of cocaine in mummified corpses in Egypt and Sudan that date back to before Columbus landed in America. Since cocaine is only known to have been cultivated in South America at that time, some people speculate that there may have been an ancient transatlantic trade route. How about it, Cecil? Do all the archaeology textbooks in the world need to be rewritten?...
At 25 the Jazz Fest is middle-aged by music-festival standards, and (thanks to the city’s 9:30 curfew on Grant Park events) for the last several years it’s been going to bed a little earlier than it used to. So the schedule of pre- and postconcert presentations–which began to take its current shape in the mid-80s and has continued to evolve since then–has become all the more important for serious jazzheads. Below, a nightly guide to the festival beyond the festival....
Partners Craig Fass (Green Dolphin Street) and Mandy Franklin (Spring, Green Dolphin Street, Hudson Club) have teamed up with general manager Gian Garofalo (Bistro 110, Spiaggia) to open the contemporary American dining room MENAGERIE. They’ve lightened up the room–previously home to the short-lived Lakeview Supper Club–with pistachio walls and colorful local art, but it’s still cozy, with burgundy velvet curtains in the front windows and a handcrafted wrought iron wine rack behind the bar....
Few 90s rock bands could work an audience into a frenzy like Chicago’s Jesus Lizard. The quartet’s sinister, Zeppelin-esque stomp routinely turned crowds into writhing mobs, body slamming and stage diving with little concern for their own–or anyone else’s–physical well-being. Duane Denison, the band’s lanky guitarist, had grown tired of such antics during the band’s final days, and he’d also become painfully aware of the increasing age gap between his audience and himself–he’s 42....
