The Mourning is something of a departure for River North artistic director Frank Chaves: this duet shows the moment of death. “He doesn’t want to let her go,” Chaves says. “And she wants to let him comfort her–yet spare him suffering.” He was inspired to create the piece (which Oak Park-based Momenta originally performed) by the music, a Russian ballad that starts out sounding like a pop love song but becomes something much more moving....
My 18-year-old sister met a creepy old man (COM) when he snuck into a dorm party at her college. He proposed to her on their first date after the party. Our parents were immediately suspicious because of the large age difference–COM is older than they are. My sister also told COM that our family is well-off. This made them suspicious about COM’s sudden proposal, so our parents hired a private investigator....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t know that I’ve seen it quite as tense as it is now, with as much mistrust of the police,” said Hatch, 49, a lifelong west sider. “I don’t think the people on the west side are waiting for leaders to tell them to do anything. This is really coming from the bottom up. I think it’s a very volatile situation–and that’s not a threat....
Chesa Boudin stood in front of a round table in a corner of 57th Street Books last Wednesday night and looked around at the packed house. It was his 28th appearance in just over two weeks for his new book, The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions–100 Answers. Earlier that day, as the honored guest at a lunch discussion sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, he’d addressed an intimate gathering of about 20 that included Venezuela’s consul general to Chicago, two economists, and a banker as comfortably as a tenured professor before a class full of freshmen....
Rock, Pop, Etc. BILLIONS, WATASHI WA, BILL MALLONEE Fri 4/23, 7:30 PM, Edman Memorial Chapel, Wheaton College, Washington & Franklin, Wheaton. 800-965-9324. CAREEN Free in-store performance. Wed 4/28, 5 PM, Record Emporium, 3346 N. Paulina. 773-248-1821. LARRY O. DEAN Free in-store performance. Sat 5/1, 5 PM, Record Emporium, 3346 N. Paulina. 773-248-1821. NELLY FURTADO All-ages. Fri 4/30, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. INDIGO GIRLS, KELLY HOGAN All-ages....
Gerrit O’Neill has a great story to tell in his one-man show. He grew up in Las Vegas in the 1970s with a quaalude-popping bingo-girl mother and hard-gambling deadbeat dad. Though his parents were well-meaning, as an adolescent O’Neill was abandoned to the casino world of drinking, drugs, commercialized sex, and what he calls “air-conditioned desperation.” Past shows have proved his prowess as an actor, but as a storyteller he’s hamstrung by a patchy script (cowritten with director Rick DesRochers) and the misguided attempt to act out his own life, impersonating a dozen or so characters in cursory fashion....
A New Twist I wrote about this case last week. Here it is again in more detail. A common-law doctrine known as the fair-report privilege protects journalists who accurately report what’s said and written in a public forum. If on the floor of the city council Alderman Doe calls Alderman Smith a drunken, adulterous embezzler, the Daily Reflux can report the accusation without worrying about how true it is. If Alderman Smith sues the Daily Reflux for defamation, the only burden on the Reflux is to demonstrate that it accurately reported Alderman Doe’s language....
CLOUD CULT are the kind of earnest, idealistic, vaguely granola indie rockers who put solar panels on their tour van. But if they ever figure out how to convert bandleader Craig Minowa’s energy into electrical power, they’ll be able to do a lot more than ditch the photovoltaic cells–like maybe take a decent-size city off the grid. Minowa’s hustle makes Jay-Z seem actually retired: he works as an environmental activist, he’s written, performed, and released five Cloud Cult records in the past five years (including the most recent, Advice From the Happy Hippo, on his own label, Earthology), and he built a geothermally powered recording studio out of recycled and salvaged materials on his own organic farm....
Brett and Rennie Sparks arrived in Chicago about 15 years ago as unemployable as a couple can be. Rennie, a nice Jewish girl from Long Island, had an MA in English, and Brett, a small-town boy from Odessa, Texas, had studied musicology in graduate school. But maybe hardship was what they were unconsciously looking for. Around 1992 Brett started teaching his wife how to play bass, and for a band name they jokingly chose Brett’s nickname, “Handsome....
Lead Story In June Mark Schneider, a prosecutor in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, asked Judge Eileen Gallagher to recuse herself from the rape trial of 22-year-old Norman Craig on the basis of her earlier comments suggesting that the alleged victim, a 16-year-old girl who was 10 at the time of the alleged attack, lacked credibility. When Schneider was 45 minutes late to court that afternoon, Gallagher abruptly dismissed all charges against Craig, telling Schneider, “Don’t treat me like a punk....
When Chris Mills entered downtown’s Wall to Wall studio in January, he had a lot to do and not much time to do it. He’d hired 16 musicians to help make his fourth album, the orch-pop opus The Wall to Wall Sessions, and was planning to have it finished–entirely recorded and mixed–in just three days. Cost considerations were part of the reason, but he also wanted to thumb his nose at modern recording methods, which he says prize technical precision over the spirit of the performance....
Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Does Mr. Miner bother to inform his readers that Shanley admitted being a founder of NAMBLA, which advocates adult-child sex, and has lectured at NAMBLA meetings? Does Miner mention that Shanley was an investor in a nude beach for homosexuals in California? Does Miner recount for his readers that the Archdiocese of Boston sent Shanley to California with a letter stating he was a priest in good standing when they already had reams of evidence of his serial child sexual abuse in Massachusetts?...
When you die you pay the biggest price for fame. —Wayne Newton Wayne Newton, who considered himself pleasantly and robustly handsome in a way that reflected his relative virtuousness, considered the possibility that his impulsive decision to cut a $13,000 check for a fellow former child star, as well as his willingness to let her pour out her life story and tears on his shoulder, was not entirely scrupulous, but he was beyond the point where he could ask her to stop and would have to, as they say, play it as it lays....
Andy Holen was worn out and a bit scatterbrained when he returned to his Edgewater apartment around midnight on July 9. He’d put in a long day at the Aon Center, where he’s an attorney, and after pulling into his parking space in the alley behind his apartment building he dragged himself out of his ’95 Maxima, leaving his wallet sitting atop a pile of papers on the passenger seat. He also didn’t remember the spare key his old roommate had left in the glove compartment weeks earlier....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But perhaps his greatest failing came in his role as chief public representative of the agency he headed. The man was consistently arrogant, rude, and contemptuous of anyone he deemed beneath himself — that by and large being everyone he ever met. Over the years I don’t know how many people — aldermen, congressmen, CTA staffers, ordinary riders — told me how much they despised him for his treatment of them — and of the public....
A friendly London cab driver who knew a lot about American history told me Indians never scalped their slain enemies until the white man showed up and taught them. Can you cast some light on this claim? –Taylor Waller, UK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Seneca leader Cornplanter was perhaps the first to suggest Europeans imported scalping, in 1820, but the idea didn’t become prominent till the 1960s and ’70s....
Unlike Tony Kushner in Old Testament-prophet mode, Bruce Norris never seems to court consideration as a “serious” writer–which makes his new play even more of a triumph. In The Unmentionables, making its world premiere here, the principles of two American couples living comfortably in an unnamed West African country are tested when they must deal with a brutal situation. Norris is aware of his characters’ pain and foibles, as usual, but overcomes his tendency to merely point them out....
Chicago has devoted new resources to its annual farmers’ market program this year, not only producing more than 30 markets around the city but hiring–in conjunction with the nonprofit Green City Market–a “farm forager” to help recruit new suppliers to meet booming demand. Major farmers’ markets in the city and nearby suburbs, including a few sponsored by nonprofits, are listed below. In addition there are 21 city-sponsored neighborhood markets; see chicagoreader....
The first annual Windy City Wine Festival, featuring tastings of more than 200 wines, demos by local chefs, and seminars on pairing wines with food, takes place at Daley Bicentennial Plaza (Columbus and Monroe) this Saturday and Sunday. For more information see windycitywinefestival.com. Below are three of our critics’ favorite places to bring their own bottles. 773-989-4511 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adria Mare sounds Italian, but it’s owned by a Croatian couple, Denis and Nadia Bajramovic, whose aim is to bridge the small distance between the northern extremes of Italy and Croatia....
Earlier this month National Review reporter John J. Miller compiled a list of the top 50 conservative rock songs of all time. (In case your Google doesn’t work, the top slot went to “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Taxman” and “Sweet Home Alabama” both made the top five.) Miller made a few confounding choices–he ranks the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” number 20, apparently because lots of people think it’s about bombing Arabs instead of defying a repressive regime–but the complete absence of Springsteen songs is totally understandable....
