So here are some of the consequences: nearly $300 million in new taxes, fines, and fees, affecting just about everyone who lives in the city or even passes through. Own a home or even rent one? You’ll be paying more. Enjoy having a beer once in awhile? The beer tax is going up. Have a car here? You’ll be paying more for your next parking tickets, which, as anyone who’s been here awhile knows, are pretty much impossible to avoid....
2 BY PEARL: HOSPICE & LATE BUS TO MECCA ECLIPSE THEATRE COMPANY INFO 773-871-3000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cleage generally likes her women mouthy and complicated. This is most obvious in Hospice: Alice, a celebrated but bitter poet, is cared for by her 30-year-old pregnant daughter, Jenny, whom Alice abandoned when she was ten to enjoy the bohemian life in 1960s Paris. (One character in Cleage’s Harlem Renaissance-era Blues for an Alabama Sky longs to move to Paris, and the abusive poet manque in Flyin’ West, set in Kansas, greatly prefers his expat life in London....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My own list of such stories is quirky and short. A handful of novels: Arundel by Kenneth Roberts, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, Watership Down by Richard Adams, The King Must Die by Mary Renault. And a pair of memoirs: An American Childhood by Annie Dillard and Where Courage Is Like a Wild Horse by Chicagoans Sharon Skolnick and Manny Skolnick....
About three years ago George Klauba arrived home from his afternoon walk to find two birds coupling missionary style on his doorstep. The bird on its back had its wings spread as wide as they could go, wide enough for Klauba to see what looked like an armpit. “It was all a pale white, and it made me think of a woman,” he says. When the birds noticed him and flew off, Klauba felt as embarrassed as if he’d caught a pair of human lovers in the act....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much of it, by most counts, probably understates how much time, commitment, and blue-collar work D’Angelo has put in over the last half-century to preserve and protect lovely old buildings and park space. It certainly understates the influence D’Angelo had on public policy, both in Little Italy and across the city, under both Mayor Daleys and the three people who ran Chicago in between....
In her new play K.M. Lickert comes up with a fate worse than No Exit: too many exits. Daniel, an unintentional suicide, is caught in a celestial waiting room–what another character calls a “sorta kinda afterlife.” He can’t decide what belief system and postearthly existence to embrace even though a wise “reincarnationist,” Alex, is there to help him come to terms with his past and future. Alex Levy stages this derivative but charming piece for Smoke & Mirror Productions with a light hand, and the actors, particularly Adam Kalesperis as Alex and Tomike Ogugua as a silent guardian angel/bouncer, bring cheery warmth to even the cutesiest segments....
In Elvis, Jesus and Santa, one of three photographic works by Jonathan Gillette at Bodybuilder & Sportsman, the three icons are played by two of the artist’s uncles and a cousin. They hold hands, linked in friendly cooperation–or in some surreal low-rent pageant. Though he was sometimes discouraged from doing so in school, Gillette often uses his family as inspiration for his artwork, which here includes photographs and a video. Elvis is Gillette’s Uncle Roger, who was brain damaged in childhood by Rocky Mountain spotted fever....
Cuban-American bandleader Xavier Cugat, who brought Latin music to the American masses in the 30s and 40s, inspired artistic director Eduardo Vilaro’s new Cugat! It’s not deep, but then neither was Cugat: he was a sharp cookie who reportedly once said, “I would rather play ‘Chiquita Banana’ and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.” Cugat! is flamboyant and often sexy, designed in black and white to suggest old films and decorated with artificial palm trees; Angel Melendez & the 911 Mambo Orchestra provide live music....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October in San Francisco, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, 32, registered his brain as a sculpture (which he’d created “thought by thought”) and began selling futures contracts on its six billion neurons, offering the rights to its creative output after his death–assuming, of course, that the medical science of the future can keep his brain functioning. Keats has written a prospectus for investors, which includes MRI scans showing the localized activity that occurred when he thought about love, art, death, and so on; for now he’s selling ten-dollar options to buy a million neurons for $10,000 when he dies....
Lead Story Things the President Actually May Not Be to Blame For Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a police report, two men who duct-taped up and robbed a 57-year-old woman in her house in Westerville, Ohio, in February got into an argument over how to proceed, during which one said, “This is all George Bush’s fault. He screwed up the economy.” Also in February a 29-year-old man was given a suspended sentence and fined for a December incident in which he scaled a fence at the White House in order, he said, to meet Chelsea Clinton; in addition to claiming that someone had put a cell phone inside his head, the man explained to a court in Washington, D....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy puts his last nickel into a rigged slot machine when he calls the following item from Time magazine “intriguing”: “Previewing the final quarter of Bush’s presidency, [administration] officials disclosed to Time that the administration is formulating a huge energy initiative designed to ‘change the whole nature of the discussion’ and challenge the G....
PASSION PLAY: A CYCLE IN THREE PARTS | GOODMAN THEATRE The show’s first–and decidedly most successful–portion takes place in an English village in 1575, when the country was reeling from the anti-Protestant purges of the late queen, Bloody Mary. Her sister and successor, Elizabeth I, has restored Protestantism as the state religion, but closet Catholics cling to their annual passion play. “The stage is our house of worship,” declares John, the intense young fisherman who’s been cast as Jesus....
I’m a straight guy with conventional tastes in women. But a few years ago I “accidentally” ended up at a bar with drag queens. I found myself surprisingly turned on by this drag queen in a G-string that came over and shook her tits in my face. Ever since then I’ve had fantasies about male-to-female transsexuals who still have their male parts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your e-mail arrived, STAB, on the same day that snail mail brought me a copy of the new book I Am Not Myself These Days (HarperCollins) and a request to allow its author, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, to serve as a guest expert in my column....
Steve Albini notoriously hates the term “project” when applied to a musical endeavor. But that’s undeniably what Shellac has become: a complex undertaking that evolves over time, like a model-train layout that’s slowly spreading across the basement. Front man Albini, bassist Bob Weston, and drummer Todd Trainer have been a band for almost twice as long as Big Black and Rapeman combined, and they’ve developed a robust chemistry that lets them do a lot of onstage tinkering without compromising the basic Shellac profile: a lean, athletic rhythm section and a guitar that sounds like a boiler explosion in a chandelier factory....
On any given night you’ll see a different sampling of the 18 new plays, none longer than seven minutes, in Collaboraction’s annual multidisciplinary festival, which also includes visual art, music, and film. But the opening lineup demonstrated the variety of effects created by very brief works–sometimes they felt just right and sometimes too short or too long. The atmosphere is all-inclusive and embracing in this celebration of creativity, however, and as a result you’re willing to go along for the ride no matter what....
With his neo-Kabuki makeup, stylized art deco costumes, and proudly gay marriage of rock and grand opera, countertenor Klaus Nomi was by far the strangest performer to surface during the punk/new-wave explosion of the late 70s. He was also one of the first celebrities diagnosed with AIDS, still shrouded in mystery at the time, and his lonely death in 1983 seemed only to enhance his alien mystique. This documentary by Andrew Horn–best known for East Side Story, a history of Soviet musicals–collects moving testimony from the New York artists and musicians who befriended the shy Berliner and helped create his head-spinning stage show....
It’s not often that I stumble into anything on the Net that scares me, but this does. A large number of sites declare that we’re about to hit, or have hit, peak oil production and that our civilization is essentially on the clock and poised to implode in the next 40 to 60 years. Are these accurate assessments, or are they taking the worst-case scenario to extremes? –Scott Lumley, via e-mail...
Brenden Clenaghen When I was young, my friends and I would sometimes describe great films as “cosmic,” partly in self-parody of our enthusiasms. But some abstract art is cosmic in a more literal way. The patterns in Brenden Clenaghen’s seven paintings at Zolla/Lieberman and in Howard Hersh’s ten at Gwenda Jay/Addington seem to stretch beyond the pictures’ borders, as if these works were mere fragments of an imagined universe. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am so excited about the maps festival it’s embarrassing. I’m also glad that it’s going to shed light on an underrated aspect of the city–we’re really important, as far as maps go. Nick Paumgarten put it much better than I could in his 2006 article about Navteq (which started in Silicon Valley but moved to the Merch Mart): “Chicago, you might say, is the Sagres of the American imperium, a hub of geographic and cartographic expertise....
Most of saxophonist Tim Berne’s work this decade has prominently featured electric and electronic instrumentation (often courtesy of keyboardist Craig Taborn and guitarist Marc Ducret), and until one gig in England last year the sound of this trio–Berne, Taborn, and drummer Tom Rainey–was largely defined by the Fender Rhodes electric piano. But no Rhodes was available that night, meaning Taborn had to adapt the material for grand piano; the results were so good that Berne stuck with the format....
