Blues Club birthday bash
“Let’s Keep the Blues Alive!” — the earnest wish at the bottom of the hand-drawn fliers advertising the coming of the Central Illinois Blues Club in February 1986 — signifies all that the organization has stood for since its inception more than two decades ago. Credit for instigating the club goes to Vicki Biddle Chmura…
Contemporary antiquaries
Christian Kiefer and Sharron Kraus The Black Dove (Tompkins Square) On their first collaboration, songwriter/brainiacs Christian Kiefer (a Ph.D. candidate in American literature) and Sharron Kraus (a former Oxford tutor in philosophy) deliver 15 moody, mostly acoustic tracks that have one foot in the art house and the other in the moors. Kraus, who sings…
Nailing the cheats
In last summer’s frothy comedy Wedding Crashers, the lead characters, played by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, used a variety of phony personas to impress women. Their favorite gimmick — guaranteed to garner “attention, admiration, and plenty of booze” — was flaunting a fake Purple Heart, the military decoration awarded to soldiers wounded in battle.…
CAP CITY
WHAT DAY IS IT? In early February, Julie Cellini, chairwoman of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, pooh-poohed the notion that there might be any urgency in hiring a replacement for Richard Norton Smith, departing director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. The 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, after all, is in 2009. A…
American life in poetry
Thousands of Americans fret over the appearance of their lawns, spraying, aerating, grooming, but here Grace Bauer finds good reasons to resist the impulse to tame what’s wild: the white of clover blossoms under a streetlight, the possibility of finding the hidden, lucky, four-leafed rarity. Against Lawn The midnight streetlight illuminating the white of clover…
The Hype
PARTY TIME If Springfield’s election-night parties are at all indicative of how energetically followers will stump for their political parties, it’s a good thing Gov. Rod Blagojevich has $15 million in the bank. The Democratic, um, party at the Carpenters Union Hall on Tuesday night was about as exciting as the governor’s hair — and…
The return of King Coal
Montgomery County Board member Ed Helgen says it was a big secret: No one came because no one knew. “There might have been six or eight people there, but they wasn’t there for that,” he recalls of the board meeting in December 2004 when he landed on the losing end of the 18-2 vote. Not…
Jaws takes a bite
Alexi Giannoulias has big trouble ahead. The wealthy and telegenic young candidate, who handily won Tuesday’s Democratic primary for state treasurer over downstater Paul Mangieri, has repeatedly claimed that his experience working at his family’s bank qualifies him to be state treasurer. But recent questions about some loans the bank made to an ex-mobster and…
Winners and losers
At the Sankey Hi-Rise polling station early Tuesday morning, plows delegated to clear the snow that blanketed central Illinois seemed to be working against each other: Just as one plow managed to clear a patch of asphalt, the other one pushed the snow right back where it had been. In many ways the plow trucks…
Independence day
A specter is haunting Latin America — the specter of socialism. From the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, alternatives to the Washington Consensus are being developed and leftist governments are being elected. A 200-year legacy of U.S. intervention in the form of the Monroe Doctrine, “dollar diplomacy,” CIA-backed dictatorships, and the International Monetary Fund…
Movie disasters
While was sitting in the dark on the night of the tornadoes, I realized that the topic for my next column was right in front of me. The disaster genre has given us some substantial hits over the years but very little in terms of quality. Why worry about a hackneyed soap-opera plot when it…
States take the lead
Instead of recognizing the obvious — that global warming is fast reaching the tipping point where it becomes irreversible (and disastrous) — the Bushites continue to keep their heads up the tailpipes and smokestacks of the industries pumping out the greenhouse gases that cause the unnatural warming. So we’re doomed, right? Not necessarily. While Washington…
Jacqueline Jackson
tornadopoem #1 after the incessant sirens after the twin tornadoes when things were calm again no rain no wind even startlingly a moon ten o’clock about I stood on the walk gazing at our darkened city no street lights no traffic lights no house lights no t v or radio chatter headlights though streaming down…
A lineman for the city
The call came while Mike Hickey was still huddled in the basement with his wife and their three kids. A journeyman communications technician for City Water, Light & Power, Hickey was summoned to the shop to begin mending the city’s fiberoptic-cable system. The first inkling he had of the magnitude of the disaster came as…
Letters to the editor
We welcome letters, but please include your full name, address, and daytime telephone number. We edit all letters for libel, length, and clarity. Send letters to Letters, Illinois Times, P.O. Box 5256, Springfield, IL 62705; fax 217-753-3958; e-mail editor@illinoistimes.com. PROVOKING A CALL FOR “REFORM” I knew a woman, like Patricia Clink in your story “American…
