The University of Chicago (StudentsReview) -

Von Tersch leaves volleyball
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 09, 2008
“After seven seasons at the helm of Chicago volleyball, head coach Dorinda von Tersch announced last week that she will not be returning next fall, citing family reasons.
Von Tersch confirmed reports of her departure, but declined to give further comment.
“It was her decision,” athletic director Tom Weingartner said. “I don’t want to speak for her, but I think that it looks like the family is moving out of the area. She’s resigning on her own, and I don’t believe she’s taken another position.”
The decision caught many team members off guard.
“We were all really sad,” third-year middle hitter Katie Volzer said. “It was out of nowhere really, but no one’s mad about it or anything, we all understand her situation.”
“I don’t think it was anything that we saw coming, it was just a good time in her life to make that transition,” said third-year outside hitter Kerry Dornfeld. “It was something that she did because it was a good time for her and her family.”
After guiding the DI Colgate Raiders to a Patriot Conference Championship and an NCAA tournament berth in 1999, von Tersch came to Chicago in 2001. Despite a 5–24 record in her inaugural season, she led the Maroons to a fifth-place UAA finish that year, the squad’s highest in five years.
Although Chicago struggled for most of von Tersch’s tenure, it set an impressive 20–14 mark in the fall of 2004, a record that still stands as volleyball’s only winning season since 1996.
Following this bright spot, the Maroons slumped again in von Tersch’s final seasons, finishing this fall at 7–26 and taking last place in the UAA. The coach leaves Chicago with a 66–169 career win-loss record.
From here, Weingartner enters a hiring process that began officially on Wednesday, as the department of physical education and athletics began advertising for the new coaching position.
“This is a faculty position, so we just yesterday began a national search,” Weingartner said. “And that means advertising nationally, mostly with the NCAA news, U.S. volleyball coaches association, and NCAA D-III athletics directors. Then, the department will form a faculty search committee, which is always three faculty members.”
Incorporating current team members into the process to help ease the transition will be an integral part of the search.
“I met with the team the other night,” Weingartner said, “and we will select several team members to be part of the interview process. We’ll just try and get the best students who will do the best job representing the team. It’s not necessarily seniority or who is the best player, just who we think will do the best job helping.”
As they face uncertainty about next year, team members are confident about the way the search will head.
“I think they should just be concerned with the best candidate for us, someone who knows about the game and will be the best leader for us,” Dornfeld said. “It will be good to make sure the players are involved and that we have a say in it as well, but I have faith the department will do everything they can to get us a good coach.”
Von Tersch will stay on to finalize recruiting, and Weingartner will also play a key role during the transition period. However, athletes have stepped into leadership roles within the squad, helping the team move through the process and keeping in touch with recruits and updating them about the situation.
As for von Tersch, players say they’ll miss the coach who helped her players as much off the court as on it, acting as a surrogate mother to many Maroons.
“She’s been a second mom to everybody,” Dornfeld said. “She’s very interested in being there for us as people and not just as players. She’s been a great mentor and just a great person, and we will definitely miss her.”
Looking for a replacement, the department can only hope that it scores a coach who can immediately make an impact in the way that two other coaching newcomers have. The University’s two most recent head coach hires, swimming coach Jason Weber and men’s soccer coach Scott Wiercinski, have both enjoyed early success. Weber has transformed his once struggling men’s squad into a top ten contender, while Wiercinski took his team to the postseason in his first year.”

Importance

Annual festival unites folks this weekend
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 09, 2008
“Though many of us here at the U of C hail from backgrounds with well loved musical traditions, and the Core sees to it that at least some of us are musically literate, traditional music isn’t the kind of thing that appears too often in iTunes libraries or end-of-the-year best lists. And if your familiarity with folk starts with Bob Dylan and ends with Simon & Garfunkel, you might well ask why you should bother slogging through the slush to the annual U of C Folk Festival at Mandel Hall this weekend.
Members of the U of C Folklore Society, who kicked off this year’s festival with dancing and live music in Hutch Commons Wednesday, would answer that folk is a whole lot of fun. The small but enthusiastic group of undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni has organized the event for 48 years running. Dave Landreth of the string act the New Bad Habits says folk is the kind of spectacle that will appeal to people as soon as they first see it performed; he calls it “a very attractive music.”
A diverse list of artists from around the U.S. will be coming to Hyde Park, and at least some genres they play—bluegrass, gospel, Cajun, and blues—should sound familiar if only because of their influence on contemporary groups. The artists share a commitment to regional sounds and music that is best experienced in a group setting.
Unlike the lone singer-songwriter sound that’s often labeled as folk rock, this kind of folk music assumes interplay with a live, participating audience. It values its ties to communal traditions like weddings and village dances. Folk, after all, is roots music, according to Edward Wallace, co-president of the Folklore Society. It’s the music of communities and families—childhood music. Where popular music—or, for the indie kids, alternative music that nevertheless achieves a similar level of recognition throughout the country thanks to media agents like Pitchfork—is a common musical denominator, folk resists such standardization. It naturally varies depending on the kind of tradition that each person has grown up with.
But not all folk is the stuff of back porches and rural landscapes, Kurt Bjorling of the Chicago Klezmer ensemble points out. “Here in America, we tend to think of folk as the kind of music that folks play after supper, well enough to satisfy themselves and anyone that happens to be playing with them—music for folks. But in Europe, the term ‘folk music’ refers to music of a particular ethnicity or nationality,” he says. “Klezmer was always conceived of as a professional music—not just what folks play. Although it was the music of a particular group, it was primarily a professional musical idiom. The people who played it guarded that repertoire.”
The common thread between variants of folk music is a recognition of its social function, which the Folk Festival tries to emphasize. Members of the Folklore Society pointed out the festival isn’t a bad setting for a date, citing alumni couples that first met or started dating at the event. Many Hyde Parkers and other Chicagoans who are expected in the audience have attended for years—even decades. The midwinter date is also a real plus for attendance.
And this year, the weather’s not nearly as bad as it was in the winter of ’67, when, in one tale associated with the mythology of the festival, a snowstorm kept half the artists at home and festival organizers couldn’t get their sound equipment from downtown until a group of guys volunteered to go get it on snowshoes and pull it back to Hyde Park on sleds tethered to their waists. So if mid-quarter isolation is starting to set in, and you want to see some dancing other than the sort people do around the lakes in the quads, look to the U of C Folk Festival to inject some warmth into your dreary February.”

Importance

Catching up with Deadspin.com editor Will Leitch
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 09, 2008
“In just over two years, “Deadspin,” the popular anti-mainstream sports blog, has evolved into the gateway drug to the sports blogosphere, and founder, editor, and Mattoon, IL native Will Leitch is embarking on a cross-country book tour in support of his book God Save the Fan . While driving from the Bay Area to Seattle, Leitch braved the dangers of multitasking to share his thoughts about the fantasies and realities of being a sports fan.
Emerald Gao: Why do you use the royal “we” on the site?
Will Leitch: I wanted to make it very clear from the beginning that it’s not one of those sites where it’s like “Here are my opinions on sports—now react to my opinions on sports!” I thought a good way to do that would be to speak as a collective, to say, “Listen, when I say ‘we’ I mean all of us.” The book is a little bit more opinionated; the site is more like a sounding board, a way to introduce topics and get people talking…. When I first started writing for the book, I would write “we,” but it was like no, no, no, it can be “me” now.
Leitch breaks from the conversation in order to cross a toll point and confesses that he’s always wanted to tip the toll guys, but is afraid of seeming crazy. We sympathize.
EG: What’s your favorite story on “Deadspin”? Are there any stories you felt a bit reluctant to post, or maybe regretted later?
WL: The only thing I’ve ever regretted—and this is something that any journalist would regret—is when I got something wrong. That happened with me most famously when the original Jason Grimsley steroid document first came out [in June 2006], and I wrote that Albert Pujols was in it, which he was not. I don’t think the site is particularly mean, and I don’t think the book is particularly mean either—to me, the general thing is just to try and be fair, so it’s never been anything like, “Oh, I was too harsh on that.”
The story that, to this day, makes me laugh whenever I look at it is still Carl Monday. I like to go back and watch that video like every month or so; it’s just like revisiting your favorite characters in a novel. I just love it to death. I know it’s not even sports-related, and if the guy in the video—Mike Cooper—hadn’t been wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt, it would’ve never been on the site, but it’s just my favorite thing.
I have a general rule about sports; I think I missed this in the book. It’s the Nancy Grace rule, which says that the minute a story gets on Nancy Grace , it’s just not any fun anymore for sports fans to talk about. Those are my least favorite stories—Duke lacrosse and the ref gambling scandal, and frequently, steroids. My theory is that most sports fans have made their peace with steroids in a way that the media hasn’t. The Clemens thing is a great example…. I did not do anything on the site today about Brian McNamee and his supposed evidence. I find that kind of telling that the story is on the front page of ESPN.com or the front page of SI.com and they’ll play like it’s a big story, and I literally have not gotten an e-mail about it all day.
EG: That brings me to my next question. On one hand, there seems to be this illusion of meritocracy in sports that’s valuable to families and young children, but most fans seem to have reconciled themselves with the dark truths of sports. How can fans still maintain the ability to lose themselves in sports when issues of science and ethics are introduced?
WL: I think the key thing that a lot of people miss about sports is that it’s paid entertainment. We pay for everything, and they are paid to entertain us. It’s not to say that it can’t touch our lives, or illuminate the way we see the world, or anything like that…. You see this with the steroids thing, where everything turns into this big morality play. If you think of sports as that kind of entertainment, you can keep it in perspective.
Being a sports fan is not a logical thing. If you really break it down in a cold-hearted, capitalistic fashion, you are rooting for one group of millionaires over another group of millionaires, and if you ever met any of these millionaires, they would not like you and you would not like them. That’s a harshly cynical way to look at the world of sports…. But for actual sports fans, I think it’s important to remember that not only are we paying for everything, but we’re actually the fabric of it all. Look at—who’s your favorite baseball team?
EG: Probably the A’s.
WL: So, in 15 years, none of the players who are there now are gonna be there. Billy Beane is probably not gonna be there. It probably won’t even be the same owners in 15 years. So the only thing that’s going to make the A’s the A’s is you. That’s the only connective tissue they have. The thing about the St. Louis Cardinals—I sometimes forget that the Cardinals are sports. They’re almost like a religion to me. Sometimes it’s illogical, sometimes it’s bad for you, but it’s all about faith…. It’s about believing in that; it’s about having this collective thing with other people.
I think you can look at things with a clear eye and still have the deep love for sports.
EG: Turning back to sports blogs for a second, there seems to be an underlying zeitgeist, a spirit of blogging. How would you describe that?
WL: I started “Deadspin” in September 2005, and I—like most fans—had no idea that there were all these great sports blogs out there. So what I did was send e-mails to each of my favorites, saying, “Hey, listen, I’m starting this site through Gawker Media, and hopefully we’ll all be able to work together.” Not only did they really embrace that, they still do, and that’s pretty amazing given how much fierce competition there is in any other medium. I think there’s a general ethos amongst sports blogs that’s like, “Hey, we’re all kind of on the same team here.” We all love sports in our different kinds of ways, we all have our disciplines and our things that we do differently, but we all still love sports.
EG: With the emergence of the sports blogosphere, it seems like journalists and columnists are getting almost as much attention as the athletes themselves.
WL: I think that’s perfectly logical. It’s so weird that someone at ESPN or Sports Illustrated would think that because they report on the game, they’re somehow not part of the story. That’s ridiculous. We see [ Sportscenter anchor] Scott Van Pelt on TV a hell of a lot more than we see the shortstop of the Devil Rays. It’s all part of the same soup. Whether you’re a player or a coach, or a media member or a blogger, you are a paid entertainer (if you get paid)…. That includes me—I talked to someone from Sports Illustrated the other day, and they were like, “Will, what would you think if we put a drunk picture of you up on our site?” I said, “I think you guys wouldn’t get many hits”…but if I were really concerned about privacy, I would have become a banker.
EG: In your book you have this chapter on fantasy sports—I get the feeling that you think it’s pretty much perfect. How do you reconcile that with the whole religion aspect of being a sports fan? For instance, when you were watching St. Louis in the World Series, were you thinking about stats or about fantasy teams, or were you just praying?
WL: I was thinking, please don’t let me have a heart attack…. I do think it’s possible to compartmentalize that way. Fans can multitask. A lot of times, fans will make their own rules—I have a rule that no matter what, if someone is playing the Cardinals, I just can’t root for that person. I’ll take the ERA hits that week. I don’t think it’s contradictory to be a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs and still be devoted to your fantasy team. Again, it’s all entertainment. It’s our stuff; what we do with it is our choice. The great thing about fantasy sports is that it has actively made something ours.
EG: Any more books in the future?
WL: I’m actually working on one right now. It’s not related to sports at all; it’s called Come As You Are , and it’s a novel about a kid who wants to kill himself on the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I always say that I have three major obsessions, which are the St. Louis Cardinals, Woody Allen, and Kurt Cobain. I’ve got my Cardinals stuff out of the way now, so next will be the Kurt Cobain book, and eventually I’ll get around to the Woody Allen book. I’m going to write forever, man.
Leitch exclaims that he’s just missed his highway exit. We feel awful, but he later finds his way back.
EG: Going back to the inception of “Deadspin,” if you had to undergo secret herpes testing and treatment under a false name, what would yours be?
WL: I would mess with everybody’s head and go by Will Leitch. Aha! No, without question, I’d use the name Skip Bayless.
EG: Good choice. Lastly, do you really believe, like the NBC website wants us to believe, that the American Gladiators are 100 percent natural?
WL: Oh, of course. Have you seen them? That doesn’t come from anything unnatural. One of my favorite things about entertainment-slash-sports, like [fake] wrestling, is that they really have no governing body that has to test for that stuff. I think the reason they do it is because deep down, they know that nobody cares. It’s great. I just assume that everyone on NBC is on steroids—including Steve Carrell and Brian Williams.
EG: So, new Gladiators versus old Gladiators ?
WL: The old one is so much better, it’s not even close.
EG: Yeah, they had Nitro.
WL: They had Nitro! Have you ever seen that video of—it might have been Nitro—one of the guys on there, where he’s literally like a ‘roided-up Kip Winger? It’s just the best thing ever. I’ve watched the new Gladiators twice, but any time the old Gladiators is on ESPN Classic, I am physically incapable of switching the channel.
Will Leitch will be in the Chicagoland area for a book signing on Monday, February 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the Borders in Oak Brook (1500 16th Street). Then he’ll go home to Mattoon to do his laundry and eat a home-cooked meal.”

Importance

Arctic tale digs into the explorer’s state of mind
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 09, 2008
“For me, stories about great explorers always bring to mind the famous lines of Dante’s Inferno about Ulysses. Exhorting his crew to keep rowing toward the sunrise, he sees a heavenly mountain in the distance. But that’s all he ever sees, because in an instant the sea becomes a storming cauldron and his ship is swallowed whole. It is this mad longing for worldly and transcendent glory that defines the nobility of the explorer.
Indeed, A Big Blue Nail, a flawed but fascinating play at Victory Gardens Theater, begins with a reading of Tennyson’s Ulysses and takes as its subject the famous American explorer Robert Peary in his quest to be the first man to reach the North Pole. Yet it is not with elegiacal solemnity and sympathetic grandeur that Nail portrays Peary’s pursuit of glory. Rather, Peary’s ambitions lay waste to his humanity, dominating his life and leaving him physically and spiritually desolate. But underneath it all there remains that stirring spirit of adventure and possibility, powerfully attractive no matter how destructive.
Nail opens with Peary’s partner and onetime friend Matthew Henson arriving at his house on an island off Maine at Peary’s invitation. We learn that the two men have a long and fraught history: Henson, a black man, played a key role in Peary’s conquest of the Pole, but was never recognized publicly either by Peary or anyone else. Henson has come to ask Peary for the approbation which he has never before received. Larry Neumann, Jr., is fantastic as Peary. As soon as he speaks, the blood starts flowing in the play’s veins. Only after Peary’s character is established does Anthony Fleming III’s Henson, too, come alive.
We are immediately drawn into Peary’s surreal mind: A hypersomniac, he spends most of the play dreaming. Director and set designer Loy Arcenas has created a stark world of shifting white platforms and sheets of textured cloth to represent this dream world, with powerful sidelights heightening the drama. Peary’s dreams are inhabited by a troop of Inuit shamans, a naked woman representing his future, and a devil boy. They compel him to relive his expeditions and moral failures. Through a series of vignettes we witness Peary’s ambitions creep toward obsession as he tries again and again to reach the vaunted Pole.
All this dreaming can get rather tiresome, despite the lovely disrobed figure of Bethanny Alexander as the future. Some of the scenes just lay flat and go nowhere. We don’t know enough about Peary’s psychology early in the play to make sense of all the portentous speeches and mystical jabber, and the symbolism is laid on pretty thick. I felt sorry for Alexander as she declared, “I represent your future.”
Along the same lines, I took exception to the character of Tupi, Peary’s Inuit valet/scheming demon known as a “Tupilaq.” In the first place, his status is unclear: Is he a real person or a phantom? No one else seems to notice him. And again the symbolism is chunk-style: Tupi leaps on a trunk and declares, “I am your desire.” Thirteen-year-old Scott Baitty, Jr., plays Tupi, and while I hate to knock a kid down, it isn’t too harsh to say that giving a child actor a lot of exposition is not usually a good idea.
The play picks up in the second half, when more time is given for Peary to speak and for his relationship with Henson to develop. Fleming and Neumann have an appealing and credible rapport despite some stiff dialogue, and Peary’s soliloquies tell us so much about his psychology that the return of his dream demons seems superfluous. As characters, real and imaginary, congregate on the stage, the line between dream and reality is blurred. Peary is slipping into a world of illusion. But illusion is the natural element of the explorer: Peary declares, “The North Pole is nothing, just a mathematical point; it has no length, no breadth….”
A world explorer himself and major black talent, playwright Carlyle Brown seems to have found a story that encapsulates his life and art. But while A Big Blue Nail will undoubtedly be described as a play about race, it is really about what it means to be an explorer and what explorers actually discover. Not surprisingly, we learn that explorers discover themselves, and this self-knowledge can be a terrifying thing. The explorer is in a constant state of dreaming, pulled by a profound desire to achieve exactly what he cannot, and to fulfill his potential to the utmost and far beyond. It is this quality that makes A Big Blue Nail interesting despite its faults, and Henson’s search for dignity is a parallel pursuit of that same dream refracted through the prism of race.”

Importance

Foote production struggles to hit its stride
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 09, 2008
“Horton Foote, one of America’s most prolific playwrights, has spent seven decades dramatizing the Depression-era American South. In January, the Goodman Theatre began a four-month tribute to Foote, the Academy Award–winning script writer of To Kill a Mockingbird, featuring the upcoming one-acts Blind Date and The Actor, the full-length The Trip to Bountiful, as well as the currently playing Talking Pictures.
Foote’s works encompass a period of American history that allows him to fill his plays with a good deal of sentiment, which is great for the average theatergoer. If you feel that the function of theater is to simply provide familiar entertainment and memories of times gone by, then Talking Pictures is certainly the play to see. The audience clearly loved the old-fashioned humor, the extreme and often-quirky characters, and the nostalgia for the period. However, if you are a patron of the theater who looks for something a little more challenging or probing, then Talking Pictures would probably bore you with its devout commitment to convention.
Talking Pictures is about the Jacksons, a family of four living in Texas during the Great Depression, and Myra, who rents one of their rooms and plays the piano at a silent–motion-picture house. The plot is multi-faceted and full of vignettes dealing with the lives of the people who come in and out of the house. Some of the more prominent plot points involve the Jacksons’ daughter Katie Bell and her fascination with silent movies, the relationship that the bricklayer Willis strikes up with Myra, and Myra’s battle with her ex-husband over the custody of their young son Pete. The vignettes allow for a pretty fair mixture of dramatic elements: love, humor, and familial drama, as well as childhood fantasy and fascination.
Most of my qualms did not involve the production itself but rather the weaknesses of Foote’s play. The script comes across as corny and saccharine. To say that the production was unimpressive, though, would be unfair; that the production manages to overcome some of the play’s flaws is rather remarkable. From a technical standpoint the production is top-notch. The lighting feels very natural while maintaining an undercurrent of theatricality. Talking Pictures also has detailed and specific sound design that occasionally borders on overbearing, but should be appreciated for its realism.
It also needs to be said that not all of the performances fall into the category of cardboard cutouts and caricatures. Jenny McKnight, who portrays the Jacksons’ tenant Myra, gives a very rich performance. McKnight’s performance is never forced and she plays Myra with an air of grace and poise that never seems to disappear even in her most serious and upsetting scenes. This attention to character consistency is what makes the audience care so much about Myra and her story, and McKnight’s performance is definitely the production’s greatest strength. Also giving a very well rounded performance is Judy Blue as Mrs. Jackson, the family’s matriarch and a devout Methodist. While a character with this much religious fervor could easily fall into the area of the extreme and the oversimplified, Blue gives her a real humanity and makes her faith seem completely genuine.
The production’s flaws are found mainly in its structure and in a few of the performances. Horton Foote’s play truly languishes in the second act, which meanders a great deal to tie up the play’s numerous storylines and leaves the audience with barely any time to catch its breath. I also was simply not invested enough in these stories to watch an act solely concerned with their respective resolutions. This production, unfortunately, is unable to do anything to resolve this problematic structure. Additionally, a number of the performances, including Audrey Francis’s Gladys and Dan Waller’s Gerard, were both written and performed thinly, embodying a sophomoric type of humor that clearly fishes for laughs.
The play generally features likable characters and the story should certainly be satisfying to most audiences, but it might very well underwhelm the more analytic and seasoned theatergoer. Only at the very end of Talking Pictures is there moment that seems to rise above the problematic play. As the lights dim, the character of Katie Bell Jackson, played by Lee Stark, sings a Spanish rendition of “Rock of Ages” to impress Estaquio, the son of a Mexican Baptist preacher. Singing softly and without bravado, she seemed to acknowledge the varied tones of the play very simply and elegantly. If every moment of Talking Pictures had felt this authentic, it would be easier to reconcile Horton Foote’s Academy Award– and Pulitzer Prize–laden legacy with the work at hand.”

Importance

The Gadabout—February 8, 2008
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 09, 2008
“Despite its proximity, South Side food is more the stuff of legend than the stuffing of Saturday night. U of C lore only mandates the occasional, possibly alcohol-induced adventure to the Harold’s on 53rd Street before graduation. Those brave souls who have traveled past the end of the world as marked by B-J report the land between 61st and 75th Streets filled with rib-tip and barbecue artisans. But the most legendary stuff of all lies nearly 50 blocks south, in the sugar coma–inducing headquarters of Old Fashioned Donuts.
Docking in at 112th Street and Michigan Avenue, Old Fashioned Donuts—a veritable Krispy Kreme on crack—qualifies as being legitimately South Side; just two neighborhoods separate it from Chicago’s southern city limits. Standing outside, you can almost hear the oil from the frying vat burble your name and your impending need for an insulin shot. A line of people often snakes through the plain interior, interrupted by small tables at which the impatient have already begun chewing their slivers of bliss.
The bakery has as many donuts as Chicago has Obama supporters, in and behind the large, sugar-encrusted counter up front. With 10 flavors of yeast dough, five types of buttermilk cake, and three of regular cake, all of which feature assorted glazing and filling options, it becomes impossible to select your ideal breakfast cocktail. The additional strawberry, lemon, and Bavarian jelly donuts and the seasonal choices on top of those are just there to mock your indecision.
On the Homer Simpson scale, the donuts themselves rate a perfect 10 “mmms.” The buttermilk-cake donuts glazed with chocolate were perfect: The donut had a crisp exterior with a dense yet soft interior, and there was just enough chocolate to get a taste of it in every bite. As a counter-taste, the plain-cake donuts without glaze—in both donut and hole form—deliciously hollered back to the original described by Washington Irving. The chocolate-covered Texas donut, essentially the obese version of its brethren (sound familiar?), takes the virgin eater about four hours to consume to match the round-trip travel time between Midway and Dallas–Fort Worth.
The cinnamon bun, another specialty, is one of the rare less-than-ideal offerings of Old Fashioned Donuts. The palm-sized bun starts off well, with a beautiful cinnamon swirl and appetizing sheen. Much like the White Sox’s last season, though, the success of the start was masked by the failures of the finish. Our bun had a hard candy layer of sugar on top that somehow managed to interfere with the taste of the pastry, and the search for cinnamon within often proved futile. Although Cinnabon’s products are 90-percent chemical, their synthetic cinnamon bun unfortunately glazes over this.
Old Fashioned Donuts’s pièce de résistance, which has single-sugaredly hurtled the bakery into lore, is its apple fritter. Compared to catcher’s mitts or human heads, their apple fritter is certainly not the second-biggest you’ve ever seen. The fried dough inside is the ideal balance for the soft, sweet apple hunks and thickly slathered icing on the outside. Finishing the whole thing in one sitting would be the Olympic eating equivalent of the triathlon.
Time may be an illusion, and lunchtime doubly so, but there is nothing imaginary—or even artificial—about the products of Old Fashioned Donuts. Rich with the splendors of fat and sugar, these hand-crafted donuts hail to a time before gentrification and skim milk. You may have to take the Metra at 8 a.m. to get to Old Fashioned Donuts while everything’s still available. You may have to wait in line for 20 minutes in a place that completely lacks the glitz of Cupcakes or Swirlz on the North Side. You may have to have all your teeth pulled out after the apple fritter. We promise it’s worth it for unequivocally the best donuts in Chicago.”

Importance

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—February 8, 2008
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 09, 2008
“These days it’s easy to feel like whoever is controlling the weather has got a bone to pick with the city of Chicago. What did we ever do to him? Whatever it was, it’s obvious that revenge is a dish best served cold with a side of blinding snow. But where nature fails, culture offers a refuge.
Friday / February 8
The 48th Annual University of Chicago Folk Festival kicks off tonight with a performance at Mandel Hall. Sponsored by the University of Chicago Folklore Society, the festival features three days of roots music by the nation’s top folk acts and weekend workshops in everything from slide guitar to barn dance. There’s something for everyone, from Irish folk to Cajun dance hall. Don’t miss the free dances on Saturday and Sunday. (Mandel Hall, 8 p.m., $10 for students, tickets can be purchased at zaptix.com, by mail, or at box office)
Doc hosts the Japan Midwest Foundation Film Festival all this weekend, featuring contemporary Japanese films sharing the theme of “The Changing Scenery of Japan.” These movies explore contemporary Japanese society through its portrayals of the generations growing up in the shadow of World War II. The series is co-sponsored by the Japan Society and Center for East Asian Studies. All Under the Moon and the prizewinning Pacchigi! screen tonight; both address ethnic divisions in Japanese society. (Max Palevsky, 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m., free)
It’s very seldom that Jeff Goldblum doesn’t play some nerd with wry, fidgety charm. But in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, screening tonight at the Music Box, his usual facetious nerd character transforms into a horrible monster lacking any trace of charm. Revising the venerable old story of science overreaching its God-given bounds, Cronenberg’s film is concerned more than anything with decomposition, flesh’s refusal to stay healthy. (3733 North Southport Avenue, midnight, $9.25, also playing Saturday)
Saturday / February 9
Paul Newman gives arguably his greatest performance in Robert Rossen’s bleak The Hustler, playing tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Newman plays an ambitious pool hustler struggling to defeat the reigning champion, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). The story barely conceals the existential cry of despair underneath. (164 North State Street, 5:15 p.m., $7 for students)
Catch some free excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, this year’s Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company show, which will be performed by the University Chamber Orchestra. The excerpts will be paired with Dvorak’s Czech Suite. (Fulton Recital Hall, 8 p.m., free)
Sunday / February 10
Platypus, a Marxist journal society, hosts its first reading group in an ongoing series focused on “The Absence of the Left” in politics. Readings include a letter from the Iraqi Communist Party. (Reynolds Club room 019, 1–4 p.m., free)
Monday / February 11
Want to laugh on a Monday? Go see “That’s Weird, Grandma,” a collection of short plays written by Chicago Public School students and performed by comedy troupe Barrel of Monkeys at the Neo-Futurarium. It sounds dubious on paper, but it is one of the funniest shows going on right now. (5153 North Ashland Avenue, 8 p.m., $10)
Chamber-pop starlit Nina Nastasia delivers stripped-down versions of her delicate, fraught songs tonight at the Hideout. The Bitter Tears round off the ticket. (1354 West Wabansia Avenue, 9 p.m., $10, 21+)
Tuesday / February 12
Professors and former Weatherman members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrm speak tonight about key political events and trends in 1968 as part of the Chicago History Museum’s The ’68 Experience. An ongoing series of talks and a bus tour, The ’68 Experience explores this fascinating time in American society, including its music, culture, and politics. (1601 North Clark Street, 7 p.m., $10)
Boasting some of the best performances of the season, Goodman Theatre’s Shining City is a ghost story for grown-ups about a Dublin widower haunted by the specter of his ex-wife. John Judd as the widower and Jay Whittaker as his shrink are both outstanding. (170 North Dearborn Street, 7:30 p.m., $23–$70)
Wednesday / February 13
Through March 2 the Museum of Contemporary Art presents Jeni Spota’s small, impasto paintings inspired by the dream sequence of a character named Giotto in the film The Decameron. Mysterious and emotive, the paintings are an auspicious beginning for Spota, who received her M.F.A. from the Art Institute in 2007. (220 East Chicago Avenue, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., $6 for students)
Thursday / February 14
The undergraduate program in English will throw a little Valentine’s party this evening, so muster your courage, eat, drink, and prepare a poem or whatever you think will work. If you want, you can submit said poem to the Valentine’s Day poetry contest at the party, too. (Rosenwald 405, 4:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m., free)”

Importance

McDonagh shoots up the big screen
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 08, 2008
“While Martin McDonagh has taken the theater world by storm since the mid ’90s, from the London premiere of The Beauty Queen of Lenane to 2006’s Tony-nominated The Lieutenant of Inishmore (which featured more blood on stage than you thought was possible), McDonagh entered the film world sideways. He won an Oscar in 2006 for his surreal short film Six Shooter. His first feature film, In Bruges, also gets its message across sideways, starting out as a fast-talking action buddy flick before taking on a much deeper meaning. While McDonagh has been compared to Conor MacPherson in theater circles due to their common Irish roots—a likening McDonagh was quick to dismiss—in the film world he’s drawing comparisons to a much better known name: Quentin Tarantino. I recently sat down with McDonagh to discuss In Bruges.
Ethan Stanislawski: How’s it been going?
Martin McDonagh: Good good, it’s been a whirlwind tour.… It’s nothing I’ve been used to with theater.… They don’t give a fuck about this sort of thing.
ES: You wrote all your plays in this one stretch in 1994. What was it like to pick up the creative process again?
MM: Well kinda, the first drafts of them. Things like The Pillowman I went back to five years later. I fleshed it out with what I’d learned since. So it wasn’t like a year of writing and then nothing.… Every year since 1996, I’ve written at least one new film or play.
ES: That’s interesting because you’re most famous for that one outburst.
MM: That was true. There was 10 months and 7 plays, but since then I’ve done other stuff.
ES: What motivated you to go into film after being in theater for so long?
MM: I grew up loving film rather than theater and always wanted to be like Terrence Malick, to just do at least one thing and then walk away.… I want to see if I could do it well.
ES: You won an Oscar.
MM: Yeah, but I didn’t enjoy that process as much with the short film—I much preferred making a feature. I thought it’d be a lot scarier, but I felt much more in control of it.
ES: In Bruges is being marketed as sort of a Tarantino-esque, talky shoot-’em-up kind of film, but there’s a lot more going on in the film than that.
MM: Yeah, I approved it. I thought it was more of a comedy than anything else. And I kind of like the fact that people come to see a cool kind of comedy film and be taken to a different place. That’s kind of the setup of the plot. Here are two hitmen, it’s funny, but then it goes to a weirder, sadder place. I hope the marketing will help that. I’d be a bit surprised if it didn’t.
ES: The film opened Sundance. What was your reaction to the festival?
MM: It was fun. It was scary to be the focus of so much attention, but it played really well. The festival itself…aspects of it, I would sort of take issue with. It didn’t seem quite as democratic, a bit too Hollywood. I had fun, but that was mostly the snowboarding.
ES: In regard to the serious aspects of the movie, a lot of your plays, like The Lieutenant of Inishmore, seem to treat death much more lightly than In Bruges. Was this a change in you or something else?
MM: It’s just a whole different story. In The Lieutenant of Inishmore there isn’t the same kind of deaths to characters that there is to this. It’s a very angry play. I kind of wanted it to explode on stage. But then there were other plays that touched more on sadness and despair. Some stories you want a more human element, and sometimes you want to explode in rage. It’s like writing a song. You can do a punk song, something from the guts. Or you could write a sweet ballad. I think it’s interesting to make the attempt to write both.
ES: As a playwright, you’re in your own world. What was it like to work with actors as a director?
MM: With all my plays, I was in the rehearsal room every single time. I’d always be there the whole five weeks. I didn’t realize that I had those kind of tools. I like actors, I understand their process, and I’m able to talk to them. But I’m still very much a writer more than a director. To me, it’s the thing I’m most proud of.
ES: Where did the idea for In Bruges come from?
MM: I took a weekend trip to Bruges about four years ago. I walked around this beautiful place and was struck by just how picturesque and weird and medieval it was. And then I just got a little bored with it and wanted to get the hell out of it. So I just had those voices kind of talking to each other, one who loves it and one who hates it. So I just thought, “Why would there be two guys there who didn’t want to be there?” And naturally hitmen came to mind, and the rest just wrote itself.
ES: If you were looking at yourself in 1994, before any of this started, could you see yourself being in this position right now?
MM: No, never in a million years. When I was writing back then, I tried to write stuff that wasn’t out there, to shake up things, but I didn’t think I’d have anything accepted. Coming from England, the plays on stage were kinda dull and middle class, and just shit. But you’re sending plays to these theaters who’ve been doing this crap for some time, so I never thought I’d get the foot in the door.… But I left school pretty young, I didn’t go to college, and I had been writing for eight years. So even though it seemed like an overnight success in lots of ways, I put in a lot of work. The thing you’ve got to do if you’re a writer is not listen to school-taught stuff; you’ve got to shut up, stay at home, and write.
In Bruges opens in Chicago today.”

Importance

In defending title, wrestling must put out NYU’s flames
by Chicago Maroon
Feb 08, 2008
“For wrestling, now is the time to lay it all on the line—or mat.
Saturday the Maroons (5–4) will head to New York City, looking to extend a conference hot-streak which has seen them capture seven out of the last eight league titles.
With the absence of any fourth-years on the roster, Chicago will rely once again on its young group of starters, anchored by second-year Troy Carlson (165 pounds) and first-year Ryan Hatten (285 pounds). The two have consistently locked down their spots throughout the year, with Hatten scoring many crucial points via pin fall. They will need to continue to carry the torch for the young team as they navigate a tough field at UAAs.
As is the case with any contact sport, injuries remain a top concern for any wrestling team. If a squad fails to field a competitor at any of the 10 weight classes, it forfeits the points for that bout, which can put a team behind the ball even before the start of a dual. Although the Maroons have had their share of sprains and strains along the way, they at least can put their best foot forward with a healthy roster heading into the start of their postseason.
“Most of the guys are pretty healthy right now. We’ve had a lot of guys healing and rehabbing for UAAs but we should have our full lineup for this weekend,” Hatten said.
The Maroons will open up their 2008 conference run with a dual against a strong Case Western (4–3) lead by fourth-year David Manoogian (141 pounds) and third-year Drew Gardella (149 pounds).
“We do not want to look past Case Western—they looked very tough at the Wheaton [Invite],” head coach Leo Kocher said.
If they can get past the Spartans, the Maroons will tussle with the hosts, 15th-ranked NYU, the toughest competition at the three-team championship.
“The matchups with Case and NYU will both be hard-fought ordeals. Case has some very solid wrestlers, and the score could end up being very close,” Carlson said. “As for NYU, they are almost certainly the favorite. Every match will be fiercely contested and if the whole team can do what is needed in each particular match and keep the intensity high, we could very well find ourselves beating NYU.”
This season has been a bit of a mixed bag for Chicago, which has seen the highs of defeating 17th-ranked Olivet College at home and the lows of battling injuries early in the year, and placing 12th out of 13 teams at the Cornell (IA) Invite.
“It has been a long season and now is the time to turn it up a notch. These upcoming few weeks are what matter and I think we are prepared and ready to go,” Carlson said.
Getting prepared has meant Kocher stressing fundamentals, not high intensity in the wrestling room. The whole season has been geared toward having everyone hit his peak at the conference tournament, and an injury to the team now would be devastating.
“The biggest danger right now is overtraining and not being recovered for this Saturday. We will do some pretty good cardio, but try not to strain the muscles too much. We want to feel rested and fresh for the UAAs,” Kocher said.
After giving many of their wrestlers an off-day during last week’s Wheaton Invite, the South Siders should be raring to go when they open up their quest for another UAA title in the Big Apple.
“Everyone wants to win this thing. NYU has a great squad this year but if we wrestle at our best, we can definitely add another championship to our streak,” Hatten said.
“Our only goal is to win. This is the only weekend in the year that really matters,” third-year Zach Matayoshi said.”

Importance