“This is our dream school. For years we have been thinking about it. We want it to be the most functional and beautiful school in the world. We want it to crystallize in architecture the best educational practices we can evolve.”–Winnetka schools superin
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 20
Issue of Feb. 28 – Mar. 6, 1991
Posted inNews & Politics
Yellow Ribbons
“Look,” she says, “There’s another one of those yellow ribbons.” They’re in the supermarket parking lot, man and wife, a cold and blustery Chicago day. Sixty years of this kind of weather toughens a man, makes him a little less tolerant. He turns, hands in coat pockets, and takes in a faded Ford Escort with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
MacArthur Foundation Readies Arts Report: Will Daley Be Embarrassed?/More Gallery Space at the Cultural Center/Art of Africa: Is International Expo Prejudiced?/Lobo a Go-Go: Dough From Ohio/Buffalo’s Box-Office Stampede
Why can’t Shona sculpture like this get into the International Art Expo? It’s “airport art,” says a member of the selection committee, but gallery owner Nicole Smith disagrees: “The only thing I can think of is prejudice.”
Posted inArts & Culture
The Secret in the Wings: A Fairy Tale Show
THE SECRET IN THE WINGS: A FAIRY TALE SHOW Lookingglass Theatre Company at Chicago Filmmakers You don’t really need characters to tell a story. Oh, you need someone to carry out the action, someone to kill the dragon or steal the secret formula, someone to live happily ever after or get run over by a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Poetic Theatre Project
THE POETIC THEATRE PROJECT Saratoga Company at the Space on Foster Chicago’s theatrical conundrum used to be how to marry performance art and theater, a concern imported from New York. But in recent years we’ve developed our own little homegrown hybrid form: performance art has been dropped in favor of performance poetry. The Poetic Theatre […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Stage: Mark Twain learns how the west was run
“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” says Huckleberry Finn at the end of the novel that Mr. Mark Twain wrote about him. In 1861, Twain himself, then still known as Samuel Clemens, lit out for the Wild West with his brother Orion, whom President Abraham Lincoln had […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Work of Art
TOM FRIEDMAN at the Rezac Gallery It must have taken Tom Friedman thousands of chews to meld individual pieces of Bazooka gum into the marble-smooth softball-sized sphere on display in a corner of the Rezac Gallery. This untitled piece paradoxically combines refinement and irreverence, surprising us with its use of a pop-culture substance to create […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Much Ado About Nothing
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Shakespeare Repertory I always find myself laughing harder at the few comic bits Shakespeare uses to lighten up his serious plays than I do at any of the Bard’s comedies. Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that bits like Polonius’s foolish blatherings in Hamlet or the Fool’s bubble-bursting quips in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
War Without Grief/War Without History/War Without Women
War Without Grief The second son of an old friend we’ve known since high school disappeared over the Persian Gulf three weeks ago. His Navy bomber was blown out of the sky. No one saw a parachute. Before the war began, we advanced the idea that this was one the White House would find easy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
American Ballet Theatre
AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE at the Civic Center for Performing Arts February 12-14 Beautiful dancing is seductive. Watching American Ballet Theatre perform Jiri Kylian’s Sinfonietta is a pleasure: the dancers’ lightness and ease in Sinfonietta’s lightning-fast leaps and changes of direction inspire a sense of wonder. Joop Caboort’s warm lighting and Walter Nobbe’s idyllic costumes and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
All About Bodies
UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS AND THE TRUE NATURE OF LOVE Halsted Theatre Centre I know I’m expected to take the long view on Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love: to look past the shocking bits to the sober message about How We Live Today. But the fact is, the shocking bits […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Everywhere I go these days I see yellow ribbons tied around oak trees, light poles, small animals, etc. These supposedly are to show concern for our troops in the Middle East. However, as I recall, in the song (you know, “Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree, blah blah blah”) the guy in […]
Posted inMusic
The unbearable lightness of being Jimmy Johnson
It’s something of a mystery why Jimmy Johnson hasn’t achieved greater popular success. Johnson is blessed with one of the most distinctive voices in modern blues–a keening high tenor that some say evokes a bluesier Jackie Wilson but always reminds me of the late blues shouter Roy Brown. His guitar work is a pastiche based […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Hey, Bossy, did you see this week’s Straight Dope? The state Department of Energy and Natural Resources has given the downstate city of Princeton $31,500 to start turning old newspapers into animal bedding for local dairy farmers at the rate of 110 tons a year. “The so-called ‘property tax revolt’… is in fact a tame […]
Posted inNews & Politics
WFMT: Public Trust, or Private Club?
To the editors: I guess I must be one of WFMT’s 300,000 [Hot Type, January 11]. I can do without the dippy English muffin commercial, but I’ll live with it and the other canned blather, if the station continues to deliver Brahms and Terkel. I don’t know much about music, but I know what I […]