MARY HATCH: NARRATIVE METAPHORS at Gilman-Gruen Galleries A perfunctory look at Mary Hatch’s paintings might give the impression that they’re simplistic narrative depictions of idyllic Americana–except that her palette is as lurid as a half-page headline in the New York Post. Bilious green and intestinal pink are juxtaposed: it should, by rights, make you want […]
Tag: Vol. 21 No. 31
Issue of May. 14 – 20, 1992
Posted inNews & Politics
Annals of school reform: The Reclosing of Wilson High, or Central Office Does It Again
About a year ago the central office announced its plan to close the Wilson Occupational High School. The idea was to merge the school for mentally handicapped students with Taft, one of the city’s largest high schools. The proposal came without warning and interrupted efforts by Wilson’s leaders to move their school into a larger […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Othello
Orson Welles’s 1952 independent feature is finally back in circulation, looking better than ever thanks to restoration work, but also sounding quite different because of the restorers’ debatable decision to redo the brilliant score and sound effects in stereo. For all the liberties taken with the play, this may well be the greatest of all […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Trafficking in Broken Hearts/Voces y Cuerpos IV
TRAFFICKING IN BROKEN HEARTS Bailiwick Repertory at the Theatre Building Trafficking in Broken Hearts, one of the offerings in Bailiwick’s annual Pride Performance Series, is supposed to be a gritty sexual drama about the relationship between a Latino hustler and a white lawyer. But it’s really a classic romantic fantasy, and the hustler, played by […]
Posted inFilm
Five Easy Pieces
NIGHT ON EARTH ** (Worth seeing) Directed and written by Jim Jarmusch With Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Esposito, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Rosie Perez, Isaach de Bankole, Beatrice Dalle, Roberto Benigni, and Matti Pellonpaa. As the most popular American independent filmmaker around, Jim Jarmusch carries a special burden: his reputation makes his work particularly hard to […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
Expectations are a funny and dangerous thing in sports. So easily did the Bulls’ championship a year ago seem, in memory, to have been achieved that after the Bulls amassed the best regular-season record in the National Basketball Association everyone expected their run to a second championship to be equally easy. Then the New York […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Imagine No First Amendment/Turning on Bush/Buy American, Burn Asian
Imagine No First Amendment Torture has no place in polite society. Nations say they don’t even when they do. Censorship is repression that’s much more socially acceptable. “If you walked down the street and you said to your ordinary man in the street ‘What do you think of torture?’ he’d say ‘Yes, it’s a terrible […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jeffrey Schanzer & Bernadette Speach
Lyrical duettists Speach (piano) and Schanzer (guitar) are both composers as well as improvisers, and the questions their music prompts are like Chinese boxes. How much of their playing is interpretation and how much is improvisation? How much of their improvising follows fixed structures, and what are those structures? How free are their rules of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story A 31-year-old man turned himself in to police in Anchorage, Alaska, in January claiming to be the fugitive “Dr. Diaper,” who had been appearing at local day-care centers in diapers and trying to get them to take him in. In an incident two years earlier, Dr. Diaper had hired a baby-sitter over the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Dance Medium
CHICAGO DANCE MEDIUM at the Harold Washington Library Theatre May 8 and 9 The opening images of Rosemary Doolas’s premiere, Allez Pleurer Comme des Hommes (“Go Cry Like Men”), come from World War II footage of tanks burning and Paris being liberated. The soft black-and-white film is filled with celebrating Parisians: women in simple dresses […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Alfredo Jaar: Geography War
ALFREDO JAAR: GEOGRAPHY WAR at the Museum of Contemporary Art I could comment on the formal virtues of the carefully crafted pieces in Alfredo Jaar’s current installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, “Geography War.” The aesthetic qualities of his light boxes deserve some praise. But to focus on that would be to miss all […]
Posted inArts & Culture
TanaReid With kenny Burrell
In jazz, the rhythm section forms the heart of almost every ensemble, and the communication between rhythm section and leader largely determines the music’s success. So when the rhythm section is the leader–as with TanaReid, the two-saxophone quintet assembled by drummer Akira Tana and bassist Rufus Reid–you’ve got it made in the shade. One of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Song of Jacob Zulu
“The fire is burning. . . It is taking the children / It is eating the future,” sings Ladysmith Black Mambazo in the choral introduction to Steppenwolf Theatre’s The Song of Jacob Zulu. The “fire” is South African apartheid, but the words could just as easily be about America’s own crisis of race and class, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Connections of the Heart
Connections of the Heart is good, clean fun in Lesboland. Paula Berg’s musical takes a witty insider’s look at the current preoccupations and obsessions in the lesbian community. It’s thick with cultural references, but you don’t always have to be queer to get them, and the story–a romantic comedy about four gals grappling with their […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Janos Starker
Budapest-born Janos Starker, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal cellist in the 50s, is still a preeminent and much-recorded concert soloist. He’s also keenly appreciated as a teacher, having trained scores of musicians during his long tenure at Indiana University. Starker’s playing style, though a bit old-fashioned in its central-European mellowness, is ideally suited for the […]