With the establishment this season of the Chicago Baroque Ensemble, the range of our town’s period-instrument chamber scene at last covers the crucial High Baroque era (1700-1750). While Mary Springfels’s Newberry Consort specializes in Medieval and Renaissance literature (thus highlighting the strength of Newberry Library’s music manuscript collection) and Kevin Mason’s Orpheus Band focuses on […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 24
Issue of Mar. 25 – 31, 1993
Posted inArts & Culture
Bettie Serveert
Bettie Serveert is a rarity: a rock band of quality from a non-English-speaking country. The Dutch foursome are your standard alternative rock lineup, their shtick similar to many other U.S. outfits: languid, plaintive vocals, background washes of guitars, and cool, sinuous guitar lines up front. (The backing tracks occasionally sound like they’ve been stripped from […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Mission impossible: Who will be the next superintendent of schools?
It’s hard to believe that more than three years have passed since school reformers ushered in Ted Kimbrough as the general superintendent who would turn the system around. Of course things didn’t work out that way. In January Kimbrough’s many squabbles with activists and board members caught up with him. The board bought out his […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Since you dealt so thoroughly with gerbil stuffing a few years back, I know you are the man to answer this question. There is a rumor going around about that frozen Stone Age man they found in the glacier between Austria and Italy in September 1991. What I have heard is that scientists found traces […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Who was the runner-up? Friends of Downtown recently gave awards in eight categories for outstanding achievements, including “Best Continued Scent” given to the Blommer Chocolate Company for “their magnificent contribution to the sensory experience of downtown.” “Too much of the nation’s scientific agenda is set by movie stars and rock-and-roll musicians,” complains Alan Schriesheim, director […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Frontiers/Theatre of the Film Noir
Frontiers, which follows roughly 30 pioneer women in Kansas, around the turn of the century, is a celebration of women and their raw strength that’s never shrill, strident, or exclusive. What a pleasure to see a show about women that doesn’t sacrifice stagecraft and solid story telling to an agenda. However important an agenda may […]
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Fashion Statements: wardrobe for a small, wet planet
We met Adam Thesz en route to his favorite fashion outlet–the Omni Super Store. Thesz stops there regularly to restock on high-quality plastic sacks, the ones he swears make the snappiest and most durable booties. Rolling by on his low-velocity velo, Thesz’s protective headgear, eyewear, snowgear, and raingear seem to tread function-over-form tracks: “Fully dressed, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: the guns of Victor Ochoa
Reviews can be as scarce as collectors in today’s art scene. Emerging artists get critical attention where they can. Victor Ochoa, a 25-year-old grad student in sculpture in Champaign, got some last December from Lieutenant Nelson of the University of Illinois Police Department’s Firearms Training Unit. Published under the letterhead of the Department of Campus […]
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Spike Heels
SPIKE HEELS Walker Productions at Victory Gardens A brilliant man nobly rescues a downtrodden, uneducated damsel and teaches her to speak properly, appreciate great books, and of course fall in love with him. It’s one of the most common male fantasies explored in film and literature, from Pygmalion to Pretty Woman. If a modern playwright […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Boutique Designer
From sketches to sales, Reginald Thomas does it all. He has to.
Posted inArts & Culture
La region centrale
Michael Snow’s 1971 film La region centrale is surely one of the most unusual in the history of the medium. For three hours we see a single northern Quebec landscape from a single position, with no signs of human presence save a rare glimpse of the camera shadow. The camera is mounted on a complex […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre
Randy Duncan is a man with a legacy. His dances might make you feel good, but he’s not just a feel-good kind of guy–like Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle, he looks for the place where the spiritual and the social and the physical come together. Add to that his talent for finding and molding dancers […]