Now that the word “jazz” has lost the opprobrium it carried in the 60s and 70s, everyone wants a piece of it, from dance bands to new-age pianists to singers trying to prop up their careers by basking in the tradition of Billie, Ella, and Sarah. So the Kansas City vocalist Karrin Allyson, making her […]
Tag: Vol. 23 No. 36
Issue of Jun. 16 – 22, 1994
Posted inArts & Culture
The Women
On Monday the brave men who play The Women return to the Park West to again assault the barriers of good taste , re-creating their unrepentantly revisionist take on Clare Booth Luce’s play: a nasty, brazen, bitchy slice of wit if there ever was one. Luce’s spitefest depicts a coven of female “friends,” jaded New […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Quona’s Karma
I read, reread, studied, and outlined your novella on Quona the cross-dresser [May 20], searching in vain for the article’s message. It was like looking for something likable in John Starks’s “just-fouled-out” mug. If the intended message was: here was a kid who had courage despite being “marginalized” and crammed into confining cultural subcategories, I […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bad Blood
The distinctive and unusual talents of French filmmaker Leos Carax have relatively little to do with story telling, and it would be a mistake to approach this, his second feature, expecting a “dazzling film noir thriller,” which is how it was described for the Chicago Film Festival in 1987. Dazzling it certainly is in spots, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Welcome to Chicago: Deposit $1
To the editors: Ben Joravsky’s June 3 Neighborhood News column on suburbanites who work in Chicago addresses a crucial problem, but shows the lack of solutions being offered, either by the City Council or most of its critics. Suburbanites who work here are not a problem per se, since there are also thousands of city […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Why were the Russians always able to land their cosmonauts on land while we had to land our astronauts on water? –Jim Blewer, Alameda, California What’s so great about coming down on land? It’s just that hard landings were better suited to a country with lots of territory, not much money or hospitable ocean access, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
1994 International Theatre Festival of Chicago
The fest finishes off this weekend with performances by the Netherlands’ Dogtroep and Ireland’s Gate Theatre; also on the agenda are breakfast and lunch presentations, postshow discussions, and professional workshops. Performances take place at DePaul University’s Merle Reskin Theatre, 60 E. Balbo, and the Navy Pier Skyline Stage, 600 E. Grand (at Lake Michigan); other […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Living; Breaking the Code
THE LIVING Interplay BREAKING THE CODE Interplay Artists have always helped us see our world anew; we need such vision now more than ever. Fortunately some of our most perceptive and ingenious social critics–Douglas Crimp, Paula Treichler, and Simon Watney, to name but a few–continue to reframe the AIDS crisis, reimagining our contemporary world partly […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
“The likelihood is that we’re going to get an information railroad and not an information highway,” Abdul Alkalimat told his audience at the Harold Washington Library last March (Video, May/June). The government, he pointed out, gave railroads public land for free, then let them charge riders and freight shippers. “At a latter stage, based on […]
Posted inNews & Politics
An Airport for the Birds
Attracting herons, terns, and ducks will require banishing two squawking species that already claim the island as their natural habitat: government workers and corporate hotshots.
Posted inArts & Culture
Sisters in the House
LOVVE/RITUALS AND RAGE Root Wy’mn Theater Company at Randolph Street Gallery, May 27 and 28 The great contradiction of performance art is that though it has habitually posed as radical and political, as ironic commentary on the academy, it is in fact very much a part of the institution it supposedly critiques. Even the issues […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Artist to Birds: eat my suit
Sculptor Mark Bello doesn’t have a Christ complex or Saint Francis fantasy, but he’s inviting a bunch of birds to a lakeside brunch–on him. He’ll be wearing a cosmopolitan suit of bread featuring baguettes, chappathi, matzo, pita, and Wonder. Bello titles his one-man bird-feeding act Beneath the Bread, part of Randolph Street Gallery’s Off Site […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: the map as metaphor
Maps are intrinsically appealing because they can be both utilitarian devices and objects of painstaking, beautiful detail. But “Art on the Map,” on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, isn’t merely about the distinguished history and craftsmanship of mapmaking. It’s an examination of the map as metaphor: for travel, for political, philosophical, and metaphysical boundaries, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Grant Park Symphony Orchestra
After almost two decades of self-imposed semiretirement, pianist Van Cliburn is making a comeback. And the Grant Park Music Festival nabbed him for its 60th season opener to the tune of a reported $50,000. Never mind that Cliburn has never lived up to the early promise he showed following Moscow’s 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition. As the […]