De La Soul’s new Buhloone Mindstate features a drawing of the group’s three members–Posdnuos, Trugoy the Dove, and Baby Huey Maseo–with their lips pulled off their faces and tied in knots. Now what are we to make of that? The threesome’s playful, swirling, psychedelic debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, sliced the top off rap’s […]
Tag: Vol. 23 No. 9
Issue of Dec. 9 – 15, 1993
Posted inNews & Politics
Wishbone Ash Is Alive and Well
To the editors: Ignorance, ineptitude, and some downright nastiness are evident in Peter Margasak’s October 29th one-sentence commentary on Wishbone Ash’s November 3rd pre-tour date at Beaumont [Spot Check]. As a classically trained musician and longtime connoisseur of both music and musical venues, I was appalled at Margasak’s pompous dismissal of Wishbone Ash’s pre-tour date […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
Drive southwest from Chicago on I-55 and you pass through a microcosm of the midwest. You see endless flat fields that grow corn and soybeans in the summer but at this time of year are bare and black, their color revealing their prairie origins. Scattered here and there along the route are heaps of tailings […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Doug Elkins Dance Company
Considered baffling by some audiences and hilarious by others, NYC choreographer Doug Elkins defies easy labeling because he wears every label. His choreography reflects his experience as a kid who discovered dance in one of the most diverse cities on earth. George Balanchine, John Travolta, Martha Graham, Michael Jackson–Elkins steals from them all. The Patrooka […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Love Comics
LOVE COMICS Illinois Theatre Center Perhaps you’ve read them, those passion-filled pages of illustrated stories chronicling the joys and perils of love (Gasp! Sigh!), true love. They’re romance comic books of the 1950s, and during that decade they outsold all other categories of comic books, providing postwar adolescent females with the motivation to settle down […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Richard Goode
One of the most accomplished musicians around, pianist Richard Goode has both versatility and range: he’s an ace accompanist (especially in lieder recitals) and an uncommonly intelligent interpreter of a variety of styles. But he seems most at ease with Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. With Beethoven, Goode has already gone through the rite […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Elvira and the Lost Prince/Home Ain’t Nothin’ But a Word
ELVIRA AND THE LOST PRINCE ETA Creative Arts Foundation HOME AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT A WORD Hidden Stages Chicago Poor Elvira–fired from her $60,000-a-year job as a corporate attorney, facing disbarment, accused of embezzlement by the press, harassed by the mob, and all because she stonewalled on a plan to build a shopping center on land […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Morgana King
The term “jazz diva” gets tossed around fairly indiscriminately; it’s been used to describe just about every improvising vocalist at one time or another. But thanks to her coloratura technique–replete with a startling dramaticism, flawless intonation, and a vibrato that can get as wide as the Mississippi–Morgana King may actually deserve the honorific. Disagreement might […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
Dear Reader: I was putting my groceries into my car at the Jewel at Howard and Western when a young lady and what may have been her boyfriend started putting their groceries into the car next to mine. “Yes,” she told him, “a man with one eyebrow across his head is the most dangerous kind […]
Posted inMusic
Masters of Modernism
ENSEMBLE INTERCONTEMPORAIN Pick-Staiger Hall, November 14 CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Orchestra Hall, November 27 and December 4 At a time when the serious-music creative community is fragmented and in danger of losing touch with even well-educated listeners, it’s heartening to see Pierre Boulez still going strong as an apostle and popularizer of 20th-century music. At 68, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Carholic schools consolidate, Rogers Park parents revolt
By all accounts, Saint Ignatius is one of the finest Catholic grade schools on the north side–its enrollment economically and ethnically diverse, its principal dynamic, its teachers dedicated, and its parents committed. And yet the Chicago archdiocese recently proposed to close the school, at 1300 W. Loyola, and scatter its students to other Catholic schools […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Taming of the Shrew
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW Shakespeare Repertory at the Ruth Page Theater In the festive opening scene of Shakespeare Repertory’s production of The Taming of the Shrew a peasant couple dressed in rags yells and fights its way onstage, followed by a band of merrymakers adorned in a rainbow of shredded fabrics and bursting with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Well-Matched Pair
THE CHRISTMAS BROTHERS: A COUPLE OF SNOW FLAKES Bailiwick Repertory Comedy teams–once standard fare in vaudeville and nightclub acts–have become increasingly rare in our onanistic age of one-person shows and stand-up acts. So rare, in fact, that whenever a funny, truly compatible pair of comedians come along–once every five years or so–they always seem visitors […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mary Hawley and Matthew Owens
MARY HAWLEY AND MATTHEW OWENS at Link’s Hall, December 3 and 4 When complementary colors, such as red and green, are placed side by side, the result is often an illusion of vibration. Blend them and you get a new shade altogether, with little to remind you of the two initial colors. Performance artist Matthew […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
TAR, 12/11, METRO Over the years Tar’s hard riff-driven music has gotten almost impossibly distilled. John Mohr and Mark Zablocki’s airtight interlocking guitar patterns merge with the taut, almost martial rhythms of drummer Mike Greenlees and the brittle, drilling bass lines of Tom Zaluckyj with minute, anal precision. It’s propulsive and audacious in its unflinching […]