Fans of extremity in music–jazz, rock, classical, whatever–here’s your ship come in. Borbetomagus is perhaps the most devastating noise band on the globe, with an approach to building and tearing apart massive edifices of sound that makes similar attempts by Einsturzende Neubauten and Glenn Branca simply irrelevant. Comprising a three-man squad from upstate New York, […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 35
Issue of Jun. 8 – 14, 1995
Posted inMusic
Closing the Coronet/Musical Editors
Coronet owner Chris Schuba/He’s mad; Evanston alderman Art Newman/He’s skeptical
Posted inArts & Culture
Sensible Footwear
Since stand-up in the United States is still dominated by hung up straight white guys slinging the same old dick shtick, it’s great to discover the trio of women who call themselves Sensible Footwear. Alex Dallas, Alison Field, and Wendy Vousden gleefully wade into waters most men (and carefully coiffed, soft-voiced stand-up babes like Rita […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Who’s Destroying Royko’s Rep?
Gays and Mike Royko share several of the same enemies. These include cement-headed thugs, fundamentalist bigots, officious hypocrites, and Mike Royko. The blotto, belligerent Royko of last December 17, immortalized in a Winnetka police report that mysteriously burst into the public eye last week, was a gay’s worst nightmare–and certainly his own. This is the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Conference Calls: the case for community radio
New York, LA, Lincoln, Nebraska–all have community radio stations. Chicago will too if the Peace and Justice Radio Project can get the word out about what we’re missing. Frustrated by inadequate media coverage of the gulf war, community, political, and labor activists started PJRP in 1991 to provide Chicago with a progressive perspective. PJRP aims […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The 1995 Chicago Fringe Festival
Making its debut so soon after the demise of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago, this brand-new project seems to challenge the notion that the Windy City isn’t hospitable to events of this kind. Producers John T. Mills and James Ellis hope to succeed where others have failed by offering a more sharply defined image […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Poland’s Music: The Feminine Voice
The mostly tonal and highly idiosyncratic compositions of percussion specialist Marta Ptaszynska reflect her attraction to Eastern art and European surrealism. She is a master of colorful, fantastical moods and feelings. In her Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra (1985), whose three movements are each named after a surrealist canvas, the mood swiftly runs the gamut […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A House in the Country
I was dating a man who went on a peace mission to Central America and returned to tell me he’d met someone on the trip who could really make him happy. I wanted to be happy too. I bought a house in the country. I was happy for a while. I was ecstatically happy, tossing […]
Posted inArts & Culture
William Shakespeare’s Robin Hood
Equity Library Theatre Chicago, at Chicago Dramatists Workshop. If Equity Library Theatre hope to pull off an elaborate practical joke by mounting what purports to be William Shakespeare’s lost Robin Hood, they ought to get their story straight. They’ve placed an authentic antique volume entitled Shakespeare’s Comedies in their lobby and opened it to the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Pirates of Penzance
Light Opera Works, at Northwestern University, Cahn Auditorium. Though seemingly simple in its tuneful gaiety, Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 sardonic delight spoofs the Victorian fondness for justifying moral cowardice as moral duty. Frederic, the dim-witted hero, strictly observes an apprenticeship to a band of Cornwall pirates–even when the indenture turns out to be for 84 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Roscoe Mitchell’s New York-Detroit Connection
There’s no mystery behind the consistently astounding talent and range of Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. Regardless of the situation–solo, quartet, with AEC–his performances bristle with thoughtfulness and intriguing ideas; they’re not always successful, but never for lack of trying. Mitchell’s somewhat infrequent Chicago gigs are always worth checking out, but what makes […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Julie Johnson
Julie Johnson, Bailiwick Repertory. Somewhere in the middle of Wendy Hammond’s humorless, overwritten, painfully predictable Julie Johnson is an interesting play. In fact, two or three of them. Unfortunately they’ve already been written. The play begins like Educating Rita, with a working-class woman who returns to school and finds herself, under the tutelage of an […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Goodbye, Girl Friend
I am in mourning. I have felt denial, anger, depression–the whole seven steps of grief. Not because Christian rock is growing like a cancer. Or because the New Republic has slouched toward the right. No, my sorrow is because good old Sassy–that ultracool teen magazine that used to light up the newsstand with sarcastic articles […]