A Brittanica Test-Drive
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 36
Issue of Jun. 15 – 21, 1995
Posted inNews & Politics
No class: City Colleges close the book on evening high school students
Ten years ago, when she was 18, Kimberly Johnson got kicked out of high school for fighting in the hallway and was left on her own to figure out what comes next for a teenager without a diploma. The City Colleges of Chicago rescued her, or helped her rescue herself. She enrolled in one of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
The sound of two large dogs fighting and one man howling in fear and pain destroyed the dark peace of the neighborhood one night. A German shepherd on the block had slipped through his gate and charged a neighbor walking his bearlike Lab-Rottweiler. By the time anyone could intervene, the shepherd’s teeth were clamped tight […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Her Own Private Paradise
Martha Ehrlich: One Hundred Paintings at Space Gallery, through June 30 Recently many artists have rejected their grand roles in the Western tradition as high priests, as creators of icons, as “the antennae of the race,” in Ezra Pound’s words. They’ve replaced the quest for God or truth or answers to eternal questions with images […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: Lorraine Peltz’s domestic bliss
Lorraine Peltz is talking about her painting Infinity, which shows seven lipsticks lined up against a pink background. “If you’re a serious artist you certainly aren’t making a pink painting,” Peltz says, explaining that she’s attempting to reclaim the color, freeing pink from its association with little girls’ bedrooms. “This pink has to do with […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
SUGAR RAY 6/16, METRO Whites in America have a long history of co-opting the music of blacks and assimilating it into the predominant culture with little grace. Back in the 60s the folk-blues revival inspired scads of heavy-handed rockers to borrow blatantly from the blues, tarnishing a once-pure form with gobs of overwrought self-indulgence. Today […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Brittanica Bytes
Will the heavyweight of encyclopedias be a victor or victim of the digital revolution?
Posted inArts & Culture
Relative Strangers
Magic If Productions, at the Theatre Building. David is HIV positive. Marie, his doting mother, and Ben, his doting lover, initially quarrel over who will nurse him in his final days, but as David’s condition worsens his caretakers discover how much they have in common beyond their shared sorrow and frustration. As they bond, we […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In September the South Dakota Supreme Court upheld a divorce court ruling that the dissolution of a couple’s marriage was clearly the fault of the husband. The divorce court had found that among the man’s several disturbing patterns was his habit of passing gas around the house and reacting testily when his wife […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dead On Stage
The Enunciation (What the Oxen Said) at Chicago Filmmakers, through June 24 In 1952–at the height of America’s love affair with poetic realism, so comfortably ensconced behind its seemingly impregnable fourth wall–John Cage and Merce Cunningham created a theatrical mini-riot at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College with an untitled event in the college dining hall […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sue Your Ex
Sue Your Ex, ImprovOlympic. A sort of Fun With Torts, ImprovOlympic’s new Friday-night concoction is billed as Chicago’s first comedy courtroom (though in 1970 Judge Julius Hoffman and the Chicago Seven came close). Exploiting our voyeuristic delight in hearing other people confess their crack-ups, the performers (alumni of Northwestern University’s Mee-Ow Show) may have found […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: little bits of Satchmo
“Call a man a genius often enough, no matter how justly, and his work gets to be beyond comment,” writes Martin Williams in his classic study The Jazz Tradition. As if acknowledging this predicament, the exhibit Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy looks not so much at the music of the great jazz trumpet player as […]
Posted inNews & Politics
What’s My Type?
According to the modern science of psychographics, I’m stable and sensible, work-oriented, and likely to own a snowblower and a self-cleaning oven.
Posted inArts & Culture
Club Dates: two nights of twisted country
The painting on the cover of Bloodshot Records’ new CD, Hell-Bent: Insurgent Country, shows a stern, emaciated Hank Williams Sr. riddled with arrows. “We come to exhume Hank, not to canonize him,” proclaim the liner notes. “Unbury him . . . from beneath the mounds of gutless swill which pass for his legacy, the suffocating […]