Prairie grasses and flowers are starting to grow in some of the hanging transparent plastic tubes that make up Michele Brody’s installation Prairie Experiment. Seeds float on the surface of water in which nutrients have been dissolved. While some of the seeds have sprouted, others have merely grown moldy. Prairie Experiment doesn’t pretend to be […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 50
Issue of Sep. 21 – 27, 1995
Posted inNews & Politics
Truths and Consequences
The Unabomber has few explicit fans, but some regard him with a certain respect: at least he knows how to get attention.
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
LOW 9/22, METRO On its second album, Long Division (Vernon Yard), the spartan Duluth trio Low doesn’t do much to alter its brand of post-Galaxie 500 somnambulism. As on last year’s nicely catatonic debut, the soothing voices of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker haunt the band’s pin-drop musical evocations like drifting ghosts. From its incessant […]
Posted inFilm
Street Values
Clockers * * * (A must-see) Directed by Spike Lee Written by Lee and Richard Price With Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, Delroy Lindo, Mekhi Phifer. Originally conceived as a vehicle for Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, the movie Clockers, based on Richard Price’s acclaimed crime novel, has taken on a different complexion in the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Politically Corrupt
Mariposa Strawdog Theatre Company A week after the Tiananmen Square massacre, I found myself in New York’s Museum of Modern Art standing next to an American painter of moderate renown. Upset about the Chinese government’s slaughter of pro-democracy students, she told her friend that she was planning a series of collages based on the incident. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Uzeda
Hailing from Sicily–a region not exactly known for its noisy rock bands–Uzeda possess a distinctly European take on aggressive American postpunk. On 1993’s impressive Steve Albini-recorded Waters (A.V. Arts) the stop-on-a-dime precision and broad dynamic range of drummer Davide Oliveri and bassist Raffaele Gulisano combine with the skewed twin-guitar attack of Agostino Tilotta and Gianni […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Our Town
Our Town, Bailiwick Repertory. Fusing oral language, sign language, and movement, director Cecilie Keenan offers a fluid and sometimes invigorating revival of Thornton Wilder’s timeless work. Her goal is to enlarge Grover’s Corners beyond speech; and set designer Rick Paul’s lattice of ladders suggests that this production won’t remain on one plane. At least three […]
Posted inMusic
Indie Father
Edwyn Collins Double Door, September 14 The destination sign on the powder blue tour bus parked in front of the Double Door pointed to the obscurity of its occupant: “No One You Would Know.” But notoriety often comes with perseverance. Ask the bus’s passenger, Edwyn Collins, whose recent single “A Girl Like You” is now […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Music Notes: films scored while you watch
Film music can be a narrative tool, heightening the drama on-screen. Free improviser Ken Vandermark plans to turn the traditional role of film music on its head with his upcoming mixed-media series Chicago Eye and Ear Control. Joined by some of Chicago’s finest improvising musicians from the rock, experimental, and jazz scenes, he’ll create instant […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Theatre Building. Charles Busch’s campy comedy, a raunchy collage of ancient and modern mythic kitsch, is a showcase for hilarious drag clowning and ingenious visual design under Doug-las L. Hartzell’s direction. It tells of two blood-sucking bisexuals whose misadventures span millennia. Their first meeting, in pagan Sodom and Gomorrah (“the Twin […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Corporalities: Films & Video by Chicago Artists
All the works in “Corporalities: Films & Videos by Chicago Artists” are by former or present students of the School of the Art Institute. The five films vary in quality, but three or four are similar enough to suggest a “school style”–collagelike combinations, image modification through optical printing, enigmatic, often autobiographical content, and the use […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hands-On Experience
The Museum: The Art of Communication Chicago Actors Ensemble, through September 23 Very few art exhibits invite viewers to play along. Participation at interactive galleries generally falls into the safe zones of button pushing, video watching, and moving through altered space, often mimicking the entertainment-as-education model of children’s museums. What a pleasure, then, to encounter […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Reel Life: Doris Wishman’s grade-Z oeuvre
Women auteurs are rare among the directors of ultracheap sleaze flicks. But starting after her husband died in 1960, self-taught filmmaker Doris Wishman wrote, directed, edited, and produced over two dozen charmingly crude films with names such as Bad Girls Go to Hell and Keyholes Are for Peeping. Unlike camp icon Russ Meyer, whose big-breasted […]