Continuing to subvert and expand the organ combo–stand-up bassist Chris Wood fills the typical guitar position, joining keyboardist John Medeski and drummer Billy Martin–Medeski, Martin & Wood have set their sights on the stratosphere with their third album, Friday Afternoon in the Universe (Gramavision). Their previous work masterfully assimilated all manner of divergent sounds, seamlessly […]
Tag: Vol. 25 No. 3
Issue of Oct. 26 – Nov. 1, 1995
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: notes from the black anti-Newt
At the same time Newt Gingrich was fending off protesters and hawking copies of his conservative manifesto to booksellers in McCormick Place last June, a very different kind of book on American politics was being quietly passed out to the same dealers by its author, a man some people might call the anti-Newt. The book […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Lose the Muse
RE: “A Pair After Moliere,” by Adam Langer, Chicago Reader, 10/6/95, pp. 42-43 I would like to recommend that you expand the first section of your venerable weekly newspaper to include a poetry and fiction section, where Adam Langer’s theatrical reviews would be better placed: his incisive improv-style prose and cutting-edge poetry do not deserve […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Chicago International Film Festival
The festival concludes this weekend with screenings at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets can be purchased by phone (644-3456), by fax (644-0784), or through the World Wide Web (http://www.ticketmaster.com), all of which entail service charges, or at the theatre box office an hour before show time. General admission to most programs is $7.50; […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mad Scene
Mad Scene’s music neatly reconciles apparently incompatible elements. Led by the husband-and-wife team of guitarist-vocalists Lisa Siegel and Hamish Kilgour, the New York City-based quintet takes a loose, shambling approach similar to that favored by Scottish popsters the Pastels and New Zealand’s Clean (cofounded by Kilgour in the late 70s), but the horn-laced arrangements on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Addiction
Here’s something to wrestle with: a PhD candidate in philosophy at NYU becomes a raving and ravenous Greenwich Village vampire and junkie–the two conditions are seen as interchangeable–while contemplating the victims of the Vietnam War and Nazi extermination camps and then promptly receives absolution. The dumbest, most pretentious script of 1995 is served up straight, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
WBEZ’s Big Mistake
Some thoughts brought on by Cate Plys’s recent article [“WBEZ’s Big Gamble,” September 15]: It’s ironic that station manager Torey Malatia is concerned about WBEZ becoming an antenna for programming produced elsewhere, because that is precisely the direction in which he has taken the station. There’s been a steady erosion of local presence on WBEZ, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
“Marriage can be understood as a kind of insurance policy that promotes economic and physical well-being,” writes William Harms in the University of Chicago Chronicle (September 28), summarizing findings of U. of C. sociologist Linda Waite. Among them: marriage prolongs life, especially for men. “Married men live, on average, 10 years longer than nonmarried men, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: culture behind the mask
“I’ve been going to Africa since 1968, and every place I’ve gone there are masks, usually for religious symbolism,” says art historian Margaret Burroughs. Burroughs made two ceramic masks in the South Side Community Art Center’s current exhibit Mask of the Spirit, which displays masks created by 14 local artists influenced by African art. Burrough’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Sad Ballad of Johnny Reb and His Beautiful Wife Cecile
The Sad Ballad of Johnny Reb and His Beautiful Wife Cecile, Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe. A year ago I would have called Scott Turner’s play about a hate-filled working stiff a piece of white middle-class paranoia that exaggerates the most eccentric views of the right-wing fringe: its romantic notions about states’ rights, its […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Getting Zappa
Dear Reader, Peter Margasak’s “review” of Frank Zappa’s artistic achievement (“False Idol,” September 29), with its barely concealed moralizing, fit perfectly with your lead article on censorship at the U. of C. in the 1950s [“Naked Censorship”]. I would ask Mr. Margasak to consider how closely his terms of condemnation (“Zappa was a nasty person […]
Posted inMusic
Original Din
MX-80 Das Love Boat (Atavistic) MX-80 Sound Hard Attack/Big Hits (Atavistic) Bruce Anderson Brutality (Atavistic) Angel Corpus Christi White Courtesy Phone (Almo Sounds) MX-80 is one of those idiosyncratic bands that came of age in the dark hours before the indie-punk revolution of 1976-’77. Along with such combos as Pere Ubu, Chrome, Debris, Half Japanese, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Thrift Shopping: rummage from the Lyric Opera
The Lyric Opera’s attic is capacious and hasn’t been cleared in decades. Many of its 300 or so costumes–kimonos from Madama Butterfly, gypsy dresses and toreador suits from Carmen, and peasant outfits from who knows what–were inherited from predecessor companies, including the Chicago Opera Company, which was founded in 1910. But this Friday the Lyric […]