Chicago Moving Company at the Dance Center of Columbia College, through June 29 By Laura Molzahn Seeing Nana Shineflug’s and Bob Eisen’s choreography on the same program was a shock. I’d always thrown them roughly together: they’re both Chicago vets, modern-dance choreographers who’ve been experimenting with and refining their visions for decades, carving out niches […]
Tag: Vol. 25 No. 38
Issue of Jun. 27 – Jul. 3, 1996
Posted inArts & Culture
Glamour
Shirley Anderson’s last one-woman show, Big Blonde, was a witty, touching portrait of the decline and fall of a jazz-age party girl, based on Dorothy Parker’s acerbic short story. There Anderson proved herself a capable comic actress, winning laughs with the tiniest gestures and changes in vocal tone. But Anderson’s new solo show, Glamour, reveals […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
By Harold Henderson Press releases that caused us to buy a CTA pass. From secretary of state George Ryan: “Panel approves Ryan plan to identify unconscious drivers.” Divorced? Lost your job? “I knew I had to do something,” says an unnamed interviewee in Cognition, magazine of the Church of Scientology of Illinois, “and I knew […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Off The Beat/Coach Weincord Walks the Hall
Trading Community Policing for Public Relations
Posted inArts & Culture
The Long Gray Line
John Ford’s first and only completed film in ‘Scope also happens to be one of his major neglected works of the 50s. A biopic of epic proportions (138 minutes) about West Point athletic instructor Marty Maher (Tyrone Power), who failed as a student at the academy but stayed on to become a much-beloved figure, this […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
American composers don’t crop up all that often in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s subscription season, let alone at the mostly easy-listening Ravinia Festival. But next week they’re well represented in back-to-back Ravinia concerts that spotlight a pair of early pioneers who steered classical music, if only a bit, from European dominance. Edward MacDowell, born in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Melvyn Poore/Martin Blume Duo
To many folks the tuba is inextricably linked with traditional German oompah-laden beer-guzzling songs performed by portly guys in lederhosen. Yet the instrument has a lengthy if near invisible jazz history, from serving a bass function in Dixieland to the big, polished bottom Bill Barber puffed into the modernistic big-band music of Gil Evans. The […]
Posted inMusic
Notes of the Weird/Schmitsville
Notes of the Weird “It’s not about pointing out what’s theological about a technological upgrade,” explains Gastr del Sol’s David Grubbs, referring to the title of the group’s new album, Upgrade & Afterlife (Drag City). “It’s about pointing out what’s secular about something like afterlife. People now talk about the afterlife of computers, and I […]
Posted inMusic
Cube
Toru Takemitsu, who died earlier this year at age 66, was arguably Japan’s most versatile modernist composer. Largely self-taught, he claimed to have been influenced by Schoenberg, Messiaen, and the musique concrete movement. During the decade after World War II, Takemitsu was part of the avant-garde of painters and composers in Tokyo who looked to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bright Ideas:lighter side of junk
Vincent Rideout makes lamps out of discarded appliances. Don’t ask him why, because he just started doing it a year ago, when his Electrolux vacuum cleaner died. He was about to throw it out, but then a lightbulb went off in his head. “One day it just hit me,” he says. “Floor lamps.” He spent […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Trib Still Zoned Out
By Michael Miner In journalism’s good old days a lot of interesting stuff that happened on Chicago’s south side never got reported because it wasn’t news. Now there’s a way to put those south-side doings in the paper yet continue to spare folks up north the annoyance of reading about them. It’s called zoning. Consider […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Love Of Labor
Dig at Creative Reuse Warehouse, through June 29 By Justin Hayford It is the first Saturday of summer–sunny, warm, conspicuously free of humidity. Along the six-block stretch of Halsted south of Roosevelt, near the former site of the Maxwell Street flea market, the sidewalks are full of men strolling back and forth. They offer me […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Douglas Ewart
Douglas Ewart plays his instruments better than anyone else in the world–partly because he knows them better than anyone else, having constructed them himself. But that hardly diminishes his accomplishment. In fact, the gorgeously simple, follow-the-wood design of Ewart’s instruments–bamboo flutes of Asian descent, nasty-talking didgeridoos adapted from the Australian outback, and the bamboon (an […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Six Finger Satellite
This Rhode Island quartet borrows here and there from the best of the old synth bands, taking the playful pop of Kraftwerk and the edgy darkness of Chrome and adding funky bass lines and a raw, searing guitar. But 6FS seem to take the most pleasure in playing with cool sounds, using a massive collection […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hour Town
HOUR TOWN, Union Palace Players, at Stage Left Theatre. Improv’s dirty little secret is that it isn’t all created out of thin air. Improvisers, at least the good ones, develop a repertoire of stock characters–goofy neighbor, dumb boss, neurotic nerd–they can draw on if the improv set starts to flag, which it does on all […]