By Michael Miner Fake ID Young reporter Allen Carpenter was under the impression that he was interviewing the most unusual actor in the long, distinguished history of Second City. There was reason to believe this. The “bio” of Peter Gwinn, which was faxed to Carpenter at the Colorado Springs Independent before he conducted the interview […]
Tag: Vol. 26 No. 18
Issue of Feb. 6 – 12, 1997
Posted inArts & Culture
True Books
The complete book of beer drinking games, by Andy Griscom, Ben Rand, and Scott Johnston (Mustang Publishing, $8.95). Synopsis: Drink the most beer and win competing against your friends with these 50 fun beer drinking games, such as Chug Boat, Beer Golf, Shot-a-Minute, and Blaster Bust, presented in order of escalating tendency to cause regurgitation. […]
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Billy Joe Shaver
BILLY JOE SHAVER The surge of popularity experienced by country vet Billy Joe Shaver in the last few years was fueled by a pair of high-octane honky-tonk records for Zoo, both branded by the searing lead-guitar work of his son Eddy. His superb new album Highway of Life (Justice), however, finds him revisiting the looser, […]
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Iphigenia and Other Daughters
IPHIGENIA AND OTHER DAUGHTERS, Greasy Joan & Company, at Griffin Theatre. As Jean Anouilh has shown, it takes above-average intelligence to give ancient Greek myth a contemporary sensibility and not end up with cheap shtick. Greasy Joan makes an admirable stab with Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters, a quasi-feminist rehashing of the House of […]
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Zine-o-file
From the pages of Chip’s Closet Cleaner Issue Thirteen (P.O. Box 11967, Chicago, IL 60611; $3 per issue)Famous Names By Chip Rowe I got ahold of this newfangled CD-ROM phone directory and began to wonder what would happen if some loner guy named Chip Rowe was caught robbing liquor stores in his boxers. My name […]
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Spot Check
BRAXTONS 2/7 & 8, ROSEMONT THEATRE A whopping nine producers working on their debut album, So Many Ways (Atlantic), failed to make these three gals with average voices sound like anything beyond a blatant attempt to ride the coattails of fab elder sister Toni. They open for Luther Vandross. CORROSION OF CONFORMITY 2/7-9, HORIZON Formed […]
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Anti-Masterpieces
Alfons Koller: Imagine That! at Tough Gallery, through February 15 Inigo Manglano-Ovalle: Balsero at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through April 6 Kara Walker at the Renaissance Society, through February 23 By Fred Camper Installations are hardly new. Ancient cave and rock drawings were surely “installations,” and Renaissance panel paintings were often part of altarpieces […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
“Housing [on the west side] remains comparatively cheap,” writes Burney Simpson in the Chicago Reporter (December), “but prices are climbing. ‘Two years ago you could pay $8,000 to $10,000 for some properties,’ said Ted Wordlaw, a real estate broker who has worked in the area for 18 years. ‘Now an unfinished property sold as is […]
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Dynamic Duo
Swans Double Door, January 21 By Monica Kendrick Creativity is a volatile high–less predictable than drugs and harder work than sex–and when you throw in the fact that rock ‘n’ roll usually requires collaboration, you’re skating on thin ice indeed. Rock ‘n’ roll is littered with artists who blew their creative wads in the first […]
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Norma
NORMA Bellini’s Norma, heroine of the opera by that name, is a complicated, volatile creature. A druid high priestess in Roman-occupied Gaul, she’s already borne two kids by a Roman proconsul before the curtain rises; over the course of the opera, she confronts, accuses, threatens, disowns, beseeches, then finally forgives her fickle lover and the […]
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Hank Crawford
HANK CRAWFORD Memphis-born alto saxophonist Hank Crawford comes by his soulfulness as honestly as anyone could hope. His first gig landed him in B.B. King’s band; he played behind Bobby Bland and Ike & Tina Turner in the 50s, and then joined Ray Charles’s scintillating jazz ‘n’ soul band–all before the age of 25. A […]
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The Baby Dance
Profiles Performance Ensemble has wisely decided to reopen its quietly successful production of Jane Anderson’s The Baby Dance, an emotionally rich examination of the wide and ever-widening gap between social classes in America. Last fall the subtle staging and honest acting well served Anderson’s wonderfully tight script, about a wealthy Los Angeles couple seeking to […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Star Wars Snit
Dear Reader, [Re: Movies, January 31] Whenever Jonathan Rosenbaum writes a film review he seems to find it imperative that he reference at least one utterly obscure film as a kind of testament to his sagacious grasp of moviemaking history. “Wow, this guy must really know his stuff,” we are supposed to mutter to ourselves. […]
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Curiouser and Curiouser
In the mid-1960s Arthur Penn and actress Anne Bancroft, director and star of The Miracle Worker, were invited to help start a theater and training center for deaf actors and audiences. Excited by the idea but too busy to carry it out, they suggested it to Penn’s frequent collaborator, Broadway set designer David Hays, who […]
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Kurt Westerberg
KURT WESTERBERG The youngish academic composer Kurt Westerberg is something of a throwback among his peers. In a field that’s leaning heavily toward eclecticism, he’s got a predilection for abstraction–a mode of expression regarded as radical around the turn of the century, popular with the intellectual elite at mid-century, and a bit passe now. It […]