Neighborhood libraries face the ax as the system moves toward centalization.
Tag: Vol. 26 No. 19
Issue of Feb. 13 – 19, 1997
Posted inFilm
Dante’s Peak
A good disaster movie is the ultimate narrative: you get the wrenching emotional catharsis without suffering the consequences. Last year offered Daylight (written by Leslie Bohem, who also wrote Dante’s Peak), which is awful, and Twister, which isn’t much better. But Dante’s Peak contends with the best of a genre that had its heyday in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Shinpi No Bi: A Festival of Japanese Contemporary Dance
Japan is unique in its placement between Asia and the West, between the very old and the newest of the new. No Asian country has so aped the United States; no country in the world can boast more extant ancient traditions. And the power of both a long history and the mad swirl of modernity […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories In November actress Anya Pencheva announced a plan to divert her fellow Bulgarians’ attention from the grim economy: She would have a plaster cast made of her breasts and display it in the National Theater in Sofia. Said Pencheva, “It is a pity to focus everything on [budget cuts] when there are such […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Movie Memory
Matthew Palm wrote you a letter (February 7) in which he recollects seeing, as a child, the words “Episode IV: A New Hope” scroll in the opening title sequence of the very first release of Star Wars, 20 years ago. Your film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, says he, Rosenbaum, saw the film in LA, and didn’t […]
Posted inMusic
Matthew Shipp/ William Parker Duo
MATTHEW SHIPP/WILLIAM PARKER DUO Because he can create thick textures from busily intersecting melody lines, and because he plays with power and passion in the arena of free improvisation, pianist Matthew Shipp has attracted the inevitable comparisons to Cecil Taylor, the guru of postsong piano jazz. Taylor’s jagged musical vocabulary, abstract syntax, and revolutionary inflection […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Rhino in Winter
Offered as an adjunct to the annual summer Rhinoceros Theater and Performance Festival, this monthlong showcase of fringe entertainment features mostly new work by such ensembles and individuals as the Curious Theatre Branch, Dolphinback Theatre Company, Ira Glass, Frank Melcori, Theater Oobleck, Jamie O’Reilly, Michael Smith, the Saint Ed Theatre Company, and John Starrs, among […]
Posted inFilm
Super-8 Eros: Films by Luther Price
Combining extensive found footage, some of it homoerotic, with material he shoots himself, Luther Price makes Super-8 films that have a raw and unfinished look and avoid obvious conclusions. In Jellyfish Sandwich he combines footage of a football game with fire-fighting scenes, right-side-up images with upside-down ones, black-and-white with color–creating a film that’s aggressive and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Therapy
THERAPY, ImprovOlympic. At first the notion of an improvisation based on group-therapy sessions seems redundant–after all, isn’t the social dynamic of many therapy groups much the same as in a classroom improv game? Once Therapy gets under way, however, the discipline becomes apparent: one player describes an allegedly personal experience, and the others act out […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
Hey, Faggot: While my buddy–straight, I thought–was out east for Xmas, I stayed at his apartment so his place wouldn’t be empty. I made myself at home. I drank his beer, I ate his food, I watched his movies. I also watched his homemade pornos: him and his two girlfriends. I know it was wrong, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Facts About the Missing Thespians
Re: Re-review of That’s the Way It Is, By Golly [January 24] Dear Jack Helbig, Albert Williams, and the Chicago Reader, While the critic reviews the play, the play also reviews the critic. There should be no debate that the review of a body of art is an opinion of the quality of the body […]
Posted inNews & Politics
It’s Only A Movie
To Jonathan Rosenbaum, Critic, Historian, Seer of the Human Condition [Re: Movies, January 31] Well, here we go again. Every time I try to give a critic some sort of credit for trying to see some things as just entertainment, one comes along and shows me that there is probably no real hope and we […]
Posted inMusic
Shellac
Shellac Judging by the dearth of visible activity in the two years since the release of its debut, Shellac at Action Park (Touch and Go), it might appear that Shellac’s not much of a going concern for its members. And some less than precise performances during the trio’s few local gigs last year (most played […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: civil rights in black and white
Readers of Mark Twain will remember Cairo as the town Jim and Huck rafted toward on the Mississippi. At the southernmost tip of Illinois, it oversaw the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio River, which would take Jim into the free north. But they missed it during a period of heavy fog and instead […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Virgins and Other Myths
VIRGINS AND OTHER MYTHS, Bailiwick Repertory. In 80 minutes actor Darren Stephens covers a lot of emotional territory, finding immediate entry into Colin Martin’s autobiographical one-man play, a lacerating look at a gay man’s very haphazard coming-out. Donning multiple costumes and voices, Stephens immerses himself in Martin’s saga, passionately moving through schoolboy sex, an attempt […]