Music in the Word Amiri Baraka–known until 1967 as LeRoi Jones, black nationalist and surrealist political playwright-poet–cut his teeth on beat poetry and the improvisational populism that fueled Greenwich Village life and art in the 60s. His commitment to art as a revolutionary form of persuasion hasn’t wavered since, although his politics have shifted from […]
Tag: Vol. 27 No. 20
Issue of Feb. 19 – 25, 1998
Posted inArts & Culture
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
Mrs. Warren’s Profession “Rich men without conviction are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in the revised preface to this 1898 play, a bitter indictment of materialism and conventional morality, both of which he viewed as inherently hypocritical. Though tame by today’s standards, the play was shunned […]
Posted inMusic
Barkin’ Bill Smith
BARKIN’ BILL SMITH Legend has it blues vocalist Barkin’ Bill Smith got his nickname from veteran guitarist Homesick James. Homesick, if you didn’t know, is one of the blues’ great ironists, and Smith–who doesn’t bark at all, but rather croons in a mellifluous baritone reminiscent of jazz balladeers like Johnny Hartman and Billy Eckstine–has an […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Love for Three Oranges
LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES, Breadline Theatre Group, at the Athenaeum Theatre studio. The folks at Breadline don’t lack for ambition. In their first Chicago production, Faust Triptych, they probed Marlowe’s, Goethe’s, and Mann’s versions of the Faust legend, hoping to dissect Renaissance, Romantic, and modernist worldviews. They ended up with a muddle. Undaunted, the ensemble […]
Posted inMusic
True Lies
Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life By Laurence Bergreen (Broadway Books) By J.R. Jones “Writing about music is like talking about fucking,” John Lennon told Playboy in 1980, and few writers have proven him wrong: to capture something as visceral as music, words seem not just inadequate but downright crude. Some writers skirt the challenge with […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories Things you thought didn’t happen anymore: An agency of the International Chamber of Commerce in London reported in January that in 1997 a total of 51 people on ships were killed in attacks by pirates. The prime areas of concern were near Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and Brazil. The blessed family unit: In […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Burning Chrome
Burning Chrome, Next Theatre Company. Science fiction author and Wired magazine poster boy William Gibson (perhaps best known for Johnny Mnemonic and Neuromancer) wins points for prescience. But once you get past his jargon, what remains is a surprisingly pedestrian pulp fiction sensibility. Unlike Anthony Burgess’s neologisms, which have a thematic purpose, Gibson’s talk often […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: medieval space exploration
AtsomepointduringtheMiddleAgesscribeschangedthestandardpractice ofrunningwordstogether and began separating them with spaces–with unforeseeable consequences. That’s the thesis of a new book, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, by Paul Saenger, curator of rare books at the Newberry Library. “I was fascinated with the late medieval world and why it was so different from the early medieval world,” […]
Posted inMusic
Billy Boy Arnold
BILLY BOY ARNOLD When people start toting up the masters of blues harmonica, Billy Boy Arnold’s name doesn’t come to the fore as quick as it should. A student of Sonny Boy Williamson, Arnold cut a series of records on Vee-Jay in the mid-50s that now rank as masterpieces; he also worked with figures ranging […]
Posted inNews & Politics
West Side Stories
My father used to work five and a half days a week as a marble worker. On Saturday morning, while he was at work, we kids helped clean the house. My mother cooked dinner, and the dinner would be on the table at one o’clock when my father got home. Well, this Saturday he didn’t […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Car Trouble
Getting rid of cars may be a good idea, but the author of Asphalt Nation needs to get her facts straight.
Posted inArts & Culture
Giving Up the Ghost
The Memory of Water Steppenwolf Theatre Company By Albert Williams “How confusing the beams from memory’s lamp are,” wrote Ogden Nash in his poem “Preface to the Past.” British actress-turned-author Shelagh Stephenson–in her witty, poignant playwriting debut, The Memory of Water–visualizes memory as a cool, soothing light gently swaying on a bedroom ceiling. Steppenwolf Theatre’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
The undead at Zion. Commonwealth Edison cut costs by closing its Zion nuclear plant. In a recent press release, David Kraft of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service asks the follow-up: “If ComEd couldn’t invest enough money and resources to keep the plant open and safe, what is their incentive to invest the resources necessary […]
Posted inMusic
Come/Sue Garner
COME/SUE GARNER A couple years ago it looked like Come was history: after a tour in support of its second album, the Boston band’s longtime rhythm section quit. But by forging ahead with several different bassists and drummers on its third record, Near Life Experience, guitarists Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw (both of whom sing […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Milked Dry
From the Chicago Tribune: Paul Galloway, February 9, 1998: “The reporter’s pulse pounds. He is seeing something that has almost vanished from the American scene, witnessing a memory from his youth, one he never expected to see again, not in an area like this anyway….Here in the middle of the night, near the center of […]