felshman.qxd In my story on the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society (Calendar, November 7), I erroneously identified Paul Waggoner as the curator of the exhibit currently on display at the Second Presbyterian Church. He is the project director; noted Arts and Crafts expert Sherry Richmond curated. My apologies to them both. Jeffrey Felshman
Tag: Vol. 27 No. 7
Issue of Nov. 20 – 26, 1997
Posted inArts & Culture
Inexplicable, Inscrutable, Incredible
House/Lights The Wooster Group at the Museum of Contemporary Art, November 12-16 By Justin Hayford It’s easy to dismiss the Wooster Group’s House/Lights as indulgent art-world posturing. Seven actors careen through 90 disjointed, aloof minutes never betraying an emotion and rarely finishing a thought–when they bother to speak at all. Instead they fling set pieces […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Last Drop
Urbus Orbis, the Wicker Park coffeehouse and cultural landmark, falls prey to the gentrification it helped attract.
Posted inArts & Culture
Stevie
STEVIE, at the O Bar & Cafe. A virtuoso talker is required for a two-hour play in which a single person does 90 percent of the talking. Hugh Whitemore’s dramatic biography of English poet Stevie Smith provides no assistance–the other two characters are little more than foils, the speakers never assume the identities of the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Living Rooms
Harold Allen: American Modernist at Ehlers Caudill, through December 6 By Fred Camper The buildings in Harold Allen’s photographs have a preternatural solidity. His intense grays and blacks make wood and stone tactile; his subjects are framed dynamically for maximum impact. Whatever structure he’s shooting, whether Stonehenge or a modest American home, it seems to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: views from a sheltered life
When Robin Barcus went to be interviewed as a volunteer for an art program at Irene’s, a daytime women’s shelter in Wicker Park where women can create art as a form of therapy, one of the first things she saw was the paintings of Barbara Jean Lindsay. “When I walked into that shelter and I […]
Posted inMusic
The Ex
THE EX Even back in 1979 the Ex wasn’t alone in setting bluntly anarchist lyrics to brittle postpunk rock. But while contemporaries like the Mekons and Mark Stewart of the Pop Group strove to engage with the mainstream music business, the Ex aligned itself with Amsterdam’s squatter community, where its music and its politics were […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Building Symphony
BUILDING SYMPATHY: The Richard Nickel Story, Center Theater Ensemble. Jessica Thebus’s remarkable elegy for a Chicago cultural hero, Richard Nickel, is a stimulating, playful dream of a life. True to her commitment to creative transformations in the Bread and Puppet/Redmoon style, Thebus tells the story in 22 scenes using animated costumes and props, movies and […]
Posted inMusic
Demarre and Anthony McGill
DEMARRE AND ANTHONY MCGILL Fredda Hyman started the “Music in the Loft” series four years ago at her spacious home on West Washington intending to revive the 19th-century salon, where chamber music was born. A former dance instructor, she believes in nurturing young talent, so she tends to book musicians in their 20s and 30s; […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Christmas Carol
A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Goodman Theatre. Sporting red stocking caps, the busts encircling the Goodman auditorium seem to be having a Dickens of a time–just like the mortals below them. Now in its 20th coming, Goodman’s Christmas Carol reflects our needs as much as it reflects its source: Scrooge resembles a self-pitying, down-sizing workaholic bottom-liner, cynical […]
Posted inMusic
Trio
TRIO In the last couple years, more than a few of us who had high hopes for saxist Joshua Redman have given voice to our disappointment in his increasingly formulaic approach, but I figure that this band has a better chance of kicking him up a few notches than almost any other he’s played with. […]
Posted inFilm
Colonial Imaging: Early Films From the Netherlands Film Museum
Colonial Imaging: Early Films From the Netherlands Film Museum Imagine you’re an American (or Dutch or French) tourist or explorer during the 1910s or 20s, visiting Africa, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and other remote places, gawking at the natives and their everyday lives and customs. At once fascinating and unnerving, this two-day, five-part program […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
One World. Cheaper telecommunications means more exporting and importing of services, writes James Burnham in a recent study published by Washington University’s Center for the Study of American Business. Jobs that involve standardized skills–like software writing and routine document processing–may be done more cheaply in Ireland or India than in Ravenswood. And xenophobia may even […]