John Agrela knows a good strike when he leads one.
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 14
Issue of Jan. 7 – 13, 1999
Posted inMusic
Top Ten of ’98
1 GASTR DEL SOL Camoufleur (Drag City). David Grubbs’s final collaboration with Jim O’Rourke is a fitting swan song, an absorbing collection of art-pop tunes expertly fitted with experimental flourishes. From Rob Mazurek’s sputtering cornet on the breezy “The Seasons Reverse” to Markus Popp’s fractal electronics on the melancholy “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder” […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
CAFE R&B 1/9, BUDDY GUY’S LEGENDS My hackles stood up immediately at the idea of this careful, James Cameron-esque evocation of postwar electric blues and early R & B (from, where else, LA), but if we must tolerate retro, I’ll take it this way. In the blues, it’s not what you say so much as […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Senseless Sentences
Drug peddler Andre Williams will spend most of his life behind bars. Is that such a good idea?
Posted inArts & Culture
Mything Out
Prometheus Bound TinFish Theatre By Justin Hayford If I had to toss one classical Greek tragedy onto the theatrical scrap heap, it would be Prometheus Bound. Sure, it has great historical significance, not least because it’s one of only seven surviving plays by Aeschylus (who wrote more than ten times that number). After all, the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
West Side Stories
Vince and I graduated from Austin in June 1940, and then we went to register at Loyola University. I had this idea of this great university I was going to attend, and then we walked into this dumpy building. The downtown campus was on Franklin Street around the corner from Washington. It was a walk-up […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: the history of Hollywood on the lake
When Arnie Bernstein was a student at Niles West High School, every afternoon he had to choose which of two great men he would study: Euclid, the Greek philosopher who’s considered the father of geometry, or Groucho Marx. Bernstein chose Groucho. Every chance he got, he skipped his afternoon math classes so he could stay […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Marlena Shaw
MARLENA SHAW For the three decades of Marlena Shaw’s career, people have been asking a musical question that’s been with us since the 1930s: Is she is or is she ain’t a jazz singer? When she started singing for Count Basie’s band in 1967–in a post previously held by heavyweights like Jimmy Rushing, Billie Holiday, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Chance to Save Her Life
Who was this woman, and what did she have in mind?
Posted inArts & Culture
Built to Last/ Blackman by the Bay/ Livent Watch ’99
Furnture designer Michael Heltzer joins the big leagues, taking over a prime showroom in the Merchandise Mart.
Posted inArts & Culture
Divorce Iranian Style
Divorce Iranian Style Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini directed this documentary about divorce in Iran, where a man is free to leave his wife but a woman needs either her husband’s permission or proof that he’s insane or sterile. The film’s image of contemporary Iranian women clashes with Western stereotypes: despite their legal handicaps, the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Contemporary Chamber Players
CONTEMPORARY CHAMBER PLAYERS Last spring, when during a Contemporary Chamber Players concert music director Stephen Mosko took ill and stumbled from the podium, he might as well have been dramatizing the troubles that had been plaguing the city’s most venerable presenter of contemporary music. At the end of the CCP’s 1995-’96 season, founder Ralph Shapey […]
Posted inMusic
George Freeman
GEORGE FREEMAN George Burns!—the title of George Freeman’s new CD on the local Southport label—does more than capture the goofy charm of the jazz album titles of the 1950s. The pun also shouts out the link between Freeman’s otherworldly guitar playing and the humor of the classic comedian who, in conflating on-screen and offscreen action […]