Is Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore the end of something, or just the beginning?
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 16
Issue of Jan. 21 – 27, 1999
Posted inMusic
Puppet on a String
The phone is no friend to Curt Kirkwood. Too often the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; she’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. Your brother showed up at my […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cube
CUBE Composer, flutist, and CUBE cofounder Janice Misurell-Mitchell had a breakthrough in 1991 with After the History, a ten-minute solo for flute and voice that combines her radical politics and restless virtuosity. A provocative piece of agitprop inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, it updates the Schoenbergian speech-song to incorporate extended flute techniques […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: paintings of an Amazon woman
On a warm afternoon in 1988, a tippy double-decker boat poked its way through a narrow channel in a Brazilian forest flooded with runoff from the far-off Andes. The trees in this pristine swamp were lush with colorful plants. The most tantalizing was a swatch of flat red leaves clinging to a trunk about ten […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Troubling Signs
Will a new ordinance suck the character out of Lincolnwood?
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
The hepatitis C virus (HCV) has become the new, ugly epidemic in this country, but it’s not showing up in the headlines. What’s up with that? There are 3.5 million Americans chronically infected with HCV. At least 80 percent of the cases are blood borne. The experts seem uncertain about the origin of the other […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Brickyard Blues
Numbed by cold, pelted by rain, enduring smashed fingers and toes, poorly paid brick salvagers keep coming back for more.
Posted inArts & Culture
Maldita Vecindad
MALDITA VECINDAD Next to the recent invasion of savvy postmodern Latin rock bands like Bloque, Los Amigos Invisibles, and Aterciopelados, Mexico’s Maldita Vecindad sounds relatively scrappy. Even Mostros (BMG U.S. Latin), the band’s latest and most accomplished album, feels garagey by comparison. But Maldita Vecindad helped lay the tarmac those jet-setting synthesists landed on, forming […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar
Friday 1/22 – Thursday 1/28 JANUARY By Cara Jepsen 22 FRIDAY Jenny Perlin’s short film The Whole History of That documents her journey to the Czech town of Pribor, where her great-grandmother was born. “I finally found someone who recognized my great-grandmother’s maiden name,” she wrote in her notes. “Elated, I took the next tram […]
Posted inArts & Culture
By & About, G.B.S.
By & About, G.B.S., Them, at Strawdog Theatre. Sam Patterson’s muddled attempt to distill two decades’ worth of correspondence between playwright George Bernard Shaw and renowned actress Ellen Terry suffers most from his inability to keep the characters consistent–surprising given that the entire text of Wit and Moonlight: A Paper Courtship is taken verbatim from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Naomi in the Living Room and the Problem
Naomi In the Living Room and The Problem, Laugh Den Productions, at Stage Left Theatre. Laugh Den Productions made a hopeful if flawed debut with last summer’s program of one-acts by resident playwright Steve Batterman (propitiously subtitled “The First Collection”). That makes their “second collection,” consisting of two early exercises by playwrights who went on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hamlet
Hamlet, StreetSigns, at Bailiwick Repertory. Artistic director Derek Goldman writes that one of the reasons StreetSigns is producing Hamlet is that company members “had never been as profoundly moved by seeing it as by reading it.” Weary of gizmo-laden Shakespeare productions, Goldman began his Hamlet “without a gimmick, with no visions of saunas, helicopters, futuristic […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Just Hanging Around
An art lover on a quest finds a long-lost Calder mobile.
Posted inArts & Culture
Playing by Heart
Playing by Heart This charming romantic comedy with a Los Angeles setting cuts between seemingly unconnected miniplots the way some Robert Altman movies do. In the final scenes the connections become clear, but until then the links are strictly thematic, having to do with love of one kind or another. A distraught man (Dennis Quaid) […]
Posted inMusic
Jo Jo Murray
JO JO MURRAY Chicago-based blues and R & B vocalist Jo Jo Murray has a great sound–a sweet and gritty tenor that he complements with his fluid, sharp-toned guitar playing. But few people have heard it, at least on record. Murray cut his first single, “Why Baby,” for the tiny Sound-O-Riffic label in 1971, and […]