JOHNNY GRIFFIN His boundless energy after five decades in jazz may amaze you, but if you’ve listened to him on disc, tenor saxist Johnny Griffin won’t surprise you. Over his lengthy career (he turns 71 on Saturday) his recordings have captured every nuance of his distinctive style: the breakneck legerdemain, the hairpin turns of his […]
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 29
Issue of Apr. 22 – 28, 1999
Posted inArts & Culture
Prometheus Bound & Unbound and Picture This
PROMETHEUS BOUND & UNBOUND, Bailiwick Repertory, and PICTURE THIS, Bailiwick Repertory. For a contemporary audience, Prometheus is a tough nut. Compared to the all-too-human Sisyphus, doomed to pointless, never-ending toil, or the pathetic but familiar Orpheus, robbed of love because he has no faith, Prometheus is unapproachable, an oddity. There the Titan sits, chained to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mad Shak Dance Company
Molly Shanahan’s dances are never, ever easy–they tug the mind in one direction, only to abandon that tangent and take up another. Yet somehow they usually coalesce into a mysterious whole. Shanahan’s new solo, Sweet Ruthless, seems to be made up of snapshots or diary entries, memories of a love affair that’s over. Marked by […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Wandering Pulitzer
By Michael Miner The Wandering Pulitzer Blair Kamin won a Pulitzer Prize last week, though every jury that read his stories wanted someone else to judge them. What Kamin does for the Tribune doesn’t fit neatly into a category. He’s the architecture critic, but his major opus in 1998, a series of articles on Chicago’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lecture Notes: guided tours of the red planet
Back in the early 70s, when Dan Troiani’s wife, Kathy, was still just his girlfriend, she dragged him to Adler Planetarium. Troiani had lived in Chicago all his life but had never been to Adler, or to a sky show anywhere else. A science-shy film major at Columbia College, his interest in space was limited […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories The University of Plymouth in England announced in March that beginning in September it would offer a bachelor’s degree in surfing. The degree, formally known as surf science and technology, will offer research opportunities in surfboard, wet-suit, and accessory design. In March more than a thousand police officers in India completed a ten-day […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Maurice John Vaughn
MAURICE JOHN VAUGHN Alligator caused quite a stir on the Chicago blues scene back in 1988 when it put out Maurice John Vaughn’s Generic Blues Album, a self-produced disc the guitarist had issued two years before on his own Reecy label. The Alligator release won widespread acclaim, and Vaughn followed it with an appearance later […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Local Lit: characters with a familiar ring
Sarajane Avidon says she never read a mystery until after her daughter was born in 1972. “The neighbor asked me over for peach ice cream and I couldn’t go. I started crying because I was stuck in the house,” she recalls. “She gave me a Dorothy Sayers mystery to distract me.” Avidon has been devouring […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
I am a 46-year-old straight male who decided to check out the escort scene after ending a long-term relationship. I went up to Vancouver, B.C., on vacation and met a 23-year-old escort and fell madly in, well, something. She is my picture of a perfect woman, very romantic and a good conversationalist. I was totally […]
Posted inMusic
Alejandron Escovedo
The track listing for Alejandro Escovedo’s new studio album, Bourbonitis Blues (Bloodshot), his first in three years, makes it doubly clear that the Austin singer-songwriter isn’t exactly in a prolific phase. Of the nine cuts, only four are originals, and one of those, “Guilty,” appeared in a different version on With These Hands (Rykodisc) in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jerico the Fool and Darshan With Custer
Jerico the Fool and Darshan With Custer, Curious Theatre Branch, at the Lunar Cabaret. It’s always a joy to watch Curious Theatre member Beau O’Reilly in action, and his appearance in Bryn Magnus’s elliptical monologue Jerico the Fool is no exception. Seated in a darkened corner of the Lunar Cabaret stage, O’Reilly delivers Magnus’s extended […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ronnie Baker Brooks
RONNIE BAKER BROOKS Ronnie Baker Brooks played his first gig in 1975, at the age of nine–when his father, guitarist Lonnie Brooks, invited him to sit in at a south-side club called Pepper’s Hideout. By 1986 he’d graduated to a full-time gig with dad’s band, and his 1998 solo debut, Golddigger (Watchdog), revealed a guitar […]