KENNY DAVERN-EDDIE HIGGINS QUARTET When bebop arrived a half century ago, it made swing and its predecessors–New Orleans jazz and its offshoots in Chicago and New York–sound suddenly old. And despite the occasional faddish revival, those forms stopped really evolving; they’ve become historical artifacts, and in a cable-modem world few musicians still trouble themselves to […]
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 38
Issue of Jun. 24 – 30, 1999
Posted inMusic
Thinking Fellers
Pavement Terror Twilight (Matador) Mekons I Have Been to Heaven and Back: Hen’s Teeth and Other Lost Fragments of Unpopular Culture Vol. 1 By Josh Goldfein The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. –Archilochus In his 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” liberal humanist Isaiah Berlin described two kinds […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Pride and Prejudice
Isn’t it about time for gay people to drop the worn-out buzzword and think of themselves as regular human beings?
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: Filipino cooking’s cultural slice and dice
As a child in Lockport, Jennifer Aranas found her mother’s Filipino home cooking far more palatable than American grub. “My mom was a nurse who worked the graveyard shift, so she had a lot of time to cook for her kids. She chopped, diced, shredded, did all that labor-intensive work Filipino food demands,” she says. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Peggy Sue Got Married
PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. In 1986–well before Pleasantville contrasted Eisenhower era “innocence” with the hip present–Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtling wryly depicted a 42-year-old mother of two time traveling from her 20th high school reunion back to her senior prom. Inevitably, Peggy Sue’s feminist sensibilities clash with sexual role-playing circa 1960, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
The girl’s about seven years old. She’s holding hands with her brother, who’s a couple years younger. They’re following their father out of the video section of the Sulzer library. “Please, please,” the girl calls out as they walk along a wall of books. The father continues toward the exit. He has a couple of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Miriam Fried
MIRIAM FRIED Violinist Miriam Fried, born in Romania in 1946 and raised in Israel, has been working the international concert circuit steadily since her New York debut in 1969, but she doesn’t enjoy anything like the marquee status of a much younger soloist like Sarah Chang. Her timing’s at least partly to blame: though she […]
Posted inMusic
Cuban Snowball
Cuban Snowball When guitarist and producer Ry Cooder headed to Havana in 1996 to record the collaborative efforts of African and Cuban musicians, he had no idea he was about to launch a cottage industry. It began with an abrupt change in plans: upon arriving, Cooder learned that the Africans couldn’t make it, so he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bobby Rush
BOBBY RUSH Lately rap and shock-rock acts have been monopolizing the attention of America’s public moralists so expertly that you wouldn’t expect a blues artist to draw their fire, but this year Kentucky officials cut singer and harpist Bobby Rush from the lineup of the state’s Hot August Blues Festival. They were apparently afraid his […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Self Helf, or the Tower of Psychobabble
SELF HELP, OR THE TOWER OF PSYCHOBABBLE, Bailiwick Repertory. LA playwright Clark Carlton’s rather overwritten dating comedy–the latest installment in Bailiwick’s gay-themed “Pride ’99” series–indulges in a lot of analytical excesses for a play that purports to ridicule our dependence on shrinkspeak and talk therapy. A sensible 35-year-old gay screenwriter cursed with half-baked relationships cures […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
I’m a gay black male with a foot fetish. I’ve tried to indulge my fetish with hustlers, but either they were not interested or I wasn’t attracted to their feet. However, I have a straight male friend with perfect feet. He knows I’m gay and that I have a foot fetish. Should I ask him […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Store: Hot Damn’s cool threads
Sarah Staskauskas first entered the heady world of rock and retail in 1981, when she, her brother, and his wife opened a vintage store in Rockford called Pinkadelic. “A couple of the guys from Cheap Trick came in,” she remembers. “We were so excited–Robin Zander was in here! And we got on the news, because […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Creeping Menace
Sarah Sze: Many a Slip at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through August 1 By Mark Swartz If Sarah Sze’s shopping list had fallen into your hands a few months ago, you might have thought twice about returning it to her–for her own good. Razor blades, pushpins, sewing shears, pills, and other potentially hazardous materials […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Speed-The-Plow
SPEED-THE-PLOW, Thirsty Theater, at the Pilsen Theatre. Actors trying to conquer David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow–or just get through it adequately–have got to be exceedingly precise. Yet Mamet offers hardly a stage direction in this morality play about power and purity in the Hollywood film industry, and he packs his dialogue with sentence fragments and unfinished thoughts. […]