Dinah Washington’s sisters offer a few revisions to Northlight Theatre’s production.
Tag: Vol. 29 No. 11
Issue of Dec. 16 – 22, 1999
Posted inNews & Politics
True Terrorists
To the editor: Help me out here–was John Conroy’s Reader article about Aaron Patterson (“Pure Torture,” 12/3/99) supposed to render John and Mary Q. Public sympathetic toward this thug-ass criminal? Why did you waste all of that newsprint on this one-man crime wave who has spent his entire privileged life making the lives of others […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Michael Zerang & Hamid Drake
MICHAEL ZERANG & HAMID DRAKE Whether powering the Brotzmann Chicago Tentet as that free-jazz jumbo jet gets airborne or entangling themselves in long, loose saxophone lines as two-thirds of a trio with tenor hero Fred Anderson, percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang have spent the last decade forging an extraordinary understanding of one another–the sort […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Emperor and the Assassin
Historical spectaculars tend to fall into two broad categories: myths of origin (Cecil B. De Mille’s 1923 and 1956 versions of The Ten Commandments) and more ponderous inquiries into the hero’s personality (Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia). Chen Kaige’s massive 161-minute epic about the unification of China, accomplished by its first emperor […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Live From the Second City–1961
The funniest show in a Chicago theater this weekend may well be playing not on a stage but on a screen–this rarely shown videotape of a live performance at Second City’s original space (1842 N. Wells) just a couple of years after the troupe’s founding. Under the meticulous direction of pioneering off-Loop theater genius Paul […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Him
HIM On his previous recordings as Him, percussionist Doug Scharin has conducted expansive experiments in dub: steady bass lines and his loose-limbed rhythms provided a framework for everything from spaced-out reggae licks to Middle Eastern textures. But compared to the new Sworn Eyes (Perishable), those records were positively rigid. This time out, Scharin’s support cast […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Best Car Money Can Buy
Everybody hates HMOs. They’re inflexible, they deny care, they turn medical professionals into bean counters. Conceived decades ago as a way to focus on preventing illness, they now dump the sick. But is it possible that everybody’s wrong? Could it be that what’s wrecking American health care isn’t HMOs but the profit motive driving many […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Music Notes: the Mauds revisit the 60s
It seemed like destiny when the phone rang at Jimy Rogers’s Lake County home last March and a voice on the other end asked if Rogers could put the Mauds together for a gig in July. The Mauds were Rogers’s hot 1960s R & B group; the gig was the Cellar Blast reunion, a nostalgia […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
The new rock opera Aida isn’t lyricist Tim Rice’s first foray into the world of ancient Egypt: in 1968 he and Andrew Lloyd Webber teamed up for the first time on a 15-minute children’s pageant based on the biblical saga of Joseph, the dream-interpreting Hebrew slave who rose to power in Pharaoh’s court. Expanded over […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Michael Flores goes time tripping
Michael Flores was a teenage hippie in Atlanta working for an underground newspaper when Otto Preminger’s pro-LSD film Skidoo came out in 1968. The bizarre musical satire, inspired by Preminger’s experience with the drug, pits the square establishment, represented by former hit man Jackie Gleason and his boss, a character named God (Groucho Marx in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Pharoahe Monch
PHAROAHE MONCH As a member of Organized Konfusion, rapper Pharoahe Monch has been acclaimed by the hip-hop faithful for most of the decade, but not until he released Internal Affairs (Rawkus) a few months ago did he finally get the sales to match his skills. On his current hit single, “Simon Says,” he even jokes […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Letter to the Editor
Dear Mr. Miner, In your Hot Type column of November 26, 1999, you said that the controversy over the selection of Ivan Rodriguez as AL MVP would have been avoided “if baseball writers had agreed beforehand about what they were voting on.” According to reliable and insightful baseball columnist Rob Neyer (and other sources), the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
What’s the Hitch?
Oak Park’s same-sex couples puzzle activists by ignoring pioneering legislation that gives them the same rights as heterosexual marrieds.
Posted inArts & Culture
Assault On the Senses
OR Dumb Type at the Museum of Contemporary Art, December 9-12 By Justin Hayford If you missed Dumb Type at the Museum of Contemporary Art last weekend, you may not have a chance to make up for your folly: the likelihood of seeing this Kyoto-based performance collective in Chicago again is slim. Formed in 1984, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories Life imitates Weekend at Bernie’s: In November government officials in East London, South Africa, thwarted an attempt by two men and a woman to register a corpse for pension benefits. According to the South African Press Association, the three took the recently deceased man (who they said was merely ill) to a pension […]