AMADOU & MARIAM, FREDERIC GALLIANO & AFRICAN DIVA The most famous singers of Malian blues, Ali Farka Toure and Habib Koite, have been celebrated for the soul-stirring purity of their work, but Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia, a married duo who met as teenagers at a school for the blind, are notable for the opposite. […]
Tag: Vol. 29 No. 41
Issue of Jul. 13 – 19, 2000
Posted inArts & Culture
Hamlet! The Musical/ Short Shakespeare! “Romeo and Juliet”
Hamlet! The Musical, Second City, at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Short Shakespeare! “Romeo and Juliet,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The high-quality air-conditioning at Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Navy Pier facility would make it easy to spend more than two and a half hours there, but the season of short attention spans is upon us. The revival of […]
Posted inMusic
Pucho & His Latin Soul Brothers
PUCHO & HIS LATIN SOUL BROTHERS In the late 1960s, when Harlem-born timbalero Henry “Pucho” Brown and his band fired off a string of funky, Cuban-influenced jazz-rock albums for Prestige, the sounds and beats of Latin America were as pervasive as they are today. But Brown came of age musically in the 60s, when African-Americans […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Maids
THE MAIDS, Rising Sun Theatre, at Center Theater. In Jean Genet’s black comedy the title characters are vengeful sisters who begin by imitating their mistress and end by attempting to kill her. Based on a true story, Genet’s sadomasochistic account depicts petulant Claire and bitter Solange as vaguely incestuous, transparently self-hating, and consumed by jealousy […]
Posted inNews & Politics
On Bad Architecture
The sad fact is that those with the power to effect change are usually those with the worst taste….Bad architecture, the offspring of powerful, arrogant, tasteless people, has not only created a tacky atmosphere, like most bad choices it has proved more expensive than good choices. I suspect the same thing will prove true with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Group Efforts: off the street and onto the stage
Standing before a diverse sea of faces from Rogers Park, Insight Arts executive director Craig Harshaw uses the set-up time between acts in the group’s “Night of Insight” event for a little consciousness-raising. “We have to change our way of thinking,” he tells the audience. As he describes the “genocidal development in our neighborhood” and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Clothing Time
My dry cleaner is going out of business, and life just isn’t going to be the same.
Posted inNews & Politics
Just Say No
Most agree that teaching kids to refrain from sex is a good idea, but should sex ed stop there? And should the Moonies be the ones teaching abstinence in public schools?
Posted inNews & Politics
On the Art Institute
In 1978 the Art Institute hired a new director, Alan Shestack, from the Yale Art Gallery. When Shestack declined the job a few days after his appointment was announced in the press, it was reported that his wife didn’t want to move to Chicago. There was considerable speculation at the time that Shestack actually turned […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hfob-n-Ffos
Hfob-n-Ffos, Adult Swim Ensemble, at Performance Loft. The confusion in the mythical town of Hfob-n-Ffos begins with a Sadie Hawkins-style contest sponsored by a glamorous fashion magazine. As the eligible ladies, including the geriatric Miss Ruby, scatter in search of their summer love, the bachelors swear to forever shun commitment. Soon one female is sighing […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Sorrow and the Pity
The cinema has produced few more impressive pieces of investigative journalism than this epic 1971 documentary by Marcel Ophuls–260 minutes long, plus a 15-minute intermission–about the German occupation of France. Ophuls, son of the great Max Ophuls, devotes the first part to the fall of France, the second part to everyday life during the Occupation […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories Toy inventor Brian Walker, 44, told the Newhouse News Service in June that by next summer he would launch himself on the world’s first homemade spaceship, blasting off at 4,000 mph, to a height of 30 miles, using 10 tanks containing 7,000 pounds of hydrogen peroxide as fuel, at an overall expense of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
On Francis Bacon
The 1959 Francis Bacon exhibition was popular with Chicago artists like George Cohen, Leon Golub, Seymour Rosofsky, and Cosmo Campoli, though not particularly with the collectors. Bacon’s work had been exhibited only once before in the United States, in a small exhibition at Durlacher Brothers in New York in 1953. I had never met Bacon, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Gene Analysis: What’s Behind the Film Center’s Name Change
By Patrick Z. McGavin Headline geeh On July 16, 1972, the Tribune published an article bemoaning the lack of art films in Chicago. The essay was an abridged version of a master’s thesis by Medill student Neill Rosenfeld. “Chicago is a hick town,” he wrote. “So is the rest of the country, except for New […]
Posted inFilm
The Sorry and the Pity
The Sorrow and the Pity The cinema has produced few more impressive pieces of investigative journalism than this epic 1971 documentary by Marcel Ophuls–260 minutes long, plus a 15-minute intermission–about the German occupation of France. Ophuls, son of the great Max Ophuls, devotes the first part to the fall of France, the second part to […]