LABRADFORD The title of Labradford’s sixth and latest album, Fixed::Context (Kranky), is a bit misleading: since 1992, when Mark Nelson and Carter Brown formed the group in Richmond, Virginia, its personnel, instrumentation, and milieu have all changed. In its early days the band blended ringing guitars, whispered vocals, grinding tape loops, and thick analog synthesizer […]
Tag: Vol. 30 No. 21
Issue of Feb. 22 – 28, 2001
Posted inNews & Politics
Welcome, Fiction
After a 20-year famine, the Chicago Reader, over the New Year’s weekend, has broken with its own tradition and treated us to a feast of some 16-odd short pieces of original fiction. Without warning or so much as an editorial comment, we have been left on our own to make what we will of this […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
MISTREATERS 2/23, HIDEOUT On their first official full-length, Grab Them Cakes (Big Neck), which reprises one song from their 1999 full-length cassette, The Mistreaters Don’t Do Drugs and Stay in School, these Milwaukee boys demonstrate how it’s done–it in this case being greasy, raw, and ruthlessly paced garage punk. Controlled sloppiness within dazzling tightness, a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
I Am Yours
I Am Yours, Cobalt Ensemble Theatre, at Stage Left Theatre. When this Judith Thompson play premiered in Toronto in 1979, it was welcomed as a groundbreaking psychological drama. Two emotionally damaged sisters vie for the center of attention, both aiming to be loved and desired. Dee (Jenny McKnight) is ruining her marriage by playing emotional […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Rosenbaum Caves
As an American film critic who has repeatedly written about the major studios’ predatory practices (e.g., punishing critics who give them unfavorable reviews), Jonathan Rosenbaum certainly stands in a small crowd. I have admired his steadfast commitment to the ethics of criticism, but more, I have admired and applauded his willingness to speak out about […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Fantasy Island
What makes River Grove’s Hala Kahiki so original? In 35 years the owners never bothered to see Hawaii.
Posted inArts & Culture
Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
BIG RIVER: THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. Director Marc Robin’s rendition of Roger Miller and William Hauptman’s 1985 Broadway hit (the show’s second local production this season is a winning revival with a rich emotional texture one doesn’t usually associate with dinner theater. Robin and his cast capture both the exuberant […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: who is that mask man?
Bob Pierron has never led a particularly quiet life. A jeweler for 30 years, he also ran jewelry classes, exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, produced sculptures in wood–including an abstract series for the Woodwork Corporation of America–and made tiny masks out of silver and gold wire, which he sold out of his gallery, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Erykah Badu
ERYKAH BADU The fat, hard-hitting groove that opens “Penitentiary Philosophy,” the first track on Erykah Badu’s new Mama’s Gun (Motown), might be explained by something called the D’Angelo Effect. It was laid down by musicians like Pino Palladino, Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, and James Poyser–all crucial players on D’Angelo’s paradigm-setting Voodoo–and both records were cut at […]
Posted inMusic
Interaction Figures
Residents Icky Flix (East Side Digital) Beastie Boys Video Anthology (Criterion Collection) By J.R. Jones More than any other art form in America, popular music has been transformed by advances in consumer electronics. The introduction of the long-playing album and the 45 rpm single in the late 40s drove a wedge between jazz and pop, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Billy
Billy, Chicago Theatre Company. A ten-year-old African-American boy, Billy, is harassed by a white teenage girl in 1937 Mississippi; when he fights back, he accidentally kills her with his pocketknife. Once the sheriff finds him, he’s convicted of first-degree murder and put to death. The narrative has rich possibilities, but David Barr’s adaptation of Albert […]
Posted inArts & Culture
New Pornographers
NEW PORNOGRAPHERS It’s a bit of a stretch to call a band featuring members of assorted Canadian indie-pop acts a “supergroup,” but this one sure made a super record–a giddy tumble of pure pop whose frothiness is balanced by a density worthy of Phil Spector. The hook-crammed Mass Romantic (on the Vancouver label Mint) was […]
Posted inArts & Culture
China Dance Theater
Hybrids can be strange two-headed monsters, and the program being presented by the 52-member Beijing-based China Dance Theatre, making its North American debut in Chicago, promises to be no exception. The 12 pieces, called collectively “August Rising,” are “modern” (that is, Western) interpretations of “traditional” (Chinese) dance movements and concepts, sometimes of recent vintage–Ode to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Damn the Torpedoes!
Damn The Torpedoes! Stockyards Theatre Project, at the Heartland Studio Theater. Disney meets A Clockwork Orange in Jill Elaine Hughes’s rather rudderless tale of six offenders locked in the detention center of Whimsey World, a theme park housing a cartoon-worshiping cult. A repressed British couple, a trailer-park mom and her four-year-old son, a stoner Pepperdine […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Steve Turre
STEVE TURRE With his long braided ponytail and Fu Manchu beard, Steve Turre cuts a striking figure, and his resume is as colorful as his image. In the 70s he worked with one-man traveling circus Rahsaan Roland Kirk, in the late 80s he played for Dizzy Gillespie in his flamboyant United Nation Orchestra, and throughout […]