Films by Oskar Fischinger By Jonathan Rosenbaum While I was living in Paris in my late 20s I used to dream of making a film–if someone were to hand me an outsize check and give me carte blanche, which of course I knew would never happen. I had a project in mind. I wanted to […]
Tag: Vol. 30 No. 29
Issue of Apr. 19 – 25, 2001
Posted inArts & Culture
Musings of a Jarfly
Musings of a Jarfly, Galileo Players, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Approximately 50 minutes of the 75 in the Galileo Players’ fifth sketch-comedy revue exhibit the curiosity and intelligence befitting the company’s alleged pursuit of humor based in “the interplay between science, technology, faith, and reason.” In one vignette that manifests this ethos, a father attempts […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar
Friday 4/20 – Thursday 4/26 APRIL By Cara Jepsen 20 FRIDAY “There are an awful lot of people who actually collect adult erotica,” says Gerber/Hart Library board member Sukie de la Croix. “[They] collect it like other people collect Barbie dolls–it’s really the same thing.” The Gerber/Hart archives themselves hold a large collection of used […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Rosie Flores
ROSIE FLORES Early in Rosie Flores’s career, she seemed to want to be a bad-girl rocker and a honky-tonk angel at the same time. In the 70s and early 80s she cut her teeth in rockabilly and cowpunk bands in southern California; her 1987 solo debut, Rosie Flores, was produced by Dwight Yoakam’s guitarist, and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Class Warfare
It hurt when the archdiocese closed Saint Greogry’s grammar school, but the identity of the new tenant is like salt in the wound.
Posted inArts & Culture
Mordine & Company Dance Theatre
Shirley Mordine’s new work, Fragile, seems to depict the essence of theatricality–our interest in both acting out and watching stories. Her dancers take turns participating in some vignettes and observing others, passing the focus from one group to another throughout the middle section, the only part I saw. Set to recorded music by Dave Pavkovic […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bill Frisell New Quartet
BILL FRISELL NEW QUARTET In 1999 at the Vancouver Jazz Festival, I heard the prototype for this band play its very first show, and I can’t recall a more stultifying professional performance: dull, affectless music, most of it taken at a pace that might’ve pleased a sloth. I don’t mention this to rag on Bill […]
Posted inMusic
A Mess of His Own/Back in Service
A Mess of His Own For nearly a decade, chaos has been a prevailing force in Tim Rutili’s music. After breaking nationally with the opiated blues rock of their Sub Pop debut, Jimmywine Majestic, in 1994, his old band Red Red Meat pulled their own plug, rotating guitarists in and out of the lineup and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
TRG Music Listings
Rock, Pop, etc. concerts AWRY Free concert. Fri 4/20, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. BLESSID UNION OF SOULS All-ages concert. Wed 4/25, 8 PM, Convocation and Athletic Center, Saint Xavier University, 3700 W. 103rd. 773-298-3121. JASON ROBERT BROWN & ANDREA BURNS Fri 4/20 and Sat 4/21, 8 PM, Metropolis […]
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George Dandin
George Dandin, A Red Orchid Theatre. Moliere is best known for his satires: The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The School for Wives. But for a time he collaborated with composer-dancer Jean Baptiste Lully on a series of plays that wove together dance, music, and text. These comedie-ballets were lighter and less biting than Moliere’s more famous works. […]
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Music Note: adventures of an avant-garde Polish percussionist
Marta Ptaszynska came to the revolution late. In 1965, the Polish-born composer lugged some of her percussion instruments into a Warsaw concert hall and participated for the first time in Warsaw Autumn–a decade after the annual new-music festival was started by leading radicals such as Witold Lutoslawski. Ptaszynska was 23 then, fresh out of conservatory.” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Need
NEED, Half Cocked Productions, at the Space. Writer-director Arik Martin’s new black comedy reminds me a lot of Quentin Tarantino–before he began taking himself too seriously and became a bloated celebrity-machine joke. Some of Martin’s staging of this tale about hoodlums, junkies, and just plain weirdos recalls classic Tarantino setups. But what really makes the […]
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Ambrosio
Ambrosio, Great Beast Theater, at the Inner Town Pub. The final line in Romulus Linney’s play about a priest struggling with evil is almost worth the price of admission: “I see the demons radiant and terrible; but you, my God, I cannot see at all.” If only the rest of Ambrosio were that clear and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
You Can’t Beat a Good Story/The China Syndrome
By Michael Miner You Can’t Beat a Good Story Here’s what Larry Hamel, the Sun-Times’s boxing writer, says happened the night of March 23 at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont: Hamel was out there covering fights. He was on deadline. Promoter Bobby Hitz was on his case. “He followed me back into the media room […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Roads and Bridges
Abraham Lim, who edited the Robert Altman comedy Cookie’s Fortune, makes an auspicious debut as a writer, director, and actor with this gripping, uncommonly poetical account of the growing bond between two outsiders on a Kansas road crew: a reasonable, accommodating black man (Gregory Sullivan) and a young Chinese troublemaker who refuses to speak (Lim). […]