DANIEL BARENBOIM AND RADU LUPU Fifty years ago, at age seven, Daniel Barenboim made his professional debut in his native Buenos Aires, and for the golden anniversary of that occasion he’s holding a series of concerts, here and at Carnegie Hall, with old friends and longtime collaborators. Last Sunday he played Symphony Center with an […]
Tag: Vol. 30 No. 8
Issue of Nov. 23 – 29, 2000
Posted inNews & Politics
Have Yourself a Jazzy Little Christmas
Chicago guitarist and arranger Bob Loewy had three daughters, one of whom grew up to be jazz pianist Judy Roberts. “He’d go to work at night,” she recalls. “And all day we’d sit around and make music.” Roberts learned more than a thousand songs from her father; she’ll perform some of them when she and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Christmas Carol
A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Goodman Theatre. It’s right that the show that ends Goodman Theatre’s 75 years in its old home behind the Art Institute is a ghost story. Dickens’s tale of redemption seems a fitting farewell, both prologue and epilogue: the Ghost of Dramas Past yields to the Ghost of Dramas Yet to Come. This […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Divine Inspiration
J.F. Powers didn’t just write about priests–he also made them thoroughly human.
Posted inArts & Culture
The King Stag
Best known for her puppet-filled stage adaptation of the animated feature The Lion King, a Broadway hit, Julie Taymor is much more than another talented Disney vassal. She’s been creating theater on the fringes for more than 20 years, incorporating an eclectic mix of influences. As a student she studied mime in Paris with Jacques […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Rx: instructional leadership. “A year ago in North Lawndale,” writes Elizabeth Duffrin in Catalyst (October), “one school saw nearly half its 3rd-, 6th- and 8th-graders fall short of the test scores required for promotion to the next grade. Around the corner, a similar school failed just one in seven students. In the Robert Taylor Homes […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Flower Power
By Hank De Zutter As miracles go, it was small, even silly. It brought a giggle, not a gasp. And yet it was miraculous that somehow on a cold November morning both a tomato plant and a sunflower were blooming out of a sidewalk in downtown Chicago. With no visible source of sustenance–not even dirt–both […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Land of Karaoking Improvisers
LAND OF THE KARAOKING IMPROVISERS, Moctis, at the Playground. Usually, the more gimmicks improvisers use–masks, props, strange acting styles and conceits–the worse the show is. The exception was the Hyde Park-based troupe Sheila. For years they performed using the most annoying, cumbersome premise: moment by moment, they followed the dictates of a “giant wall of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
I once read a quotation along the lines that there are only seven basic story lines, and that all the stories in the world can be seen as permutations of those seven. Do you know: (a) Who said/wrote it? (b) What the exact quotation is (including the descriptions of the basic story lines)? –Julian Maynard-Smith, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kiss or Kill
Who needs another killer couple fleeing cross-country with cops in hot pursuit? Yet thanks to this 1998 Australian thriller’s aggressive and unnerving formal approach–jump cuts that hurtle us through the story like a needle skipping across a record and an inventive camera style that defamiliarizes characters as well as settings–the characters’ paranoia is translated into […]
Posted inNews & Politics
“He Paints With Light”
In the photo lab, Jack Leb turns a negative into a thing of beauty. In his life, as he made his way through the Middle East and across the sea to America, he sometimes had to do the same.
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar
24 FRIDAY Last year on this, the biggest shopping day of the year, there were Buy Nothing Day anticonsumerism actions in over 30 countries. In Vancouver a gold-clad Mr. Materialism thanked shoppers for their enthusiastic spending, while in Kyoto a “Zenta” Claus sat meditating in the lotus position for eight hours on the city’s busiest […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Vote of No Confidence
Florida-style politics throw locals for a loop up north in the 33rd Ward.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Legend of Spirit Mountain
The Legend of Spirit Mountain, ETA Creative Arts Foundation. This company, dedicated to producing new plays from the African-American community, often stages works in progress–and The Legend of Spirit Mountain certainly fits that bill. Playwright K.M. Nkosi is a lyrical storyteller whose almost mythological play offers a fresh, interesting take on familiar issues: saving an […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Melt-Banana
MELT-BANANA This Japanese four-piece plays a dazzlingly intricate, perpetually wired, sometimes childlike, and nakedly joyous mix of hardcore, noise, improv, and pop, bringing the various subcultures together in a rapturous orgy of pure energy. K.K. Null took them under his wing in 1993, putting out their first album and giving them their earliest international exposure, […]