An astute fan can usually tell by reading between the lines of reviews when a band is really something remarkable–critics drop the usual obvious comparisons to greater bands and fumble for their own inspiration to pay fitting tribute to someone else’s. The easy referents for this Brooklyn quintet would be Devo, the Residents, Current 93, […]
Tag: Vol. 31 No. 18
Issue of Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2002
Posted inNews & Politics
Rosenbaum’s Double Standard
Late last year, I wrote a letter to your publication regarding Jonathan Rosenbaum. The letter questioned how Rosenbaum could utterly excoriate Shadow of the Vampire for its near-slanderous portrayal of F.W. Murnau when only a few weeks earlier, in his review of Quills, he had stated, in no uncertain terms, that historical accuracy wasn’t really […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Moon Over Buffalo
Moon Over Buffalo, Attic Playhouse. Ken Ludwig’s 1979 farce is full of slamming doors, backstage shenanigans, and hilarious misunderstandings as a struggling company of touring players tries to overcome defections, drunkenness, and the resulting confusion in time for a matinee Frank Capra is expected to attend. Seldom seen in Chicago, the play suffers by comparison […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Kehr’s Curse
Re: Hot Type 1/18/2002 Michael Miner laments that David Kehr is a freelancer and not one of the staff film critics for the New York Times even though Kehr’s New York Times review is quoted in a recent two-page advertisement in the New York Times for The Royal Tenenbaums. David Kehr is a very brilliant […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Robbie Fulks’s Grand Old Town School Opry
Few contemporary songwriters understand and appreciate the mechanics of a good song like Robbie Fulks, and even fewer can tweak those conventions as willfully as he can. He’s proven that his talent transcends idiom, with his pop-minded Geffen album Let’s Kill Saturday Night and last year’s eclectic Couples in Trouble, and though his latest offering, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
James Peterson & Lucky Peterson
Before he turned five, guitarist Lucky Peterson had made his stage debut, playing his father James’s nightclub in Buffalo; in 1971, at age six, he charted with “1-2-3-4,” one of the last hit singles Willie Dixon produced. By his teens he was touring with some of the biggest names in contemporary blues, and in 1984 […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Praise capital, from whom all blessings flow. Muslim theologian Farid Esack, quoted in U.S. Catholic (January): “The Buddhist theologian David Loy has described faith in the free market as a religion, a religion with a transcendent god, a god that is worshiped and that its adherents have a deep yearning to embrace and to be […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lost in the Cherry Orchard
Go Away–Go Away European Repertory Company at National Pastime Theater Governmental and economic systems may come and go, but the Russians remain the Russians. And to be Russian means to have a clear vision of a better world, a better life, coupled with the understanding–perhaps not as clear but far more enduring–that such a world […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Who’s a Lightweight?
The tale of the tape says the Illinois attorney general race should be the biggest mismatch since Peter McNeeley threw in the towel against Mike Tyson. John Schmidt (Harvard man, ex-associate attorney general of the United States) versus Lisa Madigan (Loyola University law ’94, first-term state senator). But Madigan’s father, Illinois house speaker Michael Madigan, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
WHO INVENTED PARADISE? I enjoyed your commentary on the Islamic concept of paradise as it is described in the Koran [December 14]. Your generalizations are acceptable except for the statement that “Christianity, after all, invented the idea of paradise in the first place.” Paradise is a Zoroastrian concept. It was borrowed by Jews from the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Song and dance man: Jason Graae’s in town
The son of an Argonne National Laboratory scientist, musical theater star Jason Graae spent his early years in Elmhurst, Lombard, and Villa Park, and after his family moved away he returned for several summers to attend a Northwestern University program for talented teens. But once his career took off in the 80s and 90s, he […]
Posted inFilm
A Page of Madness
Teinosuke Kinugasa’s mind-boggling silent masterpiece of 1926 was thought to have been lost for 40 years until the director discovered a print in his garden shed. A seaman hires on as a janitor at an insane asylum to free his wife, who’s become an inmate after attempting to kill herself and her baby. The film’s […]