I just read your response to Disabled Dilemma, the man who was trying to find a girlfriend for his disabled friend. You told DD that his disabled friend should “reconcile himself to being alone.” I’m not sure how to react. Part of me wants to call you a cold, mean-spirited fuck. The other part of […]
Tag: Vol. 31 No. 29
Issue of Apr. 18 – 24, 2002
Posted inMusic
Songs of the Pioneers
The Complete Okeh and Brunswick Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden Sessions (1924-36) (Mosaic) Frank Trumbauer is one of the odder jazz heroes. In the early 1920s, when most jazz saxophonists were still farting staccato on the beat, he brought a smooth and singing conception to the saxophone (C melody and alto), pointing the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Killer is Loose
Chicago-born Budd Boetticher, who died last November at 85, directed mostly B pictures and television, but as the Film Center’s current retrospective proves, he developed an austere yet graceful style perfectly suited to his stoic worldview and shrewd psychological insight. In this taut 1956 noir a meek, bespectacled ex-GI (Wendell Corey in a memorably creepy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lecture Notes: burrowing into Ground Zero
John Zils watched the World Trade Center burn on a television on the ninth floor of the Santa Fe Building, where the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is headquartered. “I would have never ever dreamed those buildings would have collapsed in their entirety,” says Zils, a structural engineer who, in his 33 years at […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Celebrating Stan Brakhage: A Sampler
Over a half century Stan Brakhage has come to be regarded as our most significant avant-garde filmmaker, admired for the way he explores the plastic, rhythmic quality of images (most of his films lack sound tracks or obvious narratives). The six masterpieces on this program come from different periods in his career, but they all […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Police Misconduct
To the editor: As a Chicago policeman for 20 years, including 12 assigned to the 14th District, from 1984-’96, I would like to address outright lies, embellishments, and urban legends in the article written by former police officer Juan Antonio Juarez (“A Soldier’s Story,” April 12). The late police officer John Lyons, who Juarez identified […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Angel City
Angel City, Artistic Home. There’s been quite a run on 70s Sam Shepard plays: the navel-gazing Cowboy Mouth (1971) and this 1976 satire of the Hollywood film industry opened within a week of each other. That’s not such a bad thing: at his best, Shepard is without equal when it comes to capturing the twin […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Casualties of War
Fazal Sheikh grew up in New York, but the grandfather he was named for was born in India and raised Muslim in the northern area that later became Pakistan. In 1912 his grandfather migrated within the British Commonwealth to Kenya to seek his fortune. He became a prosperous merchant in Nairobi and eventually bought a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Derrick Carter
Of Chicago’s many house DJs, probably the most popular–in town, in the country, in the world–is Derrick Carter. In fact, he’s become something of an ambassador for both the city and the style. A DJ since age 13 (spinning at the Basement) and a former buyer for local dance emporium Gramophone Records, Carter currently runs […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Cop’s Cop
The article “A Soldier’s Story” published in your April 12 issue was a disgrace to John J. Lyons Jr., his family, and his respected colleagues of the Chicago Police Department. Juan Juarez’s facts were inaccurate and the fact that he can quote a conversation from 11 years ago is prodigious. He notes that he had […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Anything Goes
ANYTHING GOES, Drury Lane Oakbrook, and ANYTHING GOES, Stage Right Dinner Theatre. It’s hard to believe this lightweight 1934 musical came out of the Depression. But its silliness was probably the point. A throwback to such Jazz Age obsessions as flappers and gangsters, the book was reassuringly retro. Americans Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse and […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
ALTAN 4/20, OLD TOWN SCHOOL This veteran band is considered by many to be the cream of the Irish-traditional crop, and with good reason–Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh’s voice skitters like a seagull over waves of clean, clear, but ornate instrumentation, emphasis on the fiddles and pipes. And there’s nobody on the mainstream world-music scene who gives […]