The half-drunk, 200-strong crowd assembled at the Chicago Brauhaus at 10 PM on a recent Saturday was already flush with the spirit of Oktoberfest by the time Gody Windischhofer, in forest green lederhosen, lurched to the front of the stage, raised his cocktail, and began to shout. “Do you know what time it is?” Windischhofer […]
Tag: Vol. 32 No. 5
Issue of Oct. 31 – Nov. 6, 2002
Posted inNews & Politics
It’s Not Funny Till Someone Gets Hurt
From “Fear Factor” to “Jackass: The Movie,” a fast growing genre celebrates the hot new American pastime: pain.
Posted inNews & Politics
Sitting Pretty
What to wear for the portrait? Mary Cassatt must have put the question to herself before she picked the gold-ribboned bonnet and shapely blue-green dress she immortalized in her watercolor self-portrait from about 1880. That work, along with William Zorach’s sketch of Edna St. Vincent Millay in a provocative silk robe and Charles Dana Gibson’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ron Sexsmith
Ron Sexsmith has been reinvigorated by love–or so he suggests in the liner notes to his new album, Cobblestone Runway (Nettwerk), where he thanks one Colleen Hixenbaugh for “taking my heart by surprise.” Too bad this newfound happiness seems to have defanged him as a lyricist. In “Former Glory” he promises, “Though the cold north […]
Posted inMusic
Cajmere
Chicago native Curtis A. Jones is probably better known as Green Velvet, a wickedly funny trickster who mocks clueless ravers (“La La Land”) and fearful parents (“Flash”) and claims to have been kidnapped by aliens while doing the dishes (“Abducted”); his dirty beats have gained him entree into the neoelectro mix that’s now all the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
David Kodeski’s True Life Tales: I Can’t Explain the Beauty
David Kodeski’s True Life Tales: I Can’t Explain the Beauty, Live Bait Theater, through December 7. Writer-performer David Kodeski has achieved no small fame for his banal brand of anthropology. Scavenging the personal histories of strangers–in this case, the mid-1930s diaries of one Fred Nye–he makes mountains of obscure molehills, filling in the gaps with […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Calling him a “terrorist” might help you get through. Tom McGrath writes U.S. Catholic (October) on the omnipresence of commercials: “If any of us were approached by a slick-talking stranger who said he wanted to come into our house and talk to our kids for a couple of hours a night–just to give them suggestions […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
Tell you what, Dan. If you do your job and answer some fucking questions, all of your readers promise to run out and buy your book and make it a best-seller. But if you keep boring us with the details of your boring book tour, none of us will buy your book! No more bullshit […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Faith of a Fireman
George Rabiela, left, was photographed in February 2000 by Robert A. Davis as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. I interviewed him in September 2000 in his office above the Chicago Fire Department’s “Survive Alive” house. My name is George Rabiela, and I’ve been on the fire department for 24 years. I came to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Life Separates Us
Life Separates Us, Cousin Billy Plays and Van Chester Productions, at Chicago Actors Studio. Playwright-director Sean Farrell is obviously still struggling to make sense of the mismatched puzzle pieces of 9/11. Not surprisingly, then, his attempt to define one character’s crisis of faith in the wake of that event is his latest work’s least compelling […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Songs of Themselves
Theater District About Face Theatre at Steppenwolf Theatre Sometime in the mid-90s it became apparent to me that female characters in contemporary television dramas are far better written than those in most plays. I’d rather watch an episode of ER than almost anything turned out recently by Donald Margulies or Rebecca Gilman–at least I know […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
DONNAS 11/1, METRO The Donnas “turned 21” almost two years ago, and they sure don’t play like little girls anymore. They can’t afford to–as Allison “Donna R.” Robertson told Spin recently, “Cock rock is about how well you play. Guys are always waiting for you to mess up.” I hope the slumber-party cover art of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Time of the Cuckoo
Time of the Cuckoo, Shattered Globe Theatre, at Victory Gardens Theater. In his memoir Original Story By, gay playwright Arthur Laurents confesses that the female central character in his 1952 drama Time of the Cuckoo “is based on…what was going on inside me” during a trip to Venice, where sex “hangs in the air.” Feisty, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Royal George Theatre Center. This off-Broadway transplant–which features a book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro, catchy music by Jimmy Roberts, and a staging by original director Joel Bishoff–offers a series of sitcom-slick sketches about dating and marriage. There isn’t much new here: women buy too many shoes, men […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Were vomitoriums really used in ancient Roman times so that people could throw up between courses in order to eat more? –Christine Let me ask you this, Christine. The last time you were doubled over the porcelain throne heaving your nachos, did you think: I want to permanently consecrate part of my home to this […]