Posted inArts & Culture

Ludacris

Foulmouthed and lascivious as he is, this former Atlanta radio personality is also one of the few best-selling MCs to recognize the fine line between sexy talk and sexist drivel, even if he can’t always figure out which side he’d rather hang on. On his breakthrough single, “What’s Your Fantasy,” Luda pried into the sexual […]

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Lysistrata 3000

LYSISTRATA 3000, American Demigods, at the Athenaeum Theatre. It seems every young company eager to make a political statement instinctively reaches for Aristophanes’ antiwar comedy, in which Lysistrata incites the women of Athens to go on a sex strike. If only writer-director Rory Leahy had had the sense to preserve the dignity of the original […]

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Beautiful Horror Show

Far Away Next Theatre Company Tony Kushner has declared that he’s “deeply envious” of Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play Far Away–and he should be. Even the most polished specimens of his trademark logorrhea don’t come close to capturing the terrible beauty of her 50-minute dark fantasia on global themes. Far Away–now receiving its Chicago premiere at […]

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Datebook

FEBRUARY 27 FRIDAY To celebrate the 17th anniversary of its Fashion Resource Center, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has put together an exhibit juxtaposing clothes from the center’s collection with photographs and sound and video installations exploring what fashion means to society. A brown chiffon Prada gown and a black-and-white-checked Vivienne Westwood […]

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The Slick and the Sloppy

Josiah McElheny: Total Reflective Abstraction at Donald Young, through April 3 Frank Bowling at G.R. N’Namdi, through March 15 Josiah McElheny’s 19 works at Donald Young are both sensuously seductive and stunningly cold. Five of them look a bit like coffee tables–circular, rectangular, irregularly curved–displaying abstract handblown mirrored-glass objects in a variety of shapes, among […]

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The Straight Dope

I often hear that there are only five or six major corporations that control almost all of the U.S. media outlets, but I’ve never seen a list. When one thinks of AM and FM radio, network and cable television, the Internet as well as newspapers and magazines, can this really be true? General Electric, Clear […]

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Rosanna Gamson/World Wide

The curtain is raised partway to reveal a woman sitting hunched over, looking like a pile of clothing, and a bare-chested man standing just behind her, shoulders back–and once the curtain rises it becomes clear that the martial arts are to be compared with lovers’ arts. Following a loud crash, six more dancers run onstage […]

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Mountain Goats

During the 90s, John Darnielle’s songwriting was easy to fall for and hard to keep up with. Using little more than a speedily strummed acoustic guitar and his nasal bark of a voice, and unencumbered by anything like production values, Darnielle (recording, with occasional help, as the Mountain Goats) cranked out an extraordinarily high quantity […]

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Calendar

Friday 2/27 – Thursday 3/4 FEBRUARY 27 FRIDAY To celebrate the 17th anniversary of its Fashion Resource Center, the School of the Art Institute has put together an exhibit juxtaposing clothes from the center’s collection with photographs and sound and video installations exploring what fashion means to society. A brown chiffon Prada gown and a […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Say Goodnight Gracie

Vaudeville song-and-dance man Nathan Birnbaum, better remembered today as George Burns, teamed up with Irish comedienne Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen in 1923. Together they forged one of showbiz’s greatest stage, radio, and TV acts–and one of its longest marriages, from 1926 until Allen’s death in 1964. Playing straight man to the wacky Allen, Burns […]

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Jackie-O Motherfucker

This tastefully named collective, founded in Portland back in 1994 but now based in Hudson, New York, are like a nonconformist jam band–or maybe a bunch of them, because they can sound radically different depending on whether they’re strumming acoustic guitars, hydroplaning on resonant electric guitar lines, or blowing gutbucket free-jazz saxophone. If there’s a […]

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Poetry in Motion

To the editor, I’m writing to clear up several misstatements of fact in the otherwise well-written piece by Deanna Isaacs, “John Barr, Poetry Czar” (Culture Club, February 13). As a journalist I understand how writers using other journalists’ accounts compound these inaccuracies. Firstly, there were no disagreements as to how the money should be spent. […]