Rabbi Byron Sherwin knows how to lift the Cubs’ curse. But don’t ask him to do it.
Tag: Vol. 34 No. 23
Issue of Mar. 3 – 9, 2005
Posted inArts & Culture
Azadeh Moaveni
You smile too much, an Iranian friend chastised California-born journalist Azadeh Moaveni shortly after she moved to Tehran in 2000. Despite the reforms of the “Khatami spring,” corrupt Islamic fundamentalists were still in charge, and ordinary Iranians knew better than to drop their guard. Since the 1979 revolution they’d taken to heart the lesson learned […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Guitar Wolf
Rock ‘n’ roll works so hard to be cool, but it has a dirty little secret–it’s actually about excessive, embarrassing, dorky passion. It’s the musical equivalent of costumed fanboys mobbing Star Trek extras like maenads, ripping them apart in an apotheosis of zitty ecstasy. Since 1987 this Japanese trio has been maniacally devoted to a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Birth of a Pundit
The number of kids affiliated with the College National Republican Committee has more than tripled in the past six years. If they’re all like Guy Benson, liberals should be shaking in their boots.
Posted inArts & Culture
Six Organs of Admittance, P.G. Six, Harris Newman
It’s hard to imagine psychedelic folk done more exquisitely than it is by the prolific Ben Chasny, aka SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE. On his latest album, School of the Flower (Drag City), he spends most of his time leisurely exploring the hypnotic possibilities inherent in an acoustic guitar painstakingly picked. But when he indulges in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Giving Away the Farm; Here’s an Idea: How About an Airport?; Who Was on That Committee Anyway?
The Park District’s latest bad deal–building a concert venue on Northerly Island and then letting Clear Channel charge admission–won’t even cover what it cost to rip up Meigs field.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Voce Morta; Oh, the Humanities!
Apparently excellence isn’t enough to keep the chamber choir Bella Voce alive.
Posted inArts & Culture
Pacific
Why this play got the nod from Steppenwolf escapes me. Andrew Case’s nonstory concerns a bereaved couple of considerable means, one of whom copes while the other doesn’t. In the course of a sibling’s visit to their palace by the sea, tensions are laid bare, hidden dynamics exposed, and the horrible secret is etc, etc. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Savina Yannatou
It’s no longer unusual for the musical styles of a particular region to get hijacked by people who didn’t grow up there, but it’s still rarely done well. Greek singer Savina Yannatou’s latest album, Sumiglia (ECM), features songs from Spain, Moldavia, Palestine, Italy, Armenia, Albania, Corsica, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and her homeland, but it never feels […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Cage
Playwright Jeremy Menekseoglu commits a crime against drama in this overwrought, unfocused new script. The audience never gets the opportunity to invest in the outcome by anticipating the action; instead we spend all our time and effort trying to fathom what the hell is happening. Menekseoglu himself plays the lead in this story about a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Patty Red Pants
In Trista Baldwin’s Red Riding Hood-derived erotic allegory, Patty and her friend Becky grapple with their awakening sexuality while processing a peer’s murder in the woods. Baldwin’s snappy teen vernacular and winding poetic images allow Blackbird Productions’ expert cast–Lois Mathilda Atkins, Salena Hanrahan, and Wil Fleming as various manifestations of the wolf–to express the allure […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Pod Sweet Pod
New interest in manufactured housing has produced some designer dwellings to die for. But so far nobody’s figured out how to make good-looking prefab affordable.
Posted inArts & Culture
Careless Love
In the 1980s New Yorker Len Jenkin penned a series of dazzling plays–Limbo Tales, Dark Ride, American Notes–full of shady, marginalized characters bumbling through the fun house-mirrored halls of the imagination. His cheesy but menacing phantasmagorias dove into the darkest recesses of human love and obsession. But by this 1993 misfire, about an aspiring Christian […]
Posted inFilm
A Peck on the Cheek
A young Indian writer decides to adopt a Sri Lankan baby, but because the law prohibits single men from adopting, he also proposes marriage to a beautiful young woman from his village. Nine years later the couple decide to tell their adopted daughter the truth about her past, and the girl and her father journey […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
This concert celebrates Pierre Boulez’s 80th birthday with works he composed or was influenced by. The musical ideas in his slow-moving, hypnotic Rituel are carried by long sequences of instrumental and percussive gestures that are repeated with only subtle variations, evoking the ancient Japanese court music known as gagaku. It’s written for solo oboe, clarinet […]