Alain Resnais, the most gifted misunderstood French filmmaker alive, turns a silly 20s farce into a dreamlike evocation of classic Hollywood musicals.
Tag: Vol. 34 No. 25
Issue of Mar. 17 – 23, 2005
Posted inArts & Culture
Christina Carter & Gown, Lichens
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Christina Carter is best known for the often emotionally harrowing music she plays in Charalambides, but her recent releases without the band sound every bit as haunted. Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death, Vol. 1 (Ecstatic Yod), recorded with guitarist Loren MazzaCane Connors, is a tribute to John Fahey, but […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
I am a 15-year-old boy who’s never had a girlfriend, and I wanted to ask you personally, How do you get girls? Like the best way to get them, so they think I’m interesting. I await your orders. –Teenager Going to Waste There’s nothing I enjoy more than ordering around the odd teenage boy, TGTW, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jamie O’Neill
It took the threat of a local appearance by Irish writer Jamie O’Neill to get me to finally read his brilliant At Swim, Two Boys (Scribner, 2001), which has been weighing down my to-read stack for about three years. O’Neill spent ten years on At Swim while working as a night porter in a London […]
Posted inArts & Culture
China Through Her Own Eyes: A Journey in Film
Presented by Columbia College Chicago, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, this series of Chinese films from the past two decades screens Thursday through Sunday, March 17 through 20, at the Columbia College Ludington Building, 1104 S. Wabash. Admission is free, though seating is limited; for […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Snips
[snip] The shrinking middle class. According to the Chicago Mutual Housing Network, the percentage of Chicagoans who could afford to buy the median-value home in the city in 1989: 44. In 1999: 36. In 2002: 17. [snip] Putting it in the nicest possible way. “When I go to a doctor and ask for a diagnosis […]
Posted inArts & Culture
What’s in It for Us?
Nine Words: “Performance of Sleep in One Long Act Without Intermission”
Posted inNews & Politics
How Much Green Does It Take to Go Green?
This obsessive environmentalist rehab has cost $1.5 million so far, but it’s powered by thinkng that can adapt to almost any budget.
Posted inArts & Culture
Story Week Festival of Writers
The ninth edition of Columbia College’s annual literary festival, hosted by the school’s fiction writing department, presents readings, signings, and panels with authors and Columbia faculty, this year under the theme “The Politics of Story.” Events run Monday, March 21, through Saturday, March 26, at various venues as shown below. All are free. (A Story […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Masters of Persian Music
Mohammed Reza Shajarian, widely considered the greatest singer of Iranian classical music today, is the center of this immodestly named group; his intense vocals can be both gorgeous and sorrowful, calm ruminations or soaring, melismatic declamations. Hossein Alizadeh is a virtuoso of the tar–a dry, twangy lute–as well as a prolific and skilled composer who’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Leave Your War at the Door
Two strong new shows about the difficulty of readjusting to civilian life and love.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Treatment
Friday 18 CHOROS, RAGS & JAZZ This show promises to explore the choro music of Brazil and its relationship to ragtime and New Orleans jazz–a tall order, but I welcome the attempt. Choro spun off from Portuguese fado in the 19th century, and like fado it conveys a mood of bluesy introspection. As it absorbed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival
The final three days of this festival, at the Chicago Cultural Center, Claudia Cassidy Theater, 78 E. Washington, include 16 film and video programs plus a few other events; all screenings are free. More information and a full festival schedule are available online at www.widc.org. Of the programs I previewed, the strongest is Miranda July’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Guinea Pig Solo
Brett C. Leonard’s visceral, far-reaching update of Woyzeck–Georg Buchner’s 1837 unfinished masterpiece about a troubled soldier who kills his lover–is far from a one-note antiwar polemic. This tale of an isolated and enraged Puerto Rican combat vet of the Iraq war, separated from his wife and son and further marginalized by class and ethnicity, also […]