Dearraindrop’s show last week couldn’t hold a candle to the last time they were in town. But then what could?
Tag: Vol. 34 No. 26
Issue of Mar. 24 – 30, 2005
Posted inMusic
The Difference a Year Makes
In the past 12 months, Champaign’s Living Blue have scored a deal with Minty Fresh, wowed Little Steven, and caught Hollywood’s ear. But at SXSW, they were still jamming econo.
Posted inNews & Politics
Life in the Rearview Mirror
Nothing like driving a busload of Miss Daisys to make you appreciate the time in front of you.
Posted inNews & Politics
Snips
[snip] “To the Bush administration, ‘Islam’ is an abstraction,” writes Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books. “For the US, the Middle East is a faraway land, a convenient place to export America’s troubles so that they won’t have to be addressed in the ‘homeland.’ But the Middle East is Europe’s ‘near abroad,’ […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Billy the Mountain & Other Wartime Stories
This rambunctious rock operetta using Frank Zappa’s lyrics contends with a handful of awkward impediments. There’s the infamous middle finger of a post that sits dead center before the Elbo Room’s stage. Then there’s the Striding Lion InterArts Workshop’s ingenious seating process, contrived to guarantee a musical-chairs free-for-all. Finally, the tale itself–the adventures of Billy, […]
Posted inMusic
Dudsville, USA
Even the worst singles on a new limited-edition box set reveal something about what would make the label great.
Posted inArts & Culture
Up and Down
Chosen to represent the Czech Republic at the Oscars, this Altman-esque fresco by Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall) offers a provocative and entertaining satirical account of intersecting lives, classes, and subcultures in contemporary Prague. At first it seems to be about immigration, but eventually it becomes a wry commentary on racism and xenophobia as manifested […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Treatment
Friday 25 GRAHAM COXON, GOLDEN REPUBLIC You can tell from Graham Coxon’s solo work that he’s the one who led Blur away from sly Britpop and toward the Pavement-y indie rock of albums like Blur (1997) and 13 (1999). On his latest record, Happiness in Magazines (Astralwerks), the guitarist ditches the lo-fi aesthetic but still […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bloc Party, Ponys
Despite the vaguely leftist connotations of their name, London’s Bloc Party sound much less Gang of Four-damaged than some of their stateside counterparts. Substituting terse quasi-anthemic pop hooks for angular clutter, they caught the attention of critics while opening for Franz Ferdinand on a UK tour in 2003; that led to a string of singles, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mountains Clouds Turbulence Coastlines
Wholesale Chicago’s multimedia antiwar piece, directed by Dolores Wilber, is blessedly oblique and nonaccusatory. Two towering men in orange jumpsuits (Steven Thompson and Douglas Grew) repeat such odd actions as spinning a safety pin on a clothesline and pretending to cook nonfood items, including what looks like sawdust with turds in it. At times the […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Berger World; Yet Another Organization Loses Its Head; The Successful Failure
The controversial landlord of the Flat Iron Building takes over the Fine Arts complex, with grand plans.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Music Man
Ray Frewen’s production of Meredith Willson’s quintessential middle-American musical–aided by Gregory Slawko’s colorful, period-perfect costumes and James Zager’s sassy choreography–captures its exuberance, tartness, and mischief. Gene Weygandt is the lovable Professor Harold Hill, sauntering through River City with a great sense of rhythm and self-assured charm as he rips off the citizens for uniforms and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Justice Yeldham & the Dynamic Ribbon Device
A performance by Justice Yeldham & the Dynamic Ribbon Device, aka Australian noise artist Lucas Abela, is as hair-raising as fingernails on a chalkboard. But in this case the fingernails are his face and the chalkboard is a pane of glass, which is rigged with a contact mike that’s attached to a belt girded with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Crossroads and Quixote
Bruce Baillie’s rarely screened Quixote (1965) stands alongside other synoptic 60s masterpieces such as Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Vision and Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise, which use dense collages of diverse images in an attempt to make sense of a troubling world. In Quixote wild horses and a basketball game are part of a cross-country […]