High on Handbags, Bowling, and Dirty Dancing
Tag: Vol. 35 No. 17
Issue of Jan. 19 – 25, 2006
Aspirations of Empire
Dear editor: So Michael Miner [Hot Type, January 6] thinks that the issue of the moment isn’t how we got into the Iraq war but rather “how it’s been run.” Perhaps he also believes that the real question for the Nixon administration wasn’t who conceived of and approved the Watergate break-in, but instead why the […]
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Other Just So Stories
Near the end of this program of three Rudyard Kipling fables the Great Djinn asked the audience, “Are you ready to leave India to seek other adventures?” and one youngster shouted, “No!” You couldn’t blame him. What, leave after only 45 minutes of Bollywood-style musical numbers, tales of crocodiles and camels and other exotic animals, […]
Savage Love
I have a sexual interest in the sounds of men using the toilet. There are several restaurants close to my home, and I hide a wireless telephone headset in an inconspicuous place in the bathroom. I can then record, from my home, the sounds of men farting and defecating. My husband is aware of this […]
Hopeful if Hellish
Curious Theatre Branch rounds up the troops for a festival of Beckett shorts.
My Time, My Dime
Hollywood kids themselves about why people aren’t going to the theater as much as before. Personally, I’m fed up with being subjected to their flood of ads before showtime, which is tantamount to them stealing my time without my permission, let alone without giving me the courtesy to choose whether to arrive there before the […]
Performance Provocateur
In 1998 a friend gave Tania Bruguera a copy of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, knowing that she was interested in “power issues, how power negotiates space and how power communicates,” Bruguera says. “I read it five times in a row and still didn’t understand a lot of things. At first I saw it in terms of […]
The Treatment
Friday 20 THE ATSRONOMER Multi-instrumentalist Charles Kim–the architect behind the deeply cinematic Pinetop Seven and Sinister Luck Ensemble–adds his vocals to the mix in his latest group, the Astronomer. But on the band’s eponymous self-released debut, his pedestrian singing lacks the supple, atmospheric quality of his guitar and pedal steel, diluting the effect of the […]
Koros Art + Style
Koros Art + Style 1019 W. Lake 312-738-0155 Is West Lake Street going the way of New York’s meatpacking district? Though until recently its next-door neighbor was a bakery equipment shop, the block where six-month-old luxury boutique Koros Art + Style is located is getting dotted with Range Rovers rather than forklifts. Inside, the cavernous […]
Girl, 20
The premise sounds like a setup for “Reviving Ophelia: The College Years”: a young woman is sent to therapy after she writes a sexually explicit essay for freshman comp. But first-time playwright Ellen Fairey focuses instead on the two young men who (improbably) observe the therapy sessions through a two-way mirror–one of them a psychology […]
“So This One Time . . . “
This slice-of-life piece, produced by the Disciples of Clyde, suffers from an excess of verisimilitude. With flashes of wit and wisdom, writers Kenneth Paul Drews and Dan Filowitz uncompromisingly replicate a scenario played out thousands of times each weekend. Their seven bar-bound twentysomethings display a completely plausible postgrad ambivalence about the future. The characters’ looping […]
Chris Brokaw, Elliot Dicks & Doug McCombs
Chris Brokaw has long been a team player, and usually prefers to make his contributions away from the spotlight; most notably, he maintained Codeine’s slow-burning trudge from behind the drum kit, and as a guitarist he added a fierce rhythmic muscle to Come. He’s also lent his talents to nearly two dozen other projects, from […]
David Alan Grier
Within two years of earning an MFA from Yale’s drama school in 1981, David Alan Grier had nabbed a Tony nomination and a Venice Film Festival best actor prize for his performance in Robert Altman’s Streamers. After In Living Color unearthed his comic gifts in the early 90s, however, he turned almost exclusively to movie […]
Sound Check: A Concert Series to Benefit Gary Schepers
Chicago soundman and musician Gary “Elvis” Schepers, profiled in the Meter on January 6, is currently in an assisted living center after several weeks of hospitalization to fight a flesh-eating bacterial infection. Schepers is uninsured, and his medical expenses have already topped six figures. The organizers of this benefit series have also established a Gary […]
So Much for Artistic Freedom
At Columbia College, you can shoot Bush but you can’t mock President Carter.