New Leaf Theatre is billing Lisa Loomer’s odd, intriguing play as a romantic comedy. Girl meets boy, and in a single night they fall in love and into bed, then fall out over issues like marriage, kids, and the importance of art in history. Loomer aims to provoke, but under Brandon Ray’s direction, this production […]
Tag: Vol. 35 No. 24
Issue of Mar. 9 – 15, 2006
Posted inNews & Politics
The Man Who Drew The Matrix
Geof Darrow, the artist best known for creating the look of the Wachowski brothers’ breakthrough movie, is back in Chicago working on a new comic book series.
Posted inArts & Culture
Orthrelm, Voltage
I’m wary of putting a Critic’s Choice button on anything I write about ORTHRELM, for fear that someone will take that recommendation to mean I’m recommending them for everybody. There’s no middle ground with these guys–in my experience anyone who isn’t fascinated by this stuff finds it completely unendurable. Mick Barr (of the equally alien […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The West Side’s Funniest Home Videos
Activists bust up a backroom meeting between schools officials and politicians; hilarity ensues.
Posted inArts & Culture
Ghostface Killah
After the paranoid lyrics and sluggish tempos of 2004’s The Pretty Toney Album, Ghostface Killah’s new Fishscale (Def Jam) comes on like a shiny party record. The lead single, “Back Like That,” is big-budget bounce slicked up with multitracked R & B ooohs and romantic piano, with Ghost sounding rough and hurt, hollering about his […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Double
When I first heard the Double’s “Idiocy”–the supercatchy single from last year’s Loose in the Air (Matador)–the band’s name struck me as appropriate. Like a Swiss army knife with a thumb drive, the quartet’s chief attribute is making a somewhat forced, somewhat incongruous flexibility work: you got your sweet melodies, particularly David Greenhill’s naturally pretty […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Pajama Men
By joining forces for the first time, Steppenwolf and Second City have raised expectations for this show, and its two men in pajamas deliver with the stuff of dreams: absurdity displaces logic, characters morph midsentence, humans embody horses and alphabet letters. Writer-performers Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez, who’ve worked together since the early 90s, inhabit […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
A fairly sophisticated colleague just completed a five-day water fast, something he does two-three times a year to “purge his body of toxins.” A Harvard-educated client of mine keeps going on fruit-juice-based fasts–again to purge the toxins. And an old friend from grad school is now engaged in a very expensive round of “chelation” to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Cradle Will Rock
Little distinguishes American composer Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 quasi-Brechtian “labor opera” from other Depression-era agitprop. But this White Horse Theatre Company production isn’t driven by leftist nostalgia, despite Curtis Anderson and Andrew Moroney’s clever slide projections of collaged period images. Under the direction of Craig Joseph and Ryan Brewster (who doubles as piano player), the 13 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cathleen Falsani
Spirituality is many things to many people, but whether it’s held close and private or preached to the masses it’s intensely personal, as evidenced in Cathleen Falsani’s new book, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Falsani, the religion writer for the Sun-Times, has collected 32 interviews on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Psychic Ills
The Psychic Ills are the first band on Social Registry to thoroughly grab hold of my ears and mind. The cover of their debut, Dins–a reproduction of Wolf Vostell’s Three Hairs and Shadow–was deceptively static at first glance; a grainy print of a helicopter augmented with a few spots of color, it’s attractive enough, but […]
Posted inArts & Culture
European Union Film Festival
The ninth European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 10, through Thursday, March 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are films screening through Thursday, March 16; for a full festival schedule visit www.chicagoreader.com. R Ae Fond Kiss […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Zbigniew Karkowski
The booklet for One and Many (Sub Rosa), the most recent album by Polish-born, Japan-based sound artist Zbigniew Karkowski, doesn’t include any information on the source material he used, but where he winds up is ultimately more important than where he started. In the past he’s pulled sounds from a Kyoto temple, digital data transmissions, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Huffs
Two women who grew up with an alcoholic parent find the humor in dark times in this 75-minute double bill by the Box Theatre Group. Meg Graves opens with a short tragicomic monologue, Something in the Way, about martinis, music, and her mother. Graves’s biting observations are amusing and affecting if a bit repetitive. A […]