The other night a colleague asked me how it can be that New Order sells out the Aragon while Echo & the Bunnymen can barely fill the Metro, when the latter group is so much more influential on modern rock. The only thing I could offer was, “Because they have a stupid name?” Great question, […]
Tag: Vol. 35 No. 9
Issue of Nov. 24 – 30, 2005
Posted inArts & Culture
Salvo Beta
Are friends electric? Salvo Beta’s computer wrangler, Sean Wolfe, has already answered Gary Numan’s question for himself, but his attitude seems to be: With friends like these, who needs enemies? “The machines that enable his creative process have also failed him the most,” says the duo’s bio from Someoddpilot Records, the label that released 2001’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Treatment
Friday 25 ASYLUM STREET SPANKERS These Energizer bunnies are touring on the new Re-Assembly, a self-released three-hour DVD that captures their tenth anniversary show last year at Austin’s Texas Union Theater, where 21 current and former members took the stage to play 29 songs. At first that might seem like too much of a good […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams
Playright Nilo Cruz taps into some of the same evocative sensuality and longing woven into his Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics. But this earlier effort, now receiving its midwest premiere under Diane Rodriguez’s direction, is too formally and politely presented given the taboo at its center. Estranged, formerly incestuous brother and sister, Luciana and Luca, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Still Lifes of Time Passing
Ron Gordon’s black-and-white photos of local cityscapes, endangered buildings, and demolition sites have their roots in a childhood spent playing in the street and building forts in vacant lots. Growing up on the far south side in the 1940s and ’50s, Gordon rarely traveled, even to the Loop. (“I thought of 91st and Commercial as […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Ice Harvest
After the gag-oriented Analyze This movies, director Harold Ramis gets a chance to show his dramatic range with this character-rich noir, adapted from a novel by Scott Phillips. John Cusack stars as a Wichita mob lawyer who conspires with a dodgy pal (Billy Bob Thornton) to embezzle $2 million from a Kansas City kingpin (Randy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Still Life in Color
T.U.T.A. (The Utopian Theatre Ensemble) performs Philip Dawkins’s new play about a love triangle set in a town inundated by rain for nine years. Dawkins’s ability to both incorporate and mock the conventions of classical Japanese theater (and briefly, Samuel Beckett’s Play) is initially promising. The cast assembled by director Zeljko Djukich is skillful, particularly […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Manon Lescaut
Abbe Prevost’s tragic 1731 novel about a young woman torn between the love she discovers with a poor student and the seductive pleasures of wealth inspired three operas. Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, his first big hit, is the most passionate. The first act is a little slow moving–this isn’t La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, or Tosca, though […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Talley & Son
The Eclipse Theatre Company ends its season of Lanford Wilson plays with the weakest of his three dramas about the Talley family. Revolving around fathers and sons, the piece is loaded with filial catastrophes: the looming death of the repellent patriarch, the younger generation’s reluctance to take over the family business, the sudden arrival of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Two-Character Play
This late, rarely performed Tennessee Williams play has been compared to Beckett and Pinter–and I’d add Sartre. But it inverts the claustrophobic gravity of these writers’ minimalist scenarios, which, however blank, possess a concrete, crushing reality. The existential terror of The Two-Character Play is defined by lightness, to use Kundera’s term: insubstantiality, transparence, oblivion. Dissociative-disorder […]
Posted inNews & Politics
It Doesn’t Take a Village
Loved your piece in today’s paper on the Andersonville cultural wars. My partner and I just moved out of the hood after a number of years of experiencing the demo-graphic changes. We were, are, and will continue to be in strong support of Dan [McCauley]. We have grown children who were always expected to behave […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Traffic Jam
Steppenwolf’s “Traffic” series, usually made up of one-night stands on Mondays, is celebrating its tenth anniversary in high style. For almost three weeks straight, artists like Elaine Stritch, the Roches, Buddy Guy, and Kiki & Herb will get a chance to try out new work, reintroduce audiences to previous shows, and chew the fat about […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Believe the Children
A “victim” in a landmark ritual-abuse case, now 30, tells a reporter he lied. But at least one prosecutor’s not buying it.
Posted inNews & Politics
They Scream for Ice Cream
Dear Mike, As a longtime Hot Type reader and one of your biggest fans, I feel compelled to call you on one aspect of your otherwise fine column on the “antitoddler coffeehouse” flap [November 18]. By granting you an interview, the toddler’s mother was doing you a favor, and your reference to “the two-year-old screaming […]
Posted inArts & Culture
“Pseudo Arrogant”
Hong Kong native Sam Ng moved to Chicago in 2001 to study film and music at Columbia College. He dressed as predictably as the next Wicker Park dude–until he started going to parties at spaces like Buddy and Camp Gay last summer. Liz Armstrong: Those shoes are insane, Sam. Sam Ng: Be careful–don’t touch them. […]