With their stacks of synths, buggy goggles, and black-and-white checkered hoods and pajamas, these two Florida nerds look like yet another gimmicky concept band. Fortunately they don’t have a kooky agenda or implausible backstory we’re supposed to buy into–they’re just here to rock our party and wear goggles while they do it. It’d be easy […]
Tag: Vol. 36 No. 21
Issue of Feb. 15 – 21, 2007
Posted inArts & Culture
The Teapot Scandals
The centerpiece of Jon Steinhagen’s sparkling new musical is a dim-bulb Republican president from Ohio with a penchant for cronyism and corruption–we’re talking Warren G. Harding, of course. Steinhagen’s take on the 29th president is surprisingly compassionate, though his sly satirical revue, receiving its world premiere from Porchlight Music Theatre, shouldn’t be taken as historical […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Seldoms
Choreographer Carrie Hanson became fascinated by the concept of darkness while reading In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s slim 1933 volume on Japanese aesthetics (one tidbit: it was once customary for elderly women to black out their teeth). The Seldoms’ program–a collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble, a music group based in Chicago and New […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Landscape of the Body
Crowded into a performing space smaller than many living rooms, John Mossman’s pressure-cooker production is well suited to John Guare’s eccentric, overheated drama about a Maine housewife turned Times Square porn star accused of killing her son. Filled with intense performances and executed at a pace that unifies Guare’s intentionally jagged storytelling, this staging reveals […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Czech Modernism in Film: The 1920s to the 1940s
Drawn from the Anthology Film Archive in New York and the National Film Archive in Prague, this series examines modernism in Czech films from the silent to the postwar era. A dozen features screen at Facets Cinematheque through Thursday, February 22; for a complete schedule visit www.facets.org. RCrisis This 1939 documentary about Hitler’s invasion of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Toy Soldiers
J. Sebastian Fabal’s song cycle opens with a requiem featuring a mother dressed in black and cradling a flag from a military funeral. Suspense is patently not the composer-playwright’s intent. Though he’s purportedly addressing the current war in the Middle East, the scenario seems closer to the Vietnam era, from protesters’ outdated slogans to soldiers’ […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
I caught a segment on some car show about modding up your car. One of the things they mentioned was the benefit of filling your tires with nitrogen instead of air. Considering I fill my tires with air and don’t have much of a problem constantly refilling them, what is the straight dope on nitrogen […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jean-Yves Thibaudet
Last month Jean-Yves Thibaudet was one of the headliners at the Cartagena International Music Festival, offering an outstanding performance of Saint-Saens’s Second Piano Concerto. He gave the dramatic Bach-like opening a bold, rich sound and played the first movement’s lyrical passages soulfully, the virtuosic sections with bravura. And though the piano had a stiff, difficult […]
Posted inMusic
Sharp Darts: A Gift Horse
Daytrotter.com records top-shelf indie bands live in the studio–and gives away the MP3s for free.
Posted inArts & Culture
Computers and Chaos
Anna Ursyn WHEN Through 2/24 WHERE Illinois Institute of Technology, Galvin Library, 35 W. 33rd, 2nd fl. INFO 312-567-5293 Anna Ursyn’s prints at the Illinois Institute of Technology–which incorporate photographic fragments and computer-generated geometrical shapes–have a complexity and suppleness unusual in computer graphics. Ursyn often repeats elements, sometimes with variations, to convey a sense of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Great Go-Goop War Part III
With a final bow to Dr. Seuss And another to the late Molly Ivins, coiner of “Shrub” By a faraway star, on a dark little globe, In a place never probed by a NASA space probe There’s a big ugly desert of bubbly black rubble That bristles with prickles and thickets of stubble. Go closer, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Pastimes: How to Win Friends and Influence Elections
Jimm Dispensa wanted AlderTrack to be more than just a resource for voters. He wanted it to be a good time.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
Hey, everybody: by now you’ve no doubt heard the news that America’s favorite crystal-meth-snorting, male-escort-blowing evangelical Christian pastor is cured! While 99.9 percent of wannabe ex-gays struggle to overcome their homosexuality for decades, Ted Haggard was pronounced “completely heterosexual” after just 21 days of counseling! Don’t you just love a happy ending? I’d like to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bobby Conn
Bobby Conn’s new King for a Day (Thrill Jockey) seems scattershot in its choice of subjects–Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, global warming, a filthy basement show where members of the band had their toes sucked by the crowd–but that’s just part of its sharply crafted artifice. After all, that lack of focus fits right in […]