Sophie Calle is an artist to attached to absences. Once, for an installation titled Ghost, at New Yorks Museum of Modem Art, she had several paintings from the permanent collection taken down. In their place she installed drawings and descriptions of the missing artwork made by museum workers–from janitors to curators. For another piece, she asked 23 blind people to put their ideas of beauty into words, then photographed their faces....
The Day the Sun Turned Cold A striking moment in Mina Shum’s Double Happiness–a recent Canadian feature about an aspiring young actress in a North American city–reveals something about our attitudes toward Chinese culture. The Chinese-American heroine is auditioning for a small part as a waitress in a TV movie. After she runs through her lines, her prospective employers ask how good she is with accents. Pretty good, she replies; at this point we’ve already heard her southern drawl, and now she asks them in a French accent what kind of accent they want–French, perhaps, or something else?...
Look Homeward, Stuart Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then earlier this year director Ina Marlowe approached the Organic board about a possible merger with her own struggling not-for-profit Touchstone Theatre. A deal to formally join the two groups was finalized last summer, and Marlowe sent Gordon a letter requesting a meeting to discuss ways in which now-famous Organic alumni could get involved with the new company....
Newt Faces of ’96: A musical welcome to the democratic convention, New Tuners Theatre. The creators of this mostly musical revue approach Washington politics and the upcoming Democratic National Convention with good-natured humor. What’s especially nice is that the satire remains bipartisan: both the donkeys and the elephants are dissected in an intelligent manner similar to the tongue-in-cheek style of Mark Russell. Highlights include author Marianne Kallen’s “Hillary’s Auxiliary,” in which a group of Park Ridge citizens forgive the first lady’s sins since she’s put their hometown on the map, and author Eric Lane Barnes’s showstopping “The One I Love,” about a man’s deep infatuation with Rush Limbaugh....
Four years ago Maria Pappas was an unknown Gold Coast lawyer waging an uphill campaign for Cook County commissioner. For her part, Pappas professes indifference. “There are two other candidates in that race,” says Pappas, referring to a pair of candidates so obscure they rarely attend local endorsement sessions. “I’m not worried about what’s-his-name.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the first time commissioners are being elected from single-member districts–a change long urged by reformers who felt the old system hindered accountability....
The thematic concerns of Ang Lee’s recent hits The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman–familial obligation, misunderstanding between generations, cultural displacement–are also evident in Pushing Hands, his 1992 feature debut. Played with remarkable depth and stoicism by Sihung Lung, a former Taiwanese matinee idol whose career Lee has helped resuscitate, Chu is a tai chi master who’s left Beijing to live with his son’s family in an upscale New York suburb....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a young black woman who likes to dance and think, I find myself in the position of defending rap as an art form while simultaneously objecting to its often fragmentary, unexamined politics. Politics that espouse, among other things, misogyny, misdirected violence, and uninformed consumerism. Then along came Arrested Development, immediately accessible to someone like me, raised on the horns of Earth, Wind & Fire and nearly hypnotized by the innocuous beat of Chic, but reluctant to shake my butt to the equally innocuous, but blatantly degrading, chants of Luke and his 2 Live Crew....
When bands like the Replacements, R.E.M., the Minutemen, and the Meat Puppets transplanted punk aesthetics into music well beyond punk’s limiting boundaries, they planted the seeds that nearly a decade later have blossomed into the current success of rootsy bands like the Jayhawks, Wilco, and Bottle Rockets. With his superb debut, Bloomed (Dejadisc), as startling proof, Richard Buckner just might be the finest singer-songwriter to emerge from this postpunk diaspora. Although Buckner’s album was recorded in Lubbock, Texas, with folks like Butch Hancock and producer Lloyd Maines, he’s actually from San Francisco, where he fronts a band called the Doubters–in this new countryish movement you don’t have to be a country boy or from the south to revel in restrained, twangy beauty....
If you’ve ever loved and lost you’ll identify with Robin Lakes’s evening of five pieces, “Before Love Came to Town.” But don’t expect any of that boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl stuff. For one thing, these five dances definitely take the woman’s point of view. For another, Lakes has really messed with that happy-ending formula. The new piece that begins the evening, Moved, reveals a woman (Lakes) agonizing over her failed relationship with a live-in lover and her decision to move out....
HEATHER NOVA, BEN FOLDS FIVE 10/27, DOUBLE DOOR Melodramatic songstress Heather Nova, who was raised on a houseboat in Bermuda but now lives in England, might well have a gift for crafting overripe pop songs, but her singing consistently detracts from any attention they might warrant. When I’ve been able to wade through her vocal quagmire her writing has reminded me of Kate Bush and Tori Amos–more concerned with evocation than melody....
Technically Stereolab’s music belongs under the heading of experimental noise rock, but wait a minute. While most noise rock is based on the sound of grinding boulders or worse, Stereolab asks the musical question: Why not make noise with sounds that are lighter? Like humming, for instance. The result is an uncompromising, entrancing melange of ambient but not entirely unaggressive rock ‘n’ roll that recalls Eno’s soothing sound scapes as much as the massive guitar constructions of the Jesus and Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine....
In cold print David Sedaris is witty, but to get the full effect you have to hear him speak the words aloud: no one knows better than he does how to wring every last wicked laugh out of his subtle prose. That’s why it’s better to hear Sedaris narrating “The SantaLand Diaries” on NPR than to read the story yourself. And that’s why even seasoned comic actor Harry Althaus, reading Sedaris’s work last April for Stories on Stage (a series of dramatic readings of prose works), didn’t quite get it right: he kept pushing things a bit too hard, overplaying phrases that were meant to be wry asides, not letting the words lead to the comedy as Sedaris does....
By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Things campaign-finance reformers don’t want to know. Why has 20 years of campaign finance reform succeeded in many specific goals (limiting individual and PAC giving, banning corporate giving) yet failed in its main goal–ending candidates’ need to raise money by kowtowing to special interests? Because, writes Norman Ornstein in the New Republic (June 10), “Reducing the supply of money without addressing the demand for money is a recipe for disaster....
Tom Corcoran is about to explain how Ted Kimbrough really got hired as superintendent when the phone rings. It’s an aide from the mayor’s office wanting to know about the unions in the school system. No one at City Hall–not even the mayor, who’s about to make a general speech on the subject–knows precisely how many there are or what they are. Corcoran is secretary to the school board, its official record keeper: the fastidious fellow at the board’s public-comment sessions who keeps checking his watch and tells speakers when they’ve exceeded their two minutes....
For a long time–into my teens actually–I was convinced that when you became a grown-up, you were invited to a special meeting where all life’s mysteries were explained. This was why adults always knew everything, and why I was perpetually perplexed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I couldn’t understand the difference between a sound track in a movie, which the actors supposedly couldn’t hear, and if there was a radio on in the movie, which the actors could hear....
When avant-garde director and theorist Richard Schechner some 20 years ago called for “all the spaces in a theater [to be] actively involved in all aspects of the performance,” I don’t think he had in mind Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding. Yet this freewheeling, audience-interactive re-creation of a contemporary Italian wedding is living proof of the marvelously spontaneous theater that can be made when the audience is included. True, the premise here is kind of silly....
It was the most significant custodial discovery since Frank Wills found the tape over the door at the Watergate complex. In the summer of 1989 a busboy cleaning a booth at Counsellors Row restaurant found an electronic bug. Its cover blown, the FBI admitted that it had been using the monitoring device to eavesdrop on the conversations of First Ward politicians. The discovery changed the face of Chicago politics. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
WOODY GUTHRIE’S AMERICAN SONG Briar Street Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That Guthrie’s vision has continued to shine through several generations of interpreters–including his son Arlo–is tribute to his power and poetry. The finely honed arrangements of Peter Glazer’s documentary-biography-revue, Woody Guthrie’s American Song, may offend purists, but they definitely reveal the humble wisdom and transcendent beauty of the originals. And now the 1991 Northlight Theatre production, which captured three of the top Joseph Jefferson awards later that year, is being revived virtually intact at the Briar Street Theatre....
20th Century Man: An Evening With Ray Davies Ray Davies has always seemed to have an inferiority complex. Pursuing an almost indescribably up and down career with the Kinks and a series of ambitious but usually ill-fated solo projects, Davies boasts a jaw-dropping resumé of hit songs. And with the possible exception of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, he’s the one survivor of 60s rock who hasn’t sold out, betrayed, or otherwise fucked over his legacy....
Friday 22 Saturday 23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two Village theaters open up for free movies today for their annual children’s holiday party. At the original Village Theatre, 1548 N. Clark, Andre the Seal is showing at 10 and noon; at the Village North Theatre, 6746 N. Sheridan, The Page Master is showing at the same times. Call the Village at 642-2403 and the Village North at 764-9100 for details....
