For years, Chicagoans have rolled their eyes while viewing films purported to be taking place in their home city, but clearly filmed elsewhere (usually in Toronto.) But the fact is that plenty of movies have been shot in Chicago – it’s just that those movies are usually supposed to take place in New York. Or Cincinnati. Or East Berlin.
Blog
The Impossible Life Of A Working Actor
Steven Barkhimer is one of Boston’s busiest actors, a man beloved by critics and audiences alike. And yet, he hasn’t been able to pay his own rent in more than a year, and barely manages to scrape by financially. He’s not an anomaly, he’s the poster boy for the life of the Boston actor. And that’s a big problem for the city’s theater scene.
Reading Is Fundamental. Or Is It?
Ever since the NEA released a report bemoaning the decline of literature’s place in American life, defenders of the canon have leaped to reestablish reading as an essential part of life. And who could argue with that? Well, Mark Edmundson isn’t arguing, exactly, but he does have a few quibbles with the approach: “Reading, you hear, is necessary to maintain democracy. It can produce informed citizens. Right, but couldn’t public radio do the same thing? We hear that reading conveys knowledge; it delivers the bounty of the past to the present. Again, good, but in terms of pure rote knowledge, couldn’t film and verbal delivery work nearly as well?”
The Real Manchurian Conspiracy?
In the original version of The Manchurian Candidate, soldiers were turned into cold-blooded assassins by “a diabolical method of mind control based on memory’s emotional power.” The brainwashing technique seemed suspiciously familiar to a lot of actors, says Lee Siegel, because it was, in fact, nearly identical to the school known as Method acting, which was developed by “left-wing, socially adversarial” Russians. Hmmmm…
Who Needs Cocktail Parties When You Can Stage An Opera?
“In Britain, these days, opera in the garden is all the rage. If you own a country house with grounds, you turn everything upside down in July and August to stage a home-grown Götterdämmerung (or for the fainter-hearted, Barber of Seville). And patrons, ideally in evening dress, picnic grandly on your lawns during intermissions… The phenomenon feeds on fantasy… the proprietors imagine they’ve traveled back in time, as 18th-century princelings with private courts and orchestras at their disposal, while they reinvent the Arcadian dream. Not that they readily admit it.”
A Museum Everyone Can Hate Together
In the Middle East, a building is never just a building, just as a national boundary is never just a boundary and a religious shrine is never just a tourist attraction. Frank Gehry is finding this out the hard way, as his design for the new Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance draws withering fire from both Israelis – who have called the design “so hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so megalomaniac” – and Palestinians, who accuse Gehry of designing a building that calls to mind the Israeli destruction of Yasir Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. What everyone seems to be saying underneath the rhetoric, however, is that the museum is just too American.
Stuck in Development
The critics are nearly unanimous: Fox’s Arrested Development is the best thing to happen to sitcoms since The Simpsons, and the show is so well-written, well-acted, and refreshing that it could revitalize the entire genre. Now, if only someone other than the critics would watch it.
The New Pulp Fiction
“For good or for bad, street lit is eating up the African American book world at the moment. Walk into the Karibu bookstore in Prince George’s Plaza and you’ll see. It used to be there were just one or two small shelves of ‘street life’ books. Now there’s a whole section… What is a street lit novel? The telltale signs usually include a shut-your-mouth title, straightforward sentences, vast amounts of drugs, sex and rap music and varying degrees of crime and punishment. An exemplary tale is a mixture of foul language, flying bullets, fast cars, a flood of drugs, fallen angels and high-priced frippery. It venerates grams over grammar, sin over syntax, excess over success.”
The Musicians’ Conductor
It’s well-documented that the conductors best loved by musicians are not always the ones who get the best results from their orchestras. So when the Toronto Symphony hired former Tokyo Quartet violinist Peter Oundjian to be their next music director, William Littler needed convincing of the wisdom of the decision. But after following Oundjian around North America for a week and talking with members of various orchestras, the critic admits that there may be something to the idea of a musician leading musicians. “There is an unfailing politeness in the way he addresses the players and a consistently high energy level in his conducting.”
The Luthier’s Secret: Cold Water & Vibrational Energy
A Berkeley acupuncturist is gaining a name for himself as a maker of some of the best modern violins available today. Peter Van Arsdale’s secret is the wood he uses – found timbers salvaged from the icy waters of Lake Superior. “Cut from logs that sank maybe two centuries ago as they were being floated to frontier settlements, the wood — rot-free because there’s almost no oxygen in the cold waters where it was preserved — has a richness and density rare in younger timber.” He also sees a connection between his two professions: “Acupuncture works with vibrational energy, and violins are nothing but vibrational energy.”