From the Ledge

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago has been on a roll lately, with its fantastic Escultura Social exhibit of new Mexican art last summer, and Sympathy for the Devil, the much-talked about showcase of the intersection of rock and roll and art last fall, proving once and for all that it is one of the top platforms in the country for brave, unique, innovative contemporary arts programming. So I was really looking forward to its Jeff Koons exhibit, simply titled “Jeff Koons”, which opened May 31.  For one, this exhibit was the first comprehensive survey of the work of this major contemporary artist, including not only his most well-known pieces but also a parallel exhibition of the works of the Chicago artists, such as Ed Paschke, who influenced him.  For another, Koons himself had been very much involved in putting the show together, and had made available some pieces from his personal collection.  Finally, it wasn’t a traveling show- it was an art show conceived in Chicago, which would only be seen in Chicago.  Well, great expectations beget even greater disappointments, and the show, as well as the artist, Jeff Koons, has fallen with a thunderous thud, in my eyes.

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Tags: Jeff Koons, MCA Chicago

Chicago is food festival central every summer.  Of course, the motherlode of culinary shamelessness, the Taste of Chicago, just wrapped over the weekend (with the hue and cry over violence at the Taste overshadowing any discussions of the quality of the delicacies on view, or more apropros, in mouth).  There’s something for every self-styled Chicago foodie over the next several weeks; from street festivals such as the Taste of Lincoln Avenue (where Chad and Trixie-watching will trump any attempt at true gastronomy) to high-end food celebrations/benefit events such as the very noteworthy Share our Strength/Taste of the Nation at the Trump International Hotel and Tower to idiosyncratic discoveries such as the Sugar Grove Corn Boil in, uhmmm, Sugar Grove, Illinois.  Since corn isn’t my vegetable of choice and Sugar Grove isn’t this white-linen-pants-wearing boy’s kind of town, I’ll be attending, instead, two of the most interesting, culinary-wise, and most significant food events of the season.  Next week, on July 17, I’ll be at the Green City Market’s Chef’s Summer Barbecue Festival.  Of course, the Green City Market, with its wonderful selection of fresh, sustainably-farmed meat and vegetables from small farmers and agricultural producers, is legendary among Chicago food lovers, and this annual benefit event helps the Market continue to enrich Chicagoans’ culinary lives. The restaurants and chefs participating in the festival are some of the boldface names of the Chicago food scene:  Rick Bayless, Blackbird’s Paul Kahan, North Pond’s Bruce Sherman, James Beard winner Carrie Nahabedian of Naha, Food and Wine Best New Chefs of the Year Koren Grieverson (Avec) and Guiseppe Tentori (Boka), Green Zebra’s Shawn McLain, and Top Chef Chicago winner Stephanie Izard.  Wow, with this lineup, you know foodies are going to be buzzing like fruitflies to honey at the corner of Clark and Stockton.  Tickets are available online at the Spice House website or at the Green City Market every Wednesday and Saturday.  Check out the mouth-watering reportage, with yumm-o pics (yep, this whole post is unleashing not just my hunger but my inner Rachael Ray!), on last year’s event that was posted at foodie blog www.lthforum.com.

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Tags: Angelic Organics, Green City Market

The long Fourth of July weekend has a way of sneaking up on you and making the week before seem hazy and lethargic.  So I’m just catching up on the arts news from last week, which had quite a number of sizzlers!  Hottest theater news - Chicago version:  The Hypocrites, one of the Chicago arts groups that really matter, announced their 2008-2009 season last week.  Someone douse me with a firehose, quick, since, from the email release, this Hypocrites season looks to be one of the hottest, and promises to be one of the most-talked about, seasons of any Chicago theater in the coming year.  The season-opener is Brecht and Weill’s masterpiece, The Threepenny Opera, to be directed by Sean Graney, one of Chicago’s most risk-taking and wildly inventive directors, at the Steppenwolf Garage.  Graney doing Brecht and a musical?  Stick me with a defillibrator right now (or better yet, have Christian Bale give me 10 minutes of CPR), my heart is uncontrallably pounding with excitement!  The season also includes a production of The Hairy Ape which will be part of the Goodman’s O’Neill festival (with the Wooster Group and the Netherland’s theatrical enfant terrible Ivo von Hove also participating, this festival will definitely not be O’Neill as read in college sophomore English classes); Graney’s three-person Oedipus Rex to be staged promenade style; and the remount of the magnificent David Cromer-helmed Our Town which I raved about here.  Hottest theater news - New York version: Broadway will be seeing this fall the acclaimed Royal Court production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with most of its London cast intact, including the fabulously incandescent Kristin Scott-Thomas of The English Patient fame, who won an Olivier Award for her performance as Arkadina.  The one big casting change from the London production, though, which has sent various Francis biological and genetic processes into nuclear overdrive is Peter Sarsgaard, brilliant actor/thinking (gay) man’s sex symbol/the-one-guy-I-would-shapeshift-into-Maggie-Gyllenhaal-for, playing Trigorin in lieu of Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Just thinking how marvelous (and how hot and sexy) Sarsgaard would be performing Chekhov is enough for a flame-retardant blanket to be thrown over me!  I can’t wait to see this production, and I’m booking my flight and buying my ticket soon!  Hottest art and culture-related news of the week:  Fritz Lang’s hypnotic Metropolis, one of the most influential films of all time, and one of the two German expressionism films that I really admire (the other one being Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is also famously one of the most incomplete masterpieces of all time.  Paramount Pictures, its US distributor, cut out key scenes and characters in order to make it more palatable for the American mass market.  A complete version of the film had been thought lost for the past eighty years, until a small Argentinian film museum discovered a copy in its archives.  Movie fans have been rejoicing and drinking themselves silly over this news- finally, there will be an opportunity very soon for everyone to see the movie as Lang envisioned it to be.  And if the mutilated film version is a classic, everyone’s holding their breath on how masterful the complete version will turn out to be. I first read about the Metropolis discovery on Rob Kozlowski’s blog last week, which had a, ahem, pretty vivid description of its impact on film preservationists.

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Tags: Fritz Lang, Hypocrites Theatre, Metropolis, Peter Sarsgaard, The Seagull

Both Chris Jones and TimeOut Chicago’s Christopher Piatt address the issue head-on at the beginning of their highly favorable reviews for Tracy Letts’s new play Superior Donuts, just opened at the Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre:  this is not August:  Osage County/a great modern American play redux, so let’s just chill out and move on.   And I think that is the savvy, responsible, truthful, and mature thing to do, just to neutralize the unrealistic and, frankly, unfair expectations all of us-critics, audience members, theatrical pundits alike- had for this play given the stature of its predecessor in the contemporary American theatrical canon.  Superior Donuts, is not, cannot be, August:  Osage County (and this is the last time I am going to conjure up the specter of that masterpiece), it is intimate, modest, heart-warming, focused, a gentle breeze on a hot summer afternoon.  It is also one hell of a good, funny play taken on its own terms, and within its own low-flying ambitions.

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Tags: Steppenwolf Theatre, Tracy Letts

After working almost nonstop for the past month, including most weekends, I needed some decompression time last weekend.  Many people would have decompressed by reading a book by the pool, or by cycling along the lakeshore bike path for many hours, or even by walking around in a cocktail-induced haze during last weekend’s Gay Pride festivities.  Since I’m battier than a New Mexico rock cave, my formula for stress relief, however, involved seeing Steven Adly Gurgis’s long (two and a half hours) metaphysical discourse on the nature of guilt and forgiveness, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, being given an energetic production by the Gift Theater, and attending the Luchino Visconti retrospective at the Siskel Film Center for the long (two and a half hours too!), over-the-top, insanely mesmerizing Visconti masterpiece, The Damned.  Paraphrasing the even battier Col. Kilgore of Apocalypse Now, (sigh deeply) I love the smell of extremely provocative art in the morning!

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Tags: Gift Theater, Siskel Film Center