AWS Website Banner 11/4 – 12/4
The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon
The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon
AWS Website Banner 11/4 – 12/4
The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon
Stories and content by Ben Rossi

Murakami masterpiece takes the stage

By Ben Rossi / October 4, 2008
Kafka on the Shore is spellbinding in its complexity. Murakami explores everything from post-war Japanese culture, to a young man’s search for identity, to time, memory, matter—you get the idea.

Murakami masterpiece takes the stage

By Ben Rossi / October 4, 2008
Kafka on the Shore is spellbinding in its complexity. Murakami explores everything from post-war Japanese culture, to a young man’s search for identity, to time, memory, matter—you get the idea.

Construction

By Ben Rossi / September 25, 2008
Projects across Hyde Park will dramatically change the face of campus

STD (Stuff to Do)—May 16, 2008

By Ben Rossi / May 16, 2008
Friday / May 16 The Rockefeller Chapel Choir and period-instrument Baroque Band present a pairing of Baroque and Neo-Baroque tonight and tomorrow afternoon at the chapel. Old-school Baroque is represented by G.F. Handel’s “Dettingen Te Deum,” while the living Swedish composer Sven-David Sandstrom checks in for the Neo-Baroque team with his “Magnificat.” (Rockefeller Chapel, 8...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—May 9, 2008

By Ben Rossi / May 8, 2008
Friday / May 9 The stage at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park plays host to a live simulcast of the Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Don Giovanni, performed concurrently at the Harris Theater. The first of its kind in Chicago performance history, the simulcast is free and allows you to enjoy the beautiful spring...

Shortcuts—Elbow’s The Seldom Seen Kid

By Ben Rossi / May 1, 2008
Elbow’s fourth studio album, The Seldom Seen Kid, arrives just in time for a spring love affair, for which it seems tailor-made. The album tells a vague story of new love mixed with a more than healthy dose of alcohol use: A natural combination. The music, at times almost mantra-like in its simplicity, is easily...

STD (Stuff to Do)—May 2, 2008

By Ben Rossi / May 1, 2008
Friday / May 2 Reputed by the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum to be the greatest film ever made, Alain Resnais’s 1961 Last Year at Marienbad was a landmark of the French New Wave and has remained a critical darling 40 years after. The premise of the feature is simple: Did a man have an affair...

STD (Stuff to Do)—Friday, April 25, 2008

By Ben Rossi / April 24, 2008
Friday / April 25 Genre-busting singer and composer Luciana Souza, a three-time Grammy nominee and teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, leads her trio through a program that draws on classical, Brazilian, and jazz music tonight at Mandell Hall. This intimate performance—featuring only drums, bass, guitar, and Souza’s voice—is sure to be one of...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—April 18, 2008

By Ben Rossi / April 18, 2008
Friday / April 18 A flawed work of daring brilliance, There Will Be Blood will never be a big Saturday night rental, what with its unsettling soundtrack, indulgent cinematography, and most of all, Daniel Day Lewis’s indelible turn as the monomaniacal oil prospector Daniel Plainview. The film is a study in the dark, unbridled energy...

Humor left black and blue at HPAC exhibit

By Ben Rossi / April 15, 2008
[img id=”80487″ align=”alignleft”] Between the late ’60s and mid-’80s, a number of black comics rose to national prominence by way of their ribald humor, which served as a vehicle for strident social criticism. Richard Pryor, Red Foxx, and Eddie Murphy truly shocked white audiences for a time. But that was then. Now, African-American comedy has...

Shortcuts—R.E.M.’s Accelerate

By Ben Rossi / April 10, 2008
[img id=”80457″ align=”alignleft”] Few aging bands so plainly advertise their method of redeeming themselves after a string of lackluster albums as R.E.M. The 28-year-old band spells it out right in the title of their new disc: Accelerate. Clocking in at a blistering 35 minutes, Accelerate is a juggernaut of an album that, if it doesn’t...

STD (Stuff to Do)—April 11, 2008

By Ben Rossi / April 10, 2008
Friday/April 11 Tour the artists’ enclave of East Pilsen tonight when studios and galleries open their doors for public receptions and new art showings as part of Chicago Arts District 2nd Fridays. Just walking around this funky neighborhood with its historic architecture and beautiful courtyard gardens on a spring night is worth it. (Information booth...

STD (Stuff to Do)—Friday, April 4, 2008

By Ben Rossi / April 3, 2008
Friday/April 4 The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, 2008 Oscar-sweeper and one of the first films of the decade to become a cultural touchstone, screens at Doc this evening. Returning to their favorite subject—the unpredictable consequences of crime—the Coens call on the tropes of Western, thriller, and suspense genres to both revel in...

Attempters succeed with clever high-school script

By Ben Rossi / March 6, 2008
[img id=”80412″ align=”alignleft”] Essentially a pastiche of every high-school romantic comedy ever made, The Attempters, which opened Wednesday night at The Building Stage, is a genuinely enjoyable—if slight—finale to the House Theater’s fifth season. The play is content with a tongue-and-cheek variation on all the venerable tropes of high school and rock-and-roll movies from American...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—March 7, 2008

By Ben Rossi / March 6, 2008
Friday / March 7 Attend Hyde and Chic, MODA’s fourth annual spring fashion show, which promises a spectacular night of fashion showcasing original designs from students and Chicago designers. The Chicago store Akira will be showing off the newest spring trends for both men and women. The show will include opening performances by Le Vorris...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—February 29, 2008

By Ben Rossi / February 29, 2008
Friday / February 29 The award-winning chamber ensemble Alban Berg Quartet gives its last Mandel Hall concert as part of its farewell tour. Crowning the elegiac program, which includes Haydn’s The Last Seven Words of Christ and Schubert’s “String Quartet in G Major,” will be Berg’s own tragic Lyric Suite. It should be a moving...

UT strikes gold with Orton’s Loot

By Ben Rossi / February 25, 2008
[img id=”80357″ align=”alignleft”] It appears that the University of Chicago is quietly staging a minor Joe Orton renaissance. With Court Theatre’s production of Orton’s 1966 What the Butler Saw winning rave reviews last quarter and now a revival of his 1965 black comedy Loot premiering at the Reynold’s Club Third Floor Theatre tomorrow, it looks...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—February 22, 2008

By Ben Rossi / February 22, 2008
In honor of the 80th annual Academy Awards on Sunday, this week’s STD features every movie—save the new ones that everyone knows about—that you could possibly want to see in the next six days. Friday / February 22 Tonight the Music Box screens Casablanca, which really needs no description if you are a member of...

Arctic tale digs into the explorer’s state of mind

By Ben Rossi / February 8, 2008
For me, stories about great explorers always bring to mind the famous lines of Dante’s Inferno about Ulysses. Exhorting his crew to keep rowing toward the sunrise, he sees a heavenly mountain in the distance. But that’s all he ever sees, because in an instant the sea becomes a storming cauldron and his ship is...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—February 8, 2008

By Ben Rossi / February 8, 2008
These days it’s easy to feel like whoever is controlling the weather has got a bone to pick with the city of Chicago. What did we ever do to him? Whatever it was, it’s obvious that revenge is a dish best served cold with a side of blinding snow. But where nature fails, culture offers...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—February 1, 2008

By Ben Rossi / January 31, 2008
Friday / February 1 Ingmar Bergman’s classic Persona, a deceptively simple film about a nurse who comes to know her patient intimately, screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center tonight. Persona has been called Bergman’s best by some critics. The film is part of the Center’s The Great Transitions: World Cinema in the ’60s series....

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—January 25, 2008

By Ben Rossi / January 25, 2008
Friday / January 25 It sounds like a creative writing major’s arch-attempt at magic realism: A cranky and utterly obscure recluse, living in a one-room garret on Chicago’s North Side, creates out of the bare materials of an impoverished life a sprawling epic of other worlds and ethereal visions. It is difficult to say which...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—January 18, 2008

By Ben Rossi / January 18, 2008
Friday / January 18 Chicago Critical Mass is an anarchic, free-form non-organization dedicated to bike-riding Michigan Avenue in semi-protest of what it calls “car culture” on its website, and apparently, it has opened up a chapter in Hyde Park. Beginning at Harper Court, this ragtag band of grassroots activists, bike enthusiasts, and curious tag-alongs will...

Novel rendition of James ghost story serves up classic scares

By Ben Rossi / January 15, 2008
What makes The Turn of the Screw so fascinating? It has proved to be the most enduring and well known of Henry James’s works; its numerous adaptations to both stage and screen could form their own literary sub-genre. Why, of all James’s complex and engrossing visions, is this seemingly straightforward ghost story still the most...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—November 9, 2007

By Ben Rossi / November 8, 2007
Friday / November 9 The small, guitarlike instrument known as the cuatro is the centerpiece of tonight’s Puerto Rican Cuatro Music Festival at the Auditorium Theatre. Unique to Puerto Rico (the cuatro is to Puerto Ricans what the bagpipe is to the Scots), it has five double strings, producing a dulcet sound that is a...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—November 2, 2007

By Ben Rossi / November 1, 2007
Friday / November 2 The Center for East Asian Studies, the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop, and the Korean Film Council are sponsoring an ongoing Korean film festival at Doc Films this month. On Friday night don’t miss Grain in Ear, about an ethnic Korean struggling to survive in Chinese society, and Save...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—October 26, 2007

By Ben Rossi / October 25, 2007
This week, the week of midterms, the events are all local. Friday / October 26 The second part of the series “Voices from Iraq,” sponsored by the department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Campus Progress, features a screening of a 2006 documentary about American army recruits. The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—October 19, 2007

By Ben Rossi / October 18, 2007
Friday / October 19 On Friday and Saturday the Franke Institute for the Humanities hosts a series of all-day mega-symposia entitled “Anxiety, Urgency, Outrage, Hope: A Conference on Political Feeling.” An irritated, multidisciplinary swarm of academics will discuss emotion in the public sphere with the aid of scholarly papers and film. Another interesting aspect of...

Voices Stuff to Do (STD)—October 12, 2007

By Ben Rossi / October 11, 2007
Friday / October 12 Ida Noyes Hall rocks out this Friday as COUP hosts its annual Blues ’n’ Ribs event. The event is a venerable campus institution—like the Committee on Social Thought, but tastier and louder. Local blues bands will you keep you shuffling back and forth and snapping your fingers awkwardly all night (or...

Palme d’Or winner derives global truths about oppression

By Ben Rossi / October 11, 2007
This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival, 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days, opens with the image of two goldfish in a bowl. It quickly becomes clear that this shot represents what it feels like to be one of the two female characters in the story. Using minimalist camera work and a...

Voices STD (Stuff to Do)—October 5, 2007

By Ben Rossi / October 5, 2007
Friday, October 5 The acclaimed Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chamber ensemble heralds the sweet embrace of the week’s end with a set of early works by Romantic composers Shostakovich and Mendelssohn, plus a more mature piece by Dvorák. Reviewers from Buffalo to Denver have raved like dervishes about this Britain-based group, and...

The Kingdom fights bad guys, runs from real issues

By Ben Rossi / September 30, 2007
The Kingdom, a Middle Eastern–flavored thriller starring Jamie Foxx, is a true testament to the magic of cinema. It transforms an appallingly complex, morally ambiguous political situation into a thrilling, vérité-style, almost guilt-free tale of good versus evil. Although set in Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom is about a million miles away from what some refer...
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