MAY
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The multimedia ensemble of the Loofah Method comprises composer and saxophonist Mark Messing, violinist and accordionist Max Callahan, bassist Douglas Johnson, video artist Kurt Heintz, photographer Sue Walsh, and poet Cindy Salach. The group’s latest work, Relax . . . You’re Soaking in It!, a potpourri of media grotesqueries, includes “Media Says,” an audience participation version of the game Simon Says; “The Good Life,” a take on Dr. Seuss’s The Yax; and “I Dream of George,” about our president. These are your last chances to see the show, as the run closes with performances tonight and tomorrow at 10:30 PM at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont; it’s $8, $7 for members. Call 281-8788 for more info.
Saturday 30
Even Sigmund Freud knew that sometimes a banana is just a banana, but the radical sex-education group the Ad/Vice Squad doesn’t agree. Thus their version of Sex Toys 101, called Basic Training III, a workshop on collecting budget-conscious erotic playthings. The group claims suitable toys can be found anywhere–“in grocery stores, tack shops, and hardware stores.” (Tack shops?) Five bucks gets you in; the class is upstairs at Ann Sather, 929 W. Belmont, at 3 PM. Call 342-2815 for details.
Tucked in among the Art Institute’s vast new galleries of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art, a $5-million, 16,500-square-foot show in the renovated Rice wing, is a spacious room that exhibits only four exquisite Japanese screens, but they are nearly upstaged by the shadowy, hushed aura of the space and its combination of muted light and a forest of black beams. The setting was designed by noted Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who will open the room at 5 PM and then give a lecture and slide show on his work at 6. It’s free, but of course there’s a $6 requested donation to the Art Institute. The museum is at Michigan and Adams; call 443-3949 for more information.
“Starting in the 1800’s, Paris, expanding upon the broad boulevards and stunning structures which Baron Haussmann had created for Napoleon III, moved towards a sumptuousness and extravagance in costume, architecture and decoration that was the wonder of the world. . . . This was the Belle Epoque, the beautiful era. It would die in 1914, a victim of the Great War, of the slaughter at the Marne and the Somme.” That’s David Garrard Lowe, a former editor of American Heritage, author of Lost Chicago and The Great Chicago Fire, and current curator of The Boulevards of Paris: Promenades of Pleasure, an exhibition of photographs opening–along with a lecture by Lowe–tonight at 8 at the Graham Foundation, 4 W. Burton. It’s free, and the show stays up until August 13. Call 787-4071 for hours and info.
