No holds barred in ‘borderless’ art show

To the uninitiated, waiting in the crowd that filled the 1104 S. Wabash Ave. building lobby for the closing night of the two-day “The Brown Sheep Project” series might have seemed uneventful for a highly anticipated Columbia art show. But once inside the green-light district just behind the doors to the Glass Curtain Gallery, it was clear that there was nothing normal about this show.
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Hokin exhibit preserves power of words

In an age of hyper-media and technology advancements, a personal touch in communications is all the more valuable. Collections of postcards, love letters, school notes and personal correspondence between family and friends are on display at the Hokin Gallery, 623 S. Wabash Ave., through Jan. 7.
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Purge D.I. spills over

Though they’ve never toured the nation, hit it big on commercial radio or established a clever meaning behind their band name, the members of Purge D.I. from Manchester, N.H. are ready to take their heavy sound on the road with their first national tour, in support of Grade 8.
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Sci-fi book not alienating

And you thought you had it bad. So you work a dead-end job serving coffee to cell-phone chatters, angry businessmen and a growing number of young caffeine addicts. Yeah, and your car horn has died from over usage in daily rush hour. And what’s that? Reality shows consume the telly? Imagine working two dead-end jobs, 17 hours a day with a 10-minute lunch.
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Film puts Kissinger on trial

When President Bush, compelled by Congress, was forced to create an independent committee to study the government’s part in the Sept. 11 terrorist assault, the choice of Henry Kissinger fit perfectly into the Bush paradigm—or so critics claimed. Many consider Kissinger—the National Security Adviser in the Nixon White House and later Ford’s Secretary of State—the master craftsman of modern U.S. foreign policy.
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Polanski returns to form with ‘The Pianist’

In The Pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman continues to play the piano as Germany bombs Warsaw during the onset of World War II. As his Polish radio station rumbles and fills with smoke and debris, Szpilman (Adrien Brody) continues to play elegant classical music, waiting until the last possible moment to stop and escape, even pausing, in near pandemonium, to converse with a beautiful fan.
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ROMAN POLANSKI BIO

Born Raimund Liebling in Paris 1933, Roman Polanski’s turbulent and oft divisive life has served as dark fodder for his 30-plus years of filmmaking. At seven, the Nazis overtook his Kraków neighborhood, his parents forced to concentration camps—his mother, a Russian Jew, dying in Auschwitz at eight months pregnant. The early plight of Polanski, who evaded the camps, survived his peril via escapism: the occasional voyage to the cinema acted as simple solace in an otherwise complex time.
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Christian karaoke music finds niche

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.—At least a decade before karaoke clubs caught on in America in the 1980s, performers in churches were belting out songs to instrumental recordings of religious music, called solo performance tracks or accompaniment music.
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CINEMA CIRCUIT

All this month, the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St., will be offering audiences a chance to see the Hollywood work of Ernst Lubitsch. “Lubitsch in Hollywood” is a program of 14 movies by one of the most consistently thrilling and engaging directors ever to work under the old studio system. “Lubitsch in Hollywood” runs through Jan. 30. Tickets are $8; $4 for members. For more information call (312) 846-2600 or visit siskelfilmcenter.org.
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In The Loop

On Dec. 13, it went to print. The captions were written, the bylines inserted, the copy edited. Come June, students will crack the binding, thumb through the entries and scrutinize the index for how many pages they’re featured on—an implicit barometer of high school popularity. It will undoubtedly sit on a shelf and fade from memory—gathering dust until the need to check a face/name combo arises. Yet one page, one photo in fact, will be hard to forget anytime soon.
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