Devon Avenue is the one of the northernmost major thoroughfares running east-west across the numbered grid of Chicago’s city streets. East-west streets are numbered at hundreds by their distance from latitude line zero, Madison Street, which cuts through the heart of Chicago’s skyscraper-laden downtown Loop. Latitude on this grid extends from 9500 South to 9600…

The minute details of sex never escape the eye of the prehistoric human artist. What registers here is a fascination with the sexual that extends beyond its ritual fetishization in functional appeals to some magical force for human fertility or robust herds. This art is uncanny and wonderful because sex is not sublimated or displaced…

Back in Chicago over intersession, doing a stint at home, I had the opportunity to visit the fall-term Student Projects Exhibition at the Institute for Design. One of the leading design schools in the nation, the Institute grew out of the New Bauhaus, founded in Chicago in 1937 by Bauhaus veteran Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and his…

This Friday (April 22nd), we here at Princeton have a similar opportunity to enjoy ethnic pageantry in the implicit service of a belief system. Instead of hailing the revolutionary proletariat, no matter what smocks they’re wearing, this Friday’s International Festival Cultural Show, from 8-10pm in the performance tent on the South Lawn of Frist, will…

Ten years ago this month, in Chicago, Illinois, the Smashing Pumpkins began to record their third album, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” A child born in that year is fast approaching the age at which we heard that album for the first time. And what an age. Ready to greet us back then, as…

Green Day has released its eighth album, a so-called punk rock opera entitled American Idiot. American Idiot sounds like, and almost certainly is, the soundtrack to a movie that is yet to be filmed.

On November 26th, 2003, rapper Soulja Slim was gunned down outside of the duplex he had bought for his mother in the Chantilly neighborhood of New Orleans.