Quimby’s Queer Store is no ordinary bookstore. Browsing in it can make you dizzy. “My goal is eventually that when people walk in they’re just overwhelmed: like, ‘Oh my god what is this.’ I want them to be stunned,” says proprietor Steven Svymbersky. You might have been more than just overwhelmed had you walked in […]
Author Archives: Rick Powell
Posted inArts & Culture
Club Dates: Arson Garden’s strange new mix
I can tell you that Arson Garden may be the only North American art-rock band that matters, and I can tell you that they come from Bloomington, Indiana, but after that I can’t tell you much. Sometimes they sound like a punk band–like a tightly controlled Mission of Burma, for example, when they cover Burma’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Ric Addy’s store full of stuff
“I moved to San Francisco when I was 15 as one of the first wave of hippies, and I lived in Haight-Ashbury,” says Ric Addy, owner of Shake, Rattle & Read. “The way I lived out there was by selling underground newspapers like the Berkeley Barb and the Los Angeles Free Press. I helped build […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: how Nancy Cohn got wrapped up in cloth
Her hands, arms, and clothing splattered with five different colors of paint, Nancy Cohn leaves her brush in the mixing pot to answer the phone. As she heads into her office, she punches off the Roches playing on the boom box. After she picks up the phone, the other fabric painters in the studio smile […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Reel Life: local kid makes vids
Eight-inch-tall Kiss dolls, whose platform shoes make up at least an inch of that height, are dancing on Dion Labriola’s dining-room table. Or at least that’s what the young film and video maker tries to imagine as he positions and repositions the figures of the glam-rock band, propping them up, leaning them against each other, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Roger and Me–Mostly Me
To the editors: Your review of Roger & Me [February 2] contained your usual attention to cinematic history and criticism and a creative, intelligent way of integrating these issues in a way that’s accessible to a non-academic reading audience. This approach sets you apart from every other writer on cinema in Chicago. On the other […]