“Chicago Times” Reaches for the Cutting Edge The March/April issue of Chicago Times–the one with Jordan, Payton, and Dawson on the cover–was pretty amazing. Once we got past the reminiscences of sporting life in other eras, and the posthumous literary career of Ernest Hemingway (who, we were reminded, briefly lived on North Clark Street), and […]
Tag: Vol. 17 No. 29
Issue of May. 5 – 11, 1988
Posted inArts & Culture
Growth Company
HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY at the Civic Center for Performing Arts April 28, 29, and 30, May 1, 5, 6, and 7, 1988 No one ever taught Lou Conte to leave well enough alone, apparently. Three years ago, at the height of his popular and critical success, Conte decided to tamper with a sure thing […]
Posted inFilm
All the World’s a Machine
JAPANESE EXPERIMENTAL FILMS Cinema has been put to diverse uses over the years. Commercial filmmakers tell stories that entertain and may enlighten. American experimental filmmakers of the 1940s and ’50s, making low-budget films financed out of their own pockets, used cinema as a medium of personal revelation. Europe’s Marxist intellectuals of the 1970s tried to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ethnic Heritage Ensemble
When Kahil El-Zabar started this trio in the mid-70s it comprised conga drums and two tenor saxophones, which is not what most people think of when they imagine a “band.” Since then, the instrumentation has diversified–the trio now includes Joseph Bowie on trombone as well as Edward Wilkerson on saxes, while El-Zabar plays trap set […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kinsey Report
Every time some professional genius declares that blues music is officially dead, someone with new ideas and hot licks comes along to cancel the funeral. One of this year’s best reasons to believe is the Kinsey Report, the brother act from Gary, Indiana, whose brand of progressive blues is as progressive as it is bluesy. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
The Hyde Park parrots are in the news again. The parrots are a flock of about 50 monk parakeets, originally psittacines of Argentina, who are now entering their eighth year of residence in a tree in Jackson Park, at 53rd and Lake Shore Drive. The founders of the colony were escapees or rejects from living […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Postpointlessness
To the editors. My mother gave me Best American Short Stories 1987 this year for Christmas and I was thrilled. I’ve set it aside, however, half-read, thanks to the tedium noted by Sara Frankel in her review, “Tedium Is the Message” [April 1]. So far, I have different favorites, mine being “Men Under Water,” by […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Flea in Her Ear
A Flea in Her Ear is theater of the bourgeois, for the bourgeois, and by the bourgeois. I don’t use that word in the Marxist sense but only because it’s appropriate and sounds French. Of the bourgeois: French playwright Georges Feydeau’s bedroom farce is the tale of an insurance salesman who, wrongly suspected of sexual […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Vows of Poverty
To the editors: Divorce lawyer Michael Minton has publicized the greed of American housewives and therefore will increase divorce proceedings instigated by women [“What’s a Wife Worth?” March 18]. Women choose to marry for love just as they choose to stay home and care for their husbands and children. The operative word is choose. Not […]
Posted inArts & Culture
International Theatre Festival of Chicago
Easy travel to other cultures. Never mind the delays at O’Hare–eight foreign countries will come to you in the course of this month-long festival. Representing the world: Comediants, from Spain; Pat Van Hemelrijck, from Belgium; Gate Theatre Dublin, from Ireland; the English Shakespeare Company, from England; Compagnie Patrice Bigel/La Rumeur, from France; Carbone 14, from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Moderns
Alan Rudolph’s 12th film, set in Paris in 1926 among American expatriates, isn’t everything that one hopes it to be; Rudolph has been wanting to film his and the late Jon Bradshaw’s script since the mid- 70s, and it has probably been stewing in his consciousness for too long. But for the first hour, at […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Marriage of Bette and Boo
THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO Center Theater In Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You playwright Christopher Durang slapped the Catholic Church square in the face and earned an Obie for his effort. He deserved it. It was a fine satire, grimly funny, and honest in its own way. But there was something […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Stormy Monday
A watchable first feature by English writer-director Mike Figgis, beautifully shot by Roger Deakins. It’s “America Week” in Newcastle, and an American gangster/businessman (Tommy Lee Jones) is trying to take advantage of this by forcing the owner of a local jazz club (Sting) to sell his building. Meanwhile, a Polish free jazz group arrives at […]