A recent Belgian documentary feature about the great jazz musician Charlie Parker, shot in New York and in English by Marc Huraux. Interviews with family, friends, and fellow musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, are included, as well as a few bits of (not always successful) docudrama and poetry. While the results are mixed, this film’s impressionistic […]
Tag: Vol. 17 No. 42
Issue of Aug. 4 – 10, 1988
Posted inArts & Culture
Concert Notes: Russian folk music meets American jazz
Billy Joel got a lot of media attention for his recent concert tour of the Soviet Union, touted (mistakenly) as the first such tour by an American since the Geneva Cultural Agreement signed by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev. In fact, that distinction belongs to American jazz saxophonist Paul Winter. Winter, who had first […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Candy Mountain
This directorial collaboration between Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, working from an original screenplay by Wurlitzer, yields a quintessential road movie that moves from the center of America to the eastern edge of Canada. A young musician (Kevin J. O’Connor) is hired to track down a legendary guitar maker named Elmore Silk, who has been […]
Posted inNews & Politics
To Serve and Project
They’re clean. Fresh. Nubile. White. The women who read Elle and the men who date them. They have names like Tish and Gwyn and Kim. And they all want to work at the Baja Beach Club.
Posted inArts & Culture
Hearts and Bodies
DANCE EXPO ’88 at MoMing Dance & Arts Center July 29, 30, and 31 On my way down Clark Street to MoMing I was thinking that I should move out of the city–it’s too hot, it’s too depressing, and it’s too hot. But by the time I left MoMing, “Dance Expo ’88” had transformed the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Blacklight Film Festival
The seventh edition of the annual festival of black independent film continues from Friday, August 5, through Sunday, August 7, at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl., 947-0600; at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 443-3737; and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, 281-4114. Tickets are […]
Posted inFilm
Make My Pay
THE DEAD POOL ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Buddy Van Horn Written by Steve Sharon With Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, and Liam Neeson. If Clint Eastwood seems a little bored in The Dead Pool, the fifth outing for the flinty San Francisco detective Dirty Harry Callahan, perhaps he has a right to be. It has […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Here’s a deep one for you. How do they get the Ms on M&Ms? My wife says they have a machine that stamps them one at a time, but I say that’s too time-consuming. Can you give us the straight dope? –G. Glenn Mahoney, Atlanta I’m troubled by the expiration date on the enclosed M&M […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dixieland Daimyo
The 36th film of Japanese filmmaker Kihachi Okamoto, based on a story by Japanese black humorist Yasutaka Tsutsui, stages a weird and anachronistic encounter between three ex-slaves, who are all jazz musicians, en route to Africa just after the Civil War. They are shipwrecked in 19th-century Japan during a country-wide conflict between the Tokugawa shogun […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
“Green Chicago teaches people how to make gardens on rubble-filled vacant lots,” according to the Chicago Horticultural Society’s Garden Talk (July 1988). “Since the program began in 1982, Green Chicago coordinator Becky Severson has directly helped 19 groups start their own community gardens.” The groups are chosen “on the basis of need and ability.” GC […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Air: Joe Frank’s radio makes waves
On one program. Joe Frank played a recording of actual emergency-room incidents. “Were going to insert a catheter in your penis,” stated a doctor to a moaning gunshot victim. Another time he called up three of his ex-girlfriends and toyed with them emotionally. On another program he asked, “How do you reconcile the Holocaust . […]
Posted inNews & Politics
End of Page?; Writers in the Sky; Arts Smarts
End of Page? In the summer of 1986, soon after a management group led by Robert Page bought the Sun-Times from Rupert Murdoch with $145 million borrowed from New York lenders, Page brought in a couple of Canadian newspaper consultants to help chart the paper’s course. This was a business-school sort of move, no doubt […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
There was no batting practice before last Friday night’s White Sox game. Instead, there was a softball-hitting contest. So while the softball players gathered in the outfield in their patchwork uniforms, before the doors were opened to the small crowd gathering outside, an occasional member or two of the White Sox strolled out onto the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Competing Together
Small manufacturers in Chicago are learing that rugged individualism has outlived its usefulness. Cooperation, even among competitors, is the way of the future.