Posted inArts & Culture

Bird Now

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 […]

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 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 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 […]