The eighth edition of the annual festival of black independent film continues through Thursday, August 17, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 443-3737; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, 281-4114; and at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 871-6604. Tickets are $5, $3 for Blacklight members; admission to the Music […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 42
Issue of Aug. 3 – 9, 1989
Posted inMusic
Style and substance: New Order confronts an old saw
Is New Order truly a case of style without substance?
Posted inArts & Culture
Wilde on the Edge
LIVING UP TO MY BLUE CHINA Cloud 42 at Stage Left Theatre “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known,” Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1895 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” That individualism, Wilde thought, makes art magnificent; history has shown it also makes art dangerous, at least […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Beautiful Madness
Bill Pinkney is going to sail around the world–the hard way.
Posted inArts & Culture
Lecture Notes: Robert Del Tredici’s book of the bomb
One of the first photographs in Robert Del Tredici’s book At Work in the Fields of the Bomb shows a mustached young man standing on the steps of a federal building in Washington, D.C., holding a model of a hydrogen bomb. The man is Howard Morland, who achieved notoriety in 1979 when the federal government […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Private Ear; The Public Eye
THE PRIVATE EAR and THE PUBLIC EYE Interplay Peter Shaffer is best known today as the playwright responsible for two middlebrow West End and Broadway hits, Amadeus and Equus. However, 17 years before Shaffer wrote the one about the man who hated Mozart to pieces and 11 years before he created the one about the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Careening Is a Skill
CAREENING IS A SKILL Curious Theater Branch at Theater Oobleck In 1985 Maestro Subgum and the Whole was a nine-piece band with a sound described by one music critic as “the Miami Sound Machine meets the Residents.” The Maestro’s music at that time was unique in that it consisted not so much of songs but […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Quiet Please
The man sitting in the library reading the Tribune appears to be about 60. There’s a dusting of gray in his thin beard, and he looks somewhat frail and unsteady. He wears a plaid cabdriver’s cap, a clashing plaid shirt, and well-pressed blue pants. A man who appears to be about 30 walks up with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lou Harrison and Gamelan Si Betty
Like fellow avant-gardist John Cage, Lou Harrison has turned a lifelong infatuation with Oriental music–especially the Javanese branch–into a rich and varied body of fascinating, Eastern-accented sound assemblages. Incorporating a wide variety of influences and techniques ranging from his mentors Henry Cowell and Schoenberg to Chinese shadow-play music, Harrison’s music can be mesmerizing: waves of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Surgeon’s Gift
Craig Bradley is clearly used to the best: his spacious office suite is decorated with tasteful, expensive furniture and lots of wood. The walls are hung with black-and-white photographs by his wife, Anne Bradley; a square coffee table in the waiting room is covered with four neat rows of magazines–including Vogue, Architectural Digest, Chicago, Better […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Half My Face Is a Clown
HALF MY FACE IS A CLOWN at Second City E.T.C. Bob Odenkirk’s program bio notes that he writes for TV’s Saturday Night Live, but don’t let that put you off. Odenkirk’s one-man show Half My Face Is a Clown displays an intelligence and craftsmanship long missing from SNL and most other shows of that ilk. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tiny Tot Mystic
TINY TOT MYSTIC Sarantos Studios A couple years ago I was conducting a seminar on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota. At one point we were discussing a short story by Chekhov, and a woman was proposing an interpretation of the story. She was articulate and made a sound argument. When she finished, the man […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hang Loose, Mother Goose
HANG LOOSE, MOTHER GOOSE Bailiwick Repertory A good children’s play has more to tell its young audience than they can immediately absorb, planting seeds for future harvests. Charmagne Spencer’s very hip Hang Loose, Mother Goose is a children’s tale that celebrates the power of make-believe and enlists its young audience in its pursuit. To do […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Boys Next Door
THE BOYS NEXT DOOR Pegasus Players Remember The Producers? Mel Brooks’s comedy about two guys who stage a musical called Springtime for Hitler, expecting it to flop? Only it doesn’t flop? And they end up in jail, ha-ha? Remember the opening-night sequence, and that one shot of the audience right after they’ve seen a big […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Lie Witness: How We Got Into Vietnam; Savage Reporting
Lie Witness: How We Got Into Vietnam Next Monday is the 25th anniversary of the shameful day when mendacity swept America into its longest war. On August 7, 1964, the two houses of Congress passed Lyndon Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution by a combined vote of 504 to 2. The resolution was sort of an experiment. […]