Pianist Pinetop Perkins, Muddy Waters’s last great keyboard man, is a living repository of over half a century of blues. He laces barrelhouse standards and up-tempo rockers alike with a deep blues sensibility and solid craftsmanship fused with an impish good humor that makes every performance an unabashed celebration of life. In recent years he’s […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 47
Issue of Sep. 7 – 13, 1989
Posted inArts & Culture
Rock ‘n’ Roll: what will become of the Cubby Bear?
FOLLOW THE BOOKER: Chicago’s premier rock club, the Cubby Bear, has always had a schizophrenic existence: Cubs fans by day, rock fans at night. Suddenly, however, the club’s concert schedule is blank, with little but second-rate metal bands booked for the future. What’s going on? Turns out the club’s booker, Sue Miller, has absconded to […]
Posted inNews & Politics
More Blue Note Memories
To the editors: I really enjoyed Dan Caine’s article on the Blue Note jazz club (Aug. 18). It brought back pleasant memories of nights spent there in the underage section of the club. The Blue Note closed before I turned 21, so I never got a legal drink there. Two memories worth recalling. One happened […]
Posted inFilm
Quack to the Future
DAFFY DUCK’S QUACKBUSTERS *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Greg Ford and Terry Lennon With Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety Pie, Sylvester the Cat, J.P. Cubish, and the voice of Mel Blanc. It seems more a matter of confusion at Warner Brothers than either poetic justice or business acumen that has denied […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Proper Egmont
To the editors: This letter is in response to Dennis Polkow’s review (July 21) of the Grant Park Symphony’s performance of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. While Polkow found conductor Parrott’s “nice and pretty Beethoven” not as personally satisfying as it could have been had the more “revolutionary and avant-garde qualities” of Beethoven’s composition been emphasized, the […]
Posted inFilm
Contemplating Suicide
DETERMINATIONS *** (A must-see) Directed by Oliver Hockenhull. Not long into Oliver Hockenhull’s film Determinations, following a dense collage of images and sounds, we see a woman in an empty room. She identifies herself as a prostitute, and describes how she has served time in jail for stabbing a man “in his privates.” As the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Professional Wordplay: Don’t Try This at Home
To the editors: As a long-time John Lennon fan, I went to see the Temporary Theater Company’s version of The Lennon Play: In His Own Write and could not see the sense in anything said by ANTHONY ADLER [August 25]. Yes, I agree the cast and crew made it autobiographical, but what else would anyone […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Marketing a million-dollar condo: Is the Gold Coast going soft?
A few years back, the duplex condominium in the turn-of-the-century Astor Street mansion would have sold only days after its owner put it up for sale. After all, the upscale real estate market was sizzling then, and the unit is a perfect location for any social climber eager to broadcast his rise to the top. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Secret Chicago: flower arranging for pros
Everything in this place is green. Never mind that a lot of it has faded into sickly pale greens over the years. The curtains are green, the chicken wire is green, the foam is green, the Xerox machine sits atop a sea-green box, the woman at the counter slicing off the green stem of a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dr. John & Sunnyland Slim
This is one of the year’s more intriguing bookings: Sunnyland Slim’s traditional Delta piano, by turns easyrolling and propulsive, juxtaposed against Dr. John’s churning New Orleans R & B and voodoo-tinged funk. Each man, in his own way, is a living repository of history: Sunnyland came of age in the prewar Delta, playing lumber camps, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord
For me, the major find of Barbara Scharres’s “Films From the Lunatic Fringe” series, which starts this week at the Film Center, is this highly distinctive pseudodocumentary by Eric Saks, an environmentalist based in Los Angeles. At once novelistic and poetic, this achronological collage of diary entries between the 1940s and 1990s by a fictional […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hedda Flapper
HEDDA Buffalo Theatre Ensemble at the Theatre Building There are some women whose status as icons is undisputed–Antigone, Joan of Arc, Nora Helmer. All performed decisive actions that have inspired women everywhere. Hedda Gabler, however, remains an enigma among the feminist candidates for canonization. Was she a spoiled and self-destructive neurotic whose suicide was precipitated […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Third Rail Comedy Hour
THE THIRD RAIL COMEDY HOUR Third Rail Comedy Ensemble at the Roxy Nothing is more striking about the Third Rail Comedy Ensemble than the fact that they are virtually indistinguishable from the dozens of other graceless Second City wannabes performing weekly throughout Chicago and environs. Thanks to the efforts of three improv factories–Players Workshop, Second […]