Pierre Dorge is the answer to the often asked musical question: what happens when you take a Danish electric guitarist full of hereditary Scandinavian melancholy, add Arabic and Balkan musical influences, the compositional ethos of Frank Zappa, an enduring respect for Thelonious Monk, and then simmer the whole stew during a few extended stays in […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 5
Issue of Nov. 17 – 23, 1988
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: confessions of a wooden horse doctor
Staring at you through a window is a small black horse with a golden bridle, a golden saddle, and a bloodred tongue. With its hooves suspended in midair and lips writhing, it looks like it’s going to break through the glass and leap out at you. “I always wanted one so badly,” says Lisa Parr. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON Chicago Children’s Theatre at North Shore Country Day School Kids have terrible taste. They like colors that verge on the garish. They’ll eat things that are purple or chartreuse, as long as those things are unbearably sweet. And when it comes to entertainment, they won’t sit still […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Sandwich Story
“It was just like a Chuck Norris movie,” said the guy in the back of the train. He was wearing a mesh New York Giants jersey with the sleeves cut off. The girl next to him was staring at him open-mouthed, saying “Wow” every two or three seconds. “You can’t tell anybody about this, ’cause […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fela
It’s hard not to be impressed by Nigeria’s formidable pop star and folk hero, Fela Anikulapo Kuti–if you can deal with the sight of his female chorus getting down on hands and knees, shaking their scantily clad butts at the audience. It might seem contradictory that a guy who once boasted a harem of over […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Law: When Do We Vote?
Sawyer v. Evans, round three: a case study in how lawyers can make a complicated mess out of something that ought to be simple.
Posted inNews & Politics
Love Amid the Rubble
Habitat for Humanity, that Jimmy Carter bunch of do-gooders, reclaims a tiny slice of the west side.
Posted inNews & Politics
Something Stupid
You think about emergencies at a time like this. When some lowdown scum-sucking dirt-ball proto-hominid parks a rusty pus green Dodge Coronet sedan in front of your driveway. You think to yourself: what a remarkably stupid and selfish thing to do. Then you start to think about the dark and terrible potentialities: What if my […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Critic’s Conversion; What Dukakis Should Have Said
A Critic’s Conversion Did someone get to John von Rhein? Oh no, he says. He decided on his own to stop beating up on Daniel Barenboim. He expects Barenboim to take over the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from Georg Solti in 1991, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Robert Marsh disagrees. “My position,” […]
Posted inFilm
Liberals Kick Ass
THEY LIVE ** (Worth seeing) Directed by John Carpenter Written by “Frank Armitage” (John Carpenter) With Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George “Buck” Flower, Peter Jason, and Raymond St. Jacques. John Carpenter has managed to remain one of the few genuinely personal writer-directors left in genre moviemaking, having returned to relatively low-budget features with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jane’s Addiction
In the pop sweepstakes of 1988, the only kinds of music that can bust open the posteverything blahs in Reagan’s Age of Stupefying Mediocrity are street-smart black hip-hop and corn-fed white glamour metal. That’s not purebred heavy metal of the Megadeth variety, but the hit-bound, scuzzy schlock-fest that Motorhead joined recently and Metallica stupidly eschews. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar Photo Caption
Can you name the politicians caricatured here? Hint: they didn’t run in the last election. They were all biggies in the July Monarchy, the corrupt administration that ruled France in the 1830s, and favorite objects of ridicule for artist/journalist Honore Daumier. That pear in the middle is his least favorite, King Louis-Phillipe. The drawing, Masks […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Land Before Time
Ironically, it is this Spielberg-Lucas collaboration–directed by Don Bluth, and scripted by Stu Krieger, Judy Freudberg, and Tony Geiss–not the Disney studio’s new Oliver & Company, that comes closest to reviving the classic character animation of Disney in its heyday. In this case, what we get is a kind of dinosaur Bambi featuring an all-prehistoric […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
How come all the bad ozone that shows up during pollution alerts doesn’t float up to replenish the good ozone that’s disappearing from the ozone layer? Where does the bad ozone go? If we sawed off LA and floated it down to the antarctic would we solve all our problems? Conversely, during the next ozone […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Professor Kochman’s Double Standard
To the editors. Two things disturb me about Thomas Kochman’s recent letter (10/7 issue) on black and white generalizations. First, instead of censuring blanket generalizations, Mr. Kochman proposes a mystifying double standard, which, stripped bare, would seem to be: Any blacks may take offense at white generalizations, which usually imply an inclusiveness; only guilty whites […]