The Balancing Act’s calm, cool, and collected appearance belies an almost hysterical amalgam of textures and influences rioting beneath the acoustic surface. Steely Dan rhythms appear in one song, Flying Burrito Brothers harmonies in the next. Similarly, as soon as you have one lyrical fixation pegged–floors, roofs, and furniture figure prominently on the group’s new […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 9
Issue of Dec. 15 – 21, 1988
Posted inArts & Culture
The My House Play
THE MY HOUSE PLAY Wisdom Bridge Theatre The My House Play could be a pilot for a sitcom. It’s a little wacky like Ozzie and Harriet, a little blue-collar like All in the Family, and not too much in its own right. But then it’s in the nature of a sitcom to be innocuous. And […]
Posted inFilm
A Perversion of the Past
MISSISSIPPI BURNING no stars (Worthless) Directed by Alan Parker Written by Chris Gerolmo With Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand, Brad Dourif, R. Lee Ermey, and Gailard Sartain. This whole country is full of lies. –Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam” The time in my youth when I was most physically afraid was a period of six […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Social security: seniors organize to move Rostenkowski
Anne Knefel didn’t expect a big turnout on the rainy Saturday afternoon in November when the Guardians first met. And at first the meeting room at the Copernicus Foundation, a northwest-side social-service agency, was pretty empty. But slowly the seniors from nearby neighborhoods–like Portage Park, Jefferson Park, and Belmont Cragin–wandered in, until finally all the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Depressing Connections
THE AMERICAN CLOCK Court Theatre This has been the season of the two steps back. There’s revival and nostalgia everywhere you look. The Northlight Theatre adapts and stages Studs Terkel’s Depression-era reminiscence, Talking to Myself; Steppenwolf does likewise with John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl manifesto, The Grapes of Wrath. Michael Butler restages Hair, the Organic hosts […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Zuckerman Meets His Maker
Philip Roth’s “autobiography” is a pretty bad book, but it may set the stage for a promising new collaboration.
Posted inArts & Culture
Little Dorrit
Conceivably the best and most serious Dickens adaptation ever filmed, Christine Edzard’s two-part, six-hour English movie tells the story as the novel does, from two consecutive points of view. Perhaps the greatest strength of the picture is its remarkably dense rendering of 19th-century England; no single art director or production designer is credited, but the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Club Dates: Bruce Vilanch returns from Hollywood
The history of 20th-century American culture should devote a large chapter to comedy writers, the unsung shapers of popular taste whose material has so much impact on how we view and laugh at life. And in the part covering the years from 1970 on, the name of Bruce Vilanch should figure prominently. Some comedy writers […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
A Compendium of Holiday Classics–and We Don’t Mean “Little Drummer Boy”
Posted inNews & Politics
The Candidate of Cool; Common Ground: George and Mikhail
The Candidate of Cool “I’ve been reading and rereading The Art of War by Sun-tzu, said Paul O’Connor while he was running for mayor. “What it is is a Taoist masterpiece, the Taoist philosophy, a fascinating document and very small, as all great things are. One thing that’s clear is that when you get in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar Photo Caption
Two Arts and Crafts lampposts at Ravinia and the Miesian Ben Rose Auto Museum in Highland Park were two of the more obscure sites photographed by David Clifton for the Evanston Junior League’s book An Architectural Album: Chicago’s North Shore. The Queen Anne-style Ullman Strong house, pictured here, which was completed in 1896 in Kenilworth, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jazz Members Big Band
The Jazz Members Big Band charts have always been terrific: the band’s coleader, Jeff Lindberg, saw to that. The soloists, including the other coleader, trumpeter Steve Jensen, remain stellar. And I can think of only one other band in the country that can match these guys when it comes to studying and executing the music […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Why are there high tides twice a day when the earth rotates beneath the moon only once a day? In diagrams it appears the moon’s gravity causes the earth’s oceans to bulge (creating a high tide) not only on the side toward the moon, but also on the side away from the moon. I’ve heard […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Dear Landlords
Any fool knows you can’t make money on humane, unsubsidized, low-income housing. But Peter Holsten and Matthew Roddy are no fools.