This is my first encounter with Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr (Family Nest) and I hope it won’t be my last. People who don’t have much use for the existential gloom of Antonioni and Tarkovsky are advised to stay away, because many of the hallmarks of that relentless black-and-white style and vision–lots of rain, fog, and […]
Tag: Vol. 19 No. 2
Issue of Oct. 26 – Nov. 1, 1989
Posted inArts & Culture
Moliere in Hollywood
THE MISANTHROPE Goodman Theatre When I think of Shakespeare I think perfect. I mean, Hamlet may have something wrong with it, theoretically, but I don’t know what it is. Hamlet’s Hamlet; it’s not something you pick apart, it’s something you discover. It has its own completeness. Its own necessity. There’s no second-guessing it. It’s just […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The gang that couldn’t run straight: Dawn Clark Netsch and Woody Bowman in the Democratic debacle of 1990
This being that crucial time of year when candidates across the state hire staff, raise money, and otherwise gear up for the primaries in March–the Democrats are busy committing political hara-kiri. There’s no rational explanation. That’s just the way it is in Illinois. Republicans almost never have a contested primary; when they do, the candidates […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Delegates of the Gods
The scholarly Reverend Alfred Momerie of the Church of England came to Chicago in September 1893 to take part in the first World’s Parliament of Religions. Afterward. he called it “the greatest event so far in the history of the world.” Over 17 days, a total of perhaps 150,000 people gathered in what is now […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art Facts: Robert Peters and the call of the authentic
Up on the fourth floor of the Public Library Cultural Center, there’s a series of partitioned spaces filled with strange objects and constructions–“site-specific installations,” as they’re known in the art world. Such works, built specifically for a particular site and often creating an environment into which the viewer enters, are not readily salable commodities. Indeed, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
L.V. Johnson & Joanna Graham
The list of contemporary guitarists who consider themselves proteges of B.B. King seems endless, but Chicago’s L.V. Johnson augments his stylistic debts with a welcome eclecticism and a considerable amount of grit. Johnson may be better known to local listeners as soul singer Tyrone Davis’s longtime bandleader; he penned “Are You Serious,” one of Davis’s […]
Posted inMusic
Alexandrov Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble
ALEXANDROV RED ARMY SONG AND DANCE ENSEMBLE at the Auditorium Theatre October 13-15 I’m not a particularly sentimental person, but I must admit that when the Auditorium Theatre’s curtain rose to reveal the Red Army chorus–100 strong in their braid-ornamented uniforms–in front of two enormous American and Soviet flags side by side, I found my […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hotel Universe
HOTEL UNIVERSE Center Theater Hotel Universe is like an episode of thirtysomething written from an existential perspective. Seven self-absorbed young people sit on the terrace of a house in the south of France, brooding about a suicide they recently witnessed. (The young man turned, smiled, said “I’m off for Africa,” and dove to his death […]
Posted inMusic
Face It, It’s Opera
THE MUSIC OF ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER IN CONCERT at the Auditorium Theatre October 17-22 I have no doubt that composer Andrew Lloyd Webber will be known to future generations as the most successful opera composer of the second half of the 20th century. Few, I suppose, would question his unparalleled success. Not only is his […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Why the Aerobic Phantom Didn’t Work Out; Hagopian and Human Relations
Why the Aerobic Phantom Didn’t Work Out A voice of our times has been silenced. The Aerobic Phantom is gone from the pages of Windy City Sports. Let publisher Mary Thorne try to explain. “We’re here to promote amateur sports,” she says of her two-and-a-half-year-old monthly. And the Aerobic Phantom, after 18 months on the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Amen Corner
THE AMEN CORNER Kuumba Theatre The dramatic works of James Baldwin are not easy to perform. He was a brilliant prose writer with an ear for the music of words, and his plays tend to be massively overwritten. Characters say the same things seven or eight times in language too splendid to consider editing (I […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Doris Humphrey: Late Works
DORIS HUMPHREY: LATE WORKS Momenta at the Academy of Movement and Music October 21, 22, 28, and 29 Momenta is continuing its mission of restoring to life in the theater the lost dances of Doris Humphrey–along with Martha Graham, a founding mother of American modern dance. Last spring, Momenta reintroduced several of her lost early […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Two questions. First, does it bug you when people write you questions on bar napkins, like I am? Second, as we leave a stoplight in our cars and look at the wheels of the car next to us, we notice that when the RPMs reach a certain point we get the optical illusion of reverse […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: A Blast of Burroughs
In the tradition of his most notorious works, this compilation is repulsive, hilarious, astonishing–an obscene carnival of bloody syringes, ruined cities and bursting trajectories of sperm.