“Have you ever chanted?” For some reason, everyone who walked into the copy shop this night was wearing Hush Puppies. It was past midnight and the crowd looked like they’d stumbled in from West Madison Street. “One time I chanted for a TV set and a stereo.” A Jamaican musician and his Wrangler-clad girlfriend had […]
Tag: Vol. 19 No. 30
Issue of May. 10 – 16, 1990
Posted inArts & Culture
Club Dates: Johnny Shines brings his blues back home
Johnny Shines went deer hunting in Alabama one day, and it got him thinking about the blues. “I was shooting at this deer,” the Tennessee-born bluesman recalls, “and I shot her in the neck. I shot her about four or five times–I was trying to break her neck–she was bleeding. And along comes this young […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Cruising
It is a nightly performance, a curious sort of automobile ballet on the quaint wide boulevard that meanders through the north end of Lincoln Park. Every model car imaginable wanders, weaves, pauses, turns around, speeds up, slows down. The lone drivers are also of every sort imaginable–white, black, brown, Asian, young and old. They have […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Borah Bergman & Paul Smoker
Trumpeter Paul Smoker, Iowa’s resident new-jazz genius, has made several trips to Chicago in recent years, and if you’ve never heard him, you’ve been missing one of the most coherent improvisers in music today. (And that’s not even mentioning his technique–I can think of no modern trumpeter who could beat this guy in a cutting […]
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A Dark Day for Cabaret/But “Dark Nights” Will Help to Fill the Void/Who Will Lead the Body Politic?/Brew Ha-ha Leaves Bitter Taste/Broadway Is a State of Mind/Priced to Stay: Joe Martin’s Oil Cartoons
When Boombala went bust, the cabaret crowd lost an invaluable showcase and Mary Ann Johnson lost most of her savings.
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Stumpy’s Gang . . . A Comic Mutilation
STUMPY’S GANG . . . A COMIC MUTATION White Noise at Stage Left Frank is a bio-maintenance disposal engineer for a genetics laboratory. That means he takes the unsuccessful experiments–many of them still alive–and throws them into the incinerator. Most of them, that is. A childlike, possibly retarded man, Frank has made pets of a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
An Offer She Couldn’t Refuse/New Paper in Town
An Offer She Couldn’t Refuse A job is filled. . . One of the more attractive positions to open recently in Chicago journalism was editor of Chicago Reporter. “We got 50 applications,” says publisher Roy Larson, “an awfully lot of them very top grade talent working in good jobs now.” That was encouraging. “And then,” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
First Is Supper
FIRST IS SUPPER National Jewish Theater When a comedian attempts a work of “serious” drama, watch out. There is nothing worse than a funny person trying to create art with a capital A. More often than not the result is something less honest, less true, and considerably less successful artistically than the comic’s earlier funnier […]
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Les Liasons Dangereuses
LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES Interplay and Windy City Theater Company Watching Interplay and Windy City Theater Company’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, I found it hard not to wish Christopher Hampton had written his adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ notorious novel about seduction and sexual intrigue as a one-man show starring that irresistible rogue the Vicomte […]
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Tony Williams Quintet
The best description I’ve heard of Tony Williams’s drumming came from a soprano friend of mine who labeled it “lead feathers.” Indeed, Williams seems to take thunder and bottle it so that he can dispense it at will. The control and musicianship he exhibits on an instrument that all too often is simply an ornamented […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Department of Unbelievable Omissions
To the editors: Your choice of the Chills this week [Section Two, April 27] was great and I’m sure the others were really good too. However, I can’t believe??? you didn’t pick Social Distortion or Thrill Kill Kult at the Vic May 2 & 4. They are both unbelievable!! If your critic’s choice is only […]
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Chekhov Lives
UNCLE VANYA Goodman Theatre Astrov: I sat down and I closed my eyes and thought: One hundred years from now. One hundred years from now: those who come after us. For whom our lives are showing the way. Will they think kindly of us? Will they remember us with a kind word, and, nurse, I […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Cruelest Energy
To the editors: The letters about Bruno Bettelheim [April 6 and 20, May 4] remind me of myself and of people I know, and of the complexity of each of us. We can know so little of each other. Sometimes the worst, sometimes the best. My perception of a local minor celebrity is that the […]
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Motion and Emotion: The Films of Wim Wenders
Though very polite and British, this feature-length documentary about German filmmaker Wim Wenders offers the most penetrating insights and the best overall critique of his work that I have encountered anywhere. Paul Joyce, who directed it, has also made documentaries about Nicolas Roeg, David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, and Dennis Hopper, and he knows the conventional […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Slug Writes:
To the editors: My name is Gregg Juhlin and I play bass for the Slugs. I’m curious as to how I can get involved in this “Battle of the Bands” [Critic’s Choice, March 2, and Letters, March 30 and April 20 and 27]. I mean–which bands do I have to slag? Or how about this–I’ll […]