Jamaica-born, Alabama-bred Eddie Kirkland is a Detroit legend, having accompanied John Lee Hooker in the late 40s and early 50s and then gone on to make a name for himself as a flamboyant soul-and-blues shouter with such R & B greats as King Curtis and, briefly, Otis Redding. But no mere biographical sketch can do […]
Tag: Vol. 19 No. 51
Issue of Oct. 4 – 10, 1990
Posted inArts & Culture
The Bay at Nice/Wrecked Eggs
THE BAY AT NICE and WRECKED EGGS Next Theatre One of the drawbacks to an author’s becoming a hot property is that the demand for works bearing the magic name may force the exhumation of things better left buried. That David Hare is a writer of great talent is well established, but I wonder how […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Annals of school reform: the security guard snafu
The council at Roosevelt High School followed all the rules last year when they hired two security guards to help keep the peace. They posted the position, solicited applications from a variety of candidates, whittled their choices to three, and eventually selected two nearby residents, to be paid from a pool of discretionary antipoverty funds. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Latino Film Festival
The sixth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival continues from Friday, October 5, through Sunday, October 7. Film screenings will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; and at the Roberto Clemente High School auditorium, 1147 N. Western. Ticket prices per program are […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ran Blake/Myra Melford
Ran Blake’s piano solos still strike me as music’s answer to recombinant DNA. Blake, who is a genuine iconoclast among the world’s artists, answers to no single bell and marches to every drummer he can find: in improvising upon a famous or obscure song, he tends to first de-compose the tune–chipping its corners, flaying its […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Red Desert
Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature in color (1964) remains a watermark for using colors creatively, expressionistically, and beautifully; to get the precise hues he wanted, Antonioni had entire fields painted. A newly struck and restored print of the film makes clear why audiences were so excited a quarter of a century ago by his innovations, which […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tuning Les Violins: Rittenberg Pitches a Little Lower/Corporate Shelter/Fishing for Night Crawlers/Flour Power
If you don’t like Tom Hodges in Lookingglass Theatre’s production of The Jungle, sneak out to the concession stand for one of his white-chocolate macadamia-nut cookies.
Posted inArts & Culture
Parting Gestures/Salome/Stone
PARTING GESTURES Latino Chicago Theater Company SALOME and STONE Live Theatre In his biography of Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann tells of a dinner party in Paris at which Remy de Gourmont interrupted a story Wilde was telling about Salome to correct him. “You have confused two Salomes,” Gourmont chided. “One was the daughter of Herod, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
It was a beautiful day for a wake–and for a birthday, our friend Neil (now and forevermore 39) reminded us as we drove down to Comiskey Park last Sunday morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the pale blue sky, only a certain cool slant to the sunlight, reminiscent of college football games. On the way, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Performance Notes: Brendan deVallance gets prepared
Brendan deVallance has a low opinion of conventional theater. “It’s just so figured out,” he says. “They work it and work it until it’s right, and then they do it 100 times that way. Well, of course they’re going to tell you each time is different, but they’re trying to do it the same way […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Last Pennant Before Armageddon
Jack Helbig reviews The Last Pennant Before Armageddon, based on W.P. Kinsella’s story in which the world will end if the Cubs win the World Series.
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story A federal fish-and-game office in southern California is considering a proposal to junk soon-to-be-obsolete five-gallons-per-flush toilets, which would badly clutter available landfills, by creating toilet-bowl reefs offshore. (An illegal toilet reef in Santa Monica Bay has become a haven for huge oyster beds.) In July a Palm Beach County (Florida) commissioner proposed getting […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Reluctant Dragon
THE RELUCTANT DRAGON Lifeline Theatre Children’s plays tend to be awfully precious and stuffy. They seem aimed not at children, but at some adult notion of what children are like–sentimental, romantic, and literate. The Reluctant Dragon might have been one of those plays. Adapted from a story by Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Los Pleneros de la 21
It doesn’t take the world’s most expert ear to hear in the music of Los Pleneros de la 21 something rich and important. Los Pleneros play bomba and plena, the fast, percussive styles of ensemble folk music from the coastal towns of Puerto Rico that exist in interesting opposition to the somewhat more stately and […]