In a front yard in Lakeview, a boy runs full speed with a yellow plastic bucket in his hand, dips it in the water, whirls and lets loose, just in time to catch his brother full across the chest with a resounding smack. Both scream, dive after more water, take off. Standing silently on the […]
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 45
Issue of Aug. 22 – 28, 1991
Posted inNews & Politics
Ex-Slacker
With his $23,000 “independent film from nowhere,” Richard Linklater is going places.
Posted inArts & Culture
Geography of a Horse Dreamer
GEOGRAPHY OF A HORSE DREAMER Wild Life Theatre Company at the Heartland Cafe Studio Theatre In D.H. Lawrence’s 1933 short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” a boy discovers that he can forecast the winning racehorse by working himself into an ecstatic trance astride his toy steed. Cody, the clairvoyant in Sam Shepard’s Geography of a Horse […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: Jo Aerne’s antiwar messages
“You’re a technician, you don’t hear the screams.” Chicago artist Jo Aerne took this quote from a Vietnam vet she heard on a radio talk show and had it copied on a stack of black four-by-five-inch stickers in plain white Helvetica lettering. This is just one of about 100 sticker designs she’s been handing out […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Landmark perturbation: home owner struggles with the ghost of Walt Disney
About ten minutes after June Saathoff signed the papers on her new house 21 years ago, the broker told her she had just bought the house Walt Disney was born in. “If I had known then what I know now, I’d have grabbed the check out of his hand and run,” said Saathoff. “I’m supposed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lee Konitz
To alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, jazz has always been an adventure. He acquired his dedication to pure melodic improvisation early, as a founder of cool jazz along with pianist-teacher Lennie Tristano, and he’s sought out a unique and wide range of challenges in the 40-odd years since–big and small bands of varying shades, pioneering solo […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lynda Barry at Home: The Good Times Are Breaking Her Heart
Inquiiring minds want to know: How did the Chicago production of Lynda Barry’s The Good Times Are Killing Me become a “staged reading”?
Posted inArts & Culture
New Music Consort
The New Music Consort is one of a handful of persuasive advocates of contemporary chamber music. Since the early 70s this New York-based collective has introduced (and rediscovered) a string of significant works from myriad currents and countries. A key to its success, I think, lies in the players’ delightful performances of what can often […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Bucktown Rhinoceros Theatre Festival
One more year like this, and we’ll have an institution on our hands. This second annual showcase of avant-garde theater in Chicago (with a taste of Wisconsin for good measure) is coordinated by Scott Turner, Valerie Turner, Jim Krulish, and John Oartel–with a bow to Salvador Dali, whose use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Chamber Music
CHAMBER MUSIC Pidgin English Productions at Talisman Theatre I’m stumped. I sat through Pidgin English’s production of Chamber Music. I listened and watched carefully. I even read the play the following day. And I still can’t make heads or tails of the show. Possibly this absurdist piece just doesn’t appeal to my sensibilities. Absurdist theater […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story Robert E. Bell Jr., head psychiatrist of the Florida prison system, was arrested in May and charged with breaking into his former girlfriend’s home and threatening to stab her to death if she did not return the chocolate syrup, tuna fish, and cigarettes he thought she had stolen from him. Least Competent People […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sydney: Dummy at Large/Scribblings From a Broad
SYDNEY: DUMMY AT LARGE and SCRIBBLINGS FROM A BROAD Itinerant Theater Guild at Victory Gardens Studio The most interesting moment in Sydney: Dummy at Large occurs at the top of the show, when we see the set for the first time: a tiny (one-third scale or so) hospital room with a single bed. In the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Fun Times: the floating gallery
I have only considered entering the Chicago River once–when, shortly after I moved here, I was fired on the first day of my job. “You had better have intestinal fortitude,” my fat, homicidal boss had gassed, and I replied that what I had was closer to intestinal flu. A half hour later I was standing […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Song of the Exile
A lovely autobiographical feature by Boat People’s Ann Hui, set in 1973. A young Chinese woman (Maggie Cheung) studying in London is summoned back to Hong Kong to attend her younger sister’s wedding, and finds herself in frequent conflict with her Japanese mother (Chang Shwu-Fen) until she accompanies her mother on her first trip back […]