Tag: Vol. 21 No. 15

This free event at the Green Mill offers an excellent opportunity for the jaded and/or curious to become acquainted with the widely varied sonic worlds of several young and hungry Chicago-area avant-garde musicians while drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon. That this program is being staged in a bar rather than an academic auditorium or […]

As is often the case with a great film, Christopher Maclaine’s rarely seen The End (1953) can be described in several apparently contradictory ways. A raw, oddball, technically crude document of early beatnik San Francisco, it is also a brilliant, disturbing, suicide film. A series of characters appears, most on the last days of their […]

Performance art used to be a serious business, full of straight-faced artists acting out tedious rituals in front of aesthetic puritans too hip to crack a smile. But ironically, as the pessimism that once mainly existed only in the art world has bubbled into the mainstream, comedy, albeit dark comedy, has become permissible in performance, […]

Nothing succeeds like success. The annual jazz fair produced by the Jazz Institute of Chicago is a veritable orgy of orgies–the crowds are huge, there’s too much variety to take in, and after a while it’s all the dazed attendee can do to wander from room to room, head swimming in music. This perfect antidote […]

What produces a skinhead is the subtle subject of Mike Leigh’s powerful and mysterious feature for British TV, though it may take you most of the film to realize it. We’re treated to the bitter inertia of a family on the dole in a cramped high rise in London’s East End, with particular emphasis on […]