You don’t become a falconer by taming a wild bird; the only way to do it is to become just a little wild yourself. And so the falconer exults every time the brid takes off from the fist.
Tag: Vol. 21 No. 35
Issue of Jun. 11 – 17, 1992
Posted inArts & Culture
Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians
The career of Robyn Hitchcock–authentic Brit eccentric, ace songwriter, blah blah blah–has been erratic as hell. In the last couple of years, however, he’s succeeded in magicking himself into a radio-friendly rocker of the first magnitude. (The fact that few radio stations have bothered to notice is beside the point.) On last year’s Perspex Island, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Songs of the Pogo/I, Lech Walesa
SONGS OF THE POGO at Club Lower Links When he died in 1973, Pogo creator Walt Kelly left behind not only 25 years’ worth of comic strips but a fair amount of comic prose and poetry as well. Now admitted Pogo-phile Frank Farrell has collected a representative sampling of his work and shaped it into […]
Posted inNews & Politics
And Now, Psychosportswriting/Bad News for Media Watchers/California Trend
In olden days sports reporters described how one team won and the other lost, often slipping in some fancy language to impress their readers. (“Outlined against a blue gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again.”) This kind of writing was OK, but so un-Freudian. Times have changed. The opponent these days isn’t the other […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Department of Unapprehended Irony
To the editors: I have not read a more insensitive, divisive and inflammatory article than your “Buy American, Burn Asian” one [Hot Type, May 15] since World War II. For those of us who were old enough to remember, it brings back nightmares of the type of yellow journalism which eventually resulted in the evacuation […]
Posted inArts & Culture
International Theatre Festival of Chicago
In Chicago, even-numbered years bring the odd productions from around the world to town. At least they have since 1986, when Jane Nicholl Sahlins, Bernard Sahlins, and Pam Marsden first launched this sometimes controversial, visionary biennial event. When the festival was founded, Chicago was routinely omitted from major national theater tours, whose producers gauged that […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sandra Bernhard
Sandra Bernhard’s out-there public persona–the King of Comedy weirdo, acidic and mocking Madonna-nonwannabe, unruly demistar–sometimes obscures her actual artistic accomplishments. Against a backdrop of the songs of a shared culture, from “Me and Mrs. Jones” to “Little Red Corvette,” an unruly demistar acts out her prejudices and anxieties, incredulous voice drawling, ungainly limbs flailing, razor-sharp […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Capturing the Erotic
SAINTS AND SINGING Sweet Jane Productions at Cafe Voltaire Gertrude Stein is Gertrude Stein is Gertrude Stein, and either you like her or you don’t. She can certainly be admired for her audacity: writing plays and stories that blatantly ignore questions like who, what, where, how, and why. Her bohemian life-style in Paris and open […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Overruled
OVERRULED Touchstone Theatre at the Halsted Theatre Centre Exasperatingly perverse, George Bernard Shaw often seemed to waffle on many big issues. Though he liked to pretend that he could cut through the cant about marriage, adultery, and feminism, he could waver spectacularly on these volatile matters, at various times treating marriage, for instance, as a […]
Posted inFilm
Lie Lady Lie
HOUSESITTER ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Frank Oz Written by Mark Stein and Brian Grazer With Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Julie Harris, Donald Moffat, Peter MacNicol, Richard B. Shull, Laurel Cronin, Roy Cooper, and Christopher Durang. I’ve seen previews of two summer comedies so far–Sister Act and Housesitter–that have elicited gales of hysterical […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Shadow of a Man/No One Writes to the Colonel
SHADOW OF A MAN Latino Chicago Theater Company There’s a certain brand of friendship between men–glamorized in literature for so long that it’s become archetypal–that surpasses mere loyalty and verges on slavishness. These men never have to indulge in idle chitchat; they understand each other deeply, respect each other, anticipate each other’s needs. They are […]
Posted inMusic
Pavement
Flavor of the month in alternative land is Pavement, an amiable, somewhat obscurantist LA group noticed both for their efficient parroting of all the right Pixilated, Sonic Youthful moves (which don’t impress me, and probably won’t you) and for their occasionally open and oddly ingratiating songwriting (which does me, and might you). On Slanted & […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jack, or the Submission/Charlie the Chicken
JACK, OR THE SUBMISSION Shattered Globe Theatre at the Project Back in the 50s, before the advent of death by TV, it seemed as if theater had a future. They called it the Theater of the Absurd–a smart, anarchistic, philosophically cynical, largely European sort of thing, though a few Americans, like Edward Albee, had a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: Saturday Night Vivo, a crushing disappointment
It was Saturday night and I was a pound underweight. We had reservations at Vivo, the coolest of the hot new Italian restaurants, and I could eat anything I wanted. What more can you ask of life? Jerry Kleiner (who also gave us Shelter) and his partners Dan Krasny and Howard Davis opened Vivo last […]