I went rattlesnake hunting last Saturday. Guided by Tom Anton, who works in the fish department at the Field Museum and pursues snakes as an avocation, I wandered through several forest preserves along the Des Plaines River peering under hummocks of grass and turning over logs. I am still trying to decide whether this was […]
Tag: Vol. 21 No. 44
Issue of Aug. 13 – 19, 1992
Posted inNews & Politics
Designing a Better World
Architects have a special calling to improve society, having done so much to screw it up in the first place.
Posted inNews & Politics
Heavy traffic: Don’t blame the messengers, it’s crazy out there!
In July the city passed an ordinance regulating downtown bike messengers, and just about everyone applauded. “Some of these riders, the way they zip in and out of traffic and over the sidewalks, are a detriment to the safety of pedestrians and themselves,” says Alderman Burt Natarus, who led the movement to adopt the ordinance. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Naked TV
NAKED TV Your Imaginary Friends at Synergy Center If a good idea were all you needed for a great show, theater would be a breeze. You’d scribble your clever idea down on a pad of paper and poof! you’d be rich, happy, and well fed for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, in between the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Harder They Drum
CLEPSYDRAS Jo Hormuth at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery A clepsydra is a water clock: a device for measuring time by marking the gradual flow of liquids through a small opening. And Clepsydras–an installation by Jo Hormuth at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery–is an economical yet stimulating piece that marks the passage of time with objects that speak of the body. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Men at Midlife
NEW FORMS/CHANCE DANCE FESTIVAL Tim Buckley and Bob Eisen at Link’s Hall August 4 When a dancer hits middle age, everything begins to harden. The joints begin to calcify, setting permanent limits on their, and the dancer’s, movement. The once-exhilarating activity of making and performing dances starts to seem routine, and threatens to become rote […]
Posted inMusic
Records
HIDDEN GEMS Carla Thomas Stax 8568-2 CAN’T GET AWAY FROM THIS DOG Rufus Thomas Stax 8569-2 A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA William Bell Stax 8566-2 REMEMBER ME Otis Redding Stax 8572-2 Stax Records, which folded ingloriously in 1976 after being rent by internal tensions and financial mismanagement, was more than the purveyor of some of the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Last Dance for Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble/More Musicals: Pegasus Announces a Singing Season
Great moments in arts administration: after 11 years, Tara Mitton’s Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble is closing down–with all its bills paid!
Posted inArts & Culture
Notes From Earth: Two Plays by Jim Nisbet
NOTES FROM EARTH: TWO PLAYS BY JIM NISBET Free Street Theater “OK,” Free Street Theater director David Schein announces in the lobby. “We’re going to take the first group back now.” Instead of walking into the theater, we follow him through a long room with faded white walls and melon-color trim. “This used to be […]
Posted inArts & Culture
El Vez
I know, I know–when you hear the words Elvis impersonator, you reach for your revolver, too. But El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, is something special. From the splendid pun of his name to his heavily parodic stage show El Vez mixes multicultural polemics with popular culture absurdities to create a world with implications that go […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Dreamer Examines His Pillow/The Dreamer Examines His Pillow
THE DREAMER EXAMINES HIS PILLOW Act Now Productions at Cafe Voltaire Here we have two productions of the same script, John Patrick Shanley’s The Dreamer Examines His Pillow. Both are non-Equity; both have been mounted, I assume, under typical off-off-Loop conditions–low salaries, inadequate rehearsal time, inadequate production budgets. Yet the contrast between these two couldn’t […]
Posted inNews & Politics
What Does Maria Pappas Want?
Is she a blast of hot wind, or a breath of fresh air?
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story Unimist, a product now available from Unimed Company at pharmacies nationwide, comes in a pump-squeeze container and promises “Instant Dry Mouth Relief”; it “eliminates dryness by replenishing normal levels of moisture” and is “safe to use” with a “refreshingly slightly minty taste.” People With Too Much Time on Their Hands Among the award-winning […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: helen Leister, a bride in blue
Helen Leister says it was the railroad job that spurred Volney into popping the question and set her to thinking about wedding gowns, back in the spring of 1938. The country was still dragging itself out of the Depression then; caution was the order of the day, even when it came to marriage. But when […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Andrej Roublev
Andrei Tarkovsky’s first major film, cowritten by Andrei Konchalovsky, about a 15th-century icon painter. This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we’ve come to expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a stirring climax in color. Not to be missed […]