MITOS, SUENOS, Y ENCUENTROS Grupo Zopilote and Latino Chicago Theater Company at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum Revisionist history certainly seems to be the rage these days–just look at the flood of films, plays, and books on Columbus’s voyages to the Americas. Such reclamations of history can be exciting and important events, as long-silenced […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 1
Issue of Oct. 15 – 21, 1992
Posted inArts & Culture
Modern Insanity
ELEKTRA Lyric Opera Though he lived until 1949, Richard Strauss is generally regarded as a relic of the 19th century. Grounds for this view are found in his sumptuous musical idiom for Der Rosenkavalier and his various tone poems. Strauss retained his distinctive and emphatically tonal mode of expression until the end of his life, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Moonie the Magnificent/Pie Story Theatre
MOONIE THE MAGNIFICENT Famous Door Theatre Company PIE STORY THEATRE Emerging Artists Project at the Theatre Building Philip E. Johnson, aka Moonie the Magnificent, claims to have been influenced by the internationally renowned Avner the Eccentric, but Johnson’s maskless clown resembles him only in his onstage silence. Johnson’s act–a medley of juggling, rope walking, acrobatics, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Flaming Creatures
Forget everything you might have heard about the late Jack Smith’s legendary, bisexual, orgiastic, super-low-budget experimental 1963 masterpiece–a lot more is going on here, artistically and otherwise, than either Jonas Mekas or Susan Sontag ever suggested. This 45-minute film, rarely shown over the last two decades, holds up amazingly well as much more than just […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fashion Statements: like mother, like daughter
We ran smack into this baby art patron twirling around the floor at World Tattoo. Her outfit babbled pure girl talk–short and sweet. Our fashion gumshoes checked out her statement anyway, but it came up 100 percent innocent. The trapeze dress, with its narrow shoulders and wide swing hem, skipped many a jump rope before […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Earn it or spurn it: the last word in welfare
Both Bill Clinton and George Bush are cautioning that the free ride for welfare recipients is over–that people on the dole must get jobs or risk losing their benefits. The Illinois Department of Public Aid (IDPA) is ahead of them, having already trimmed thousands of single poor people, mostly black men in urban areas, from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago International Children’s Film Festival
The ninth annual Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, featuring films and videotapes from about a dozen countries, continues from Friday, October 16, through Sunday, October 18. In the listings below, films and videos not identified by country are from the United States. All screenings are at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Single tickets are […]
Posted inArts & Culture
This Week at the Chicago Film Festival
The 28th Chicago International Film Festival moves into its top-heavy second week, with a disproportionate number of high points scheduled for this weekend. The first four features that I cited last week as my favorites among the festival selections I’d seen so far–Actress, Angel of Fire, Hyenas, and Reservoir Dogs–will all be showing simultaneously this […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Search for Nightlife: reporter goes native
Sister Liz, Reader and Advisor, 1644 N. Damen: The strangest thing happened to Filberta. Most of her life she had been a reporter with a brilliant future in nightlife writing. She would stand on the sidelines interpreting the complex behavior of the clubgoers, interested yet detached–the mark of a professional! Then one day, without warning, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
The Chicago baseball season didn’t deserve to the way it did. By that I’m not referring to the third-place finish of the White Sox or the Cubs’ fourth-place finish–no, those were both fully deserved–but to the last Chicago game of the year. Andre Dawson homered to give the Cubs a 3-2 victory over the Montreal […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Questions and Answers
GOAT ISLAND at Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ October 9-11 and 16-18 There’s a story about how kangaroos got their name–I don’t know if it’s true. Some European explorers in Australia would get very excited every time they saw a kangaroo, pointing and talking among themselves. The aborigines, noticing, would ask each other, “What’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ten Gay Men
SOME QUEERS Chicago Stage Company at Sheffield’s School Street Cafe DEL & DAVE IN REHEARSAL FOR THE APOCALYPSE Remains Theatre A dozen years ago Charles Busch, who had yet to write the hilarious travesties Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Psycho Beach Party, brought his Hollywood Confidential to the Victory Gardens Studio Theatre. Sadly, he made […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In July police in India’s western state of Maharashtra called an end to a traditional annual event in which women from the adjacent villages of Sukhed and Bor line up on opposite sides of a canal and yell insults at each other. The event had become a festival, with men playing music to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: the creator with four heads
In 1988 four classmates from the School of the Art Institute joined forces to buck the gallery system. Instead of waiting to be discovered, Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof decided to create their own noncommercial exhibit space. They used an empty apartment in Bucktown for their canvas, each taking a room […]