Amazing but true: Before you spend $60 for a phone-order theater ticket, Shubert manager Ken Shaw thinks you ought to be told where your seat is! What will they think of next?
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 2
Issue of Oct. 22 – 28, 1992
Breast Beating
To the editors: [Re: Hitsville, October 9] I hate Camille Paglia’s guts as much as the next intelligent person, thank you. I am, however, fed up above eye level with so-called “feminist” appropriation of a male supremacist preconception, which equates female body parts and sexual exploitation. The ancient linking of breasts, fertility, and sexuality is […]
The City File
You’ll never guess who they’re talking about. (A) “The world’s foremost champion of farm animals,” according to the Farm Animal Reform Movement. (B) “One of the most profound and revered [fictional] figures in twentieth-century American culture,” according to Pharos Books. (Answers at end of column.) City desk, please? I have a dozen veteran teachers here […]
Dream of Another Time
LE DORTOIR Carbone 14 at Centre East October 15-17 Chicago has nothing like Montreal’s Carbone 14. Few cities do, I suppose–rarely will you see theatrical images this imaginatively conceived, grandly designed, and expertly executed. Le dortoir (“The Dormitory”), created by artistic director Gilles Maheu in 1988, exemplifies the kind of exquisite craftsmanship that has rightfully […]
Pathetic Pipes
To the editors: I wanted to inform you of a striking coincidence. Recently, Albert Williams reviewed Power Pipes, a play about the “indigenous Americans whose culture was trampled by the European explorers,” and gave it his Critic’s Choice [September 18]. I’m sure it was an excellent play. Amazingly, I saw a play with the exact […]
28th Chicago International Film Festival
The 28th Chicago International Film Festival has its final screenings Friday through Sunday, October 23 through 25, at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. (Please note the added screenings of Sofie, occasioned by the fact that the print that originally arrived had only French subtitles; the print showing this weekend has English subtitles.) Tickets can […]
Outright Lies
To the editors: I realize the editorial section of publications is to print various and opposing opinions, but when what is printed is outright lies, meant to mislead the public, I strongly object. I am referring to Daniel Sobieski’s letter, September 4. This must be one of his favorites, for I’ve seen it published elsewhere. […]
Field & Street
Twenty years ago Barry Commoner laid out the causes of our environmental crisis in his book The Closing Circle. Our problems, he wrote, arise from our failure to recognize four basic laws of ecology. Law number one says that everything is connected to everything else. Law number two states that everything has to go somewhere. […]
Reading: The Joy of History
Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has itself declined and fallen into desolate ruin. But what a storyteller! What a yarn!
Iranian Sights
AND LIFE GOES ON . . . **** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami With Farhad Kheradmand and Pooya Pievar. It’s fascinating to consider the ideological factors that influence how film canons are formed, especially when it comes to films that depict unfamiliar cultures. Without thinking much about it, we tend to prefer American […]
Holmes Brothers
About 1979 or so I remember reading an interview with the great soul singer Solomon Burke in an R & B fanzine, wherein Burke was lamenting the demise of gospel-based soul in the face of 70s disco. Burke predicted that in a few years the disco sound would grow stale, “and then the real music […]
Buddy Guy–The Very Best of Buddy Guy/The Complete Chess Studio Recordings/My Time After Awhile
THE VERY BEST OF BUDDY GUY Rhino 70280 BUDDY GUY–THE COMPLETE CHESS STUDIO RECORDINGS Chess/MCA 9337 BUDDY GUY–MY TIME AFTER AWHILE Vanguard 141/42 It never fails: a legendary bluesman, after years of scuffling that brought little financial success but made him well-known among black listeners and later a legend among white aficionados, finally wins mainstream […]
Sam’s Liquors takes on Wal-Mart: What’s in a name?
As Fred Rosen sees it, the odds against him in his fight against Wal-Mart are the most lopsided since “David took on Goliath back in the biblical times. Just the fact that most people never heard of me but everyone’s heard of Wal-Mart proves my point. With all their money and political clout, they could […]
Eddie Palmieri
It’s not hard to see why Eddie Palmieri was once dubbed salsa’s answer to Duke Ellington; to borrow a favorite Ellington encomium, Palmieri’s music often is indeed “beyond category.” Like Ellington, Palmieri is a pianist, composer, and bandleader, and like Ellington he generates a remarkable and unquestionably artistic excitement: it stems not from synthetic pseudo-Latin […]