Critical Feet/Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 4
Issue of Nov. 5 – 11, 1992
Posted inArts & Culture
Piano Bar
PIANO BAR at Cafe Voltaire At a piano bar more often than not the bar is a bigger attraction than the piano. And where booze won’t work, music leavens the miseries and speeds the courtships–as it does in Piano Bar, a 90-minute musical collage performed by happy-hour patrons at Sweet Sue’s, a New York City […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In August in Eugene, Oregon, Rick Geoffroy opened Lollipops, a juice bar that will feature topless female dancers. Geoffroy said Lollipops is aimed at men 18 to 20 who cannot attend topless bars that serve liquor. Geoffroy told the Eugene Register-Guard that he believes the community “needs more activities for young people.” The […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Whale Story/Final Days
Whale Story Fame is such a bummer. But much less of a bummer, Lair Scott can now see, than obscurity. Given an ounce of professional celebrity, the ounce journalists consider their due, Scott would never have been accused of duplicity by the Shedd Aquarium and Lincoln Park Zoo. Ergo, his recent attempt at investigative journalism […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen!
As the title indicates, this two-part new-music jamboree intends to be funky and irreverent, yet relevant–a welcome attempt by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, its sponsor, to reach out to a younger, hipper audience. Composer-in-residence Shulamit Ran chose the pieces for the programs, which are supposed to reflect the cultural diversity that has worked its way […]
Posted inFilm
What’s Sex Got to Do With It?
THE HOURS AND TIMES *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Christopher Munch With David Angus, Ian Hart, Stephanie Pack, Robin McDonald, Sergio Moreno, and Unity Grimwood. A TALE OF SPRINGTIME ** (Worth seeing) Directed and written by Eric Rohmer With Anne Teyssedre, Hugues Quester, Florence Darel, Eloise Bennett, and Sophie Robin. It’s easy enough […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Rimers of Eldritch/Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You
THE RIMERS OF ELDRITCH Acme Arts Company at the Wellington Avenue Church of Christ Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch is a tender and poetic condemnation of American society and its religious underpinnings. It’s a murder mystery of sorts, written in 1966 and set in a former mining town, population 70, somewhere in the midwest. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
What Did Sinead Expect?
To the editors: Contrary to Bill Wyman’s column in last week’s Reader [October 23], the recent controversy created by Sinead O’Connor is not evidence that celebrities are prevented by the media and public criticism from making political statements. Wyman said, “The backlash against Sinead O’Connor . . . demonstrates yet again that celebrities in America […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Songs of War
THE SONGS OF WAR National Jewish Theater The success of Neil Simon’s autobiographical plays–Brighton Beach Memoirs, etc–has prompted other comedy writers to talk about their families with only the thinnest veneer of literary camouflage. In The Songs of War it’s Murray Schisgal’s turn to accuse and forgive his parents–and in doing so perhaps exorcise the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Scientologists’ Method
To the editors: Harold Henderson’s article on the Church of Scientology vs CAN (Cult Awareness Network) [October 16] is disappointing in that it fails to shed light on what Scientology fanaticism is all about and deceptive in that it does not accurately disclose what Scientology courses really cost. Fortunately for the Chicago area, there is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Forthright Republican
To the editors: In the October 23 Reader, in the discussion on the Education Amendment, you quote Judy Topinka, Republican from North Riverside, as saying, “Giving kids a bad education is the next best thing to killing them outright.” I assume she means that the best thing would be killing them outright. I do not […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Woman Who Kept Getting Stuck
Lauri Macklin’s dances have always played nip and tuck with narrative. The dances tell stories, but Macklin creates dance images that only obliquely relate to them. In Macklin and Blair Thomas’s 1990 work The Boto, about a mythical porpoise man, six people dance under a 40-by-40-foot sheet of clear pstic, while electric fans make it […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Oobleck Objects Again
To the editors: So Bush’s big issue in the campaign now is that Clinton’s a baddie for protesting the Vietnam war, for not supporting our boys. Jesus Christ. Ever get the sinking feeling that you must fight every battle twice? That we are all subject to a kind of institutionalized amnesia that makes all progress […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Spirit in the Sky
WINGS Goodman Studio Theatre Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or . . . there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. –from Plato’s Symposium “What she described was a world of fragments,” writes Arthur Kopit in the introduction to his play Wings, speaking of […]