Though composing has always been his first love, Dan Tucker made a living as a newspaperman most of his life. In the early 40s, after graduating from the American Conservatory of Music, he got a job in journalism–the occupation of his father and brother–and eventually ended up as an editorialist for the Tribune. Yet he […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 14
Issue of Jan. 12 – 18, 1995
Posted inNews & Politics
In Case You Weren’t Sure
An attorney for The Gap, Inc., has asked us to clarify the origin of the khaki ad parody in our Year in Review issue of December 23, 1994. The Gap did not create this ad parody, nor did it authorize use of the Gap’s trademark or advertising trade dress. The editors
Posted inArts & Culture
Rebirth Brass Band
New Orleans’s vaunted tradition of musical eclecticism very likely originated among the early brass ensembles that marched in street parades–bands capable of everything from funeral hymns to syncopated, collectively improvised barn burners. The ReBirth Brass Band, despite the members’ relative youth, boasts a musical lineage that extends directly back to those original masters. All the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
New Bomb Turks
In their year-end roundups scores of music writers are obsessing on 1994 as the year punk really broke, citing Green Day and Offspring’s wild popularity, to say nothing of lesser successes like Bad Religion and the laughable Rancid. But Green Day are just amped-up popsters with bad English accents, and Offspring are a frat band […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Clip ‘n’ Save
I read today the article “Policy: Guns ‘n’ Poses” [December 16]. I thought it was enormously interesting, and I clipped it out. L. Myers W. North Shore
Posted inArts & Culture
Crosscurrents
The title of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s ongoing contemporary chamber series, “Out of the Ordinary,” serves to warn older subscribers even as it tries to sell younger listeners on the notion that Orchestra Hall is a hip forum for today’s music. Yet tonight’s program, titled “Crosscurrents” and curated by composer in residence Shulamit Ran, has […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Televisionary
Denise Zaccardi wants to use TV to teach inner-city kids to look critically at their own lives and find solutions to the problems that cripple their communities. In short, she wants to change the world.
Posted inNews & Politics
Be Nice
Dear Mr. [Mike] Lenehan: Just who is Jack Helbig anyway? Has he ever written a positive theater review for your paper? If he has, I’d love it if you would reprint it to prove it to me. Mr. Helbig reviewed two plays in your November 18, 1994, issue and scathingly panned both of them. I […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Death and the Maiden
With the help of Rafael Yglesias and Ariel Dorfman, Roman Polanski has adapted Dorfman’s three-character play about a former political prisoner (Sigourney Weaver) kidnapping a doctor (Ben Kingsley) whom she believes was her torturer, while her lawyer husband (Stuart Wilson) serves as a go-between. Even though he’s psychologically expanded his source, the material is a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Open-and-Shut Case/More Casualties/On the Move
Tony Fitzpatrick’s gallery will rise again: “One little fuck-up isn’t going to croak the whole thing.”
Posted inNews & Politics
Better Shop Around
Let’s get this compact disc pricing issue resolved once and for all [Letters, September 30 and October 21]. The retailers pay an average of $8 to $9 per single disc, sometimes less. No question. They say otherwise, they’re lying or they’re stupidly buying from the wrong people. Use those costs as a basis to do […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
“A young singer once described herself as ‘trying to beat my voice into submission,’” writes Patricia Martinez in Singers’ Voice (November-December), based on South Michigan. “Many artists…fear becoming happy or resolving their turmoil because they are afraid they will lose ‘the edge,’ that sharp gnawing feeling which spurs them on. They continue to operate from […]
Posted inMusic
Still Reachin’
Digable Planets Blowout Comb (Pendulum) Two years ago, you nearly had to be sequestered not to know the Digable Planets were cool like dat, fly like dat, and slick like dat. With those few lines from “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”–murmured over a catchy acoustic bass line (straight outta Art Blakey)–they rode deep into […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Adventures in Poverty
To the editor: Those Wicker Park artists still don’t get it [“The Panic in Wicker Park,” August 26]. Gentrification, my friends, is not some inconvenience that deprives you of your right to live in a cold-water apartment and put in your requisite years of suffering before the big-time art world discovers you. Gentrification is working-class […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Everyone is familiar with Teflon, that nonstick surface no self-respecting housewife can do without. If’n it works so well slippin’ and slidin’ yer flapjacks, how do they get it to stick to the pan in the first place? –Richard Lavine, via the Internet A favorite question of smart-aleck drive-time radio hosts, and to tell you […]