Famous Door’s Dating Game: Uncensored Famous Door Theatre Company How to Meet Girls Zebra Crossing Theatre I’m not convinced that game-show hosts are fully human. They never seem to come from anywhere in particular, except maybe other game shows, materializing before us like highly advanced alien life forms (it’s not a strain to imagine wires […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 45
Issue of Aug. 17 – 23, 1995
Posted inArts & Culture
Ramones
It’s possible that no band so beloved has been so taken for granted. After a full 20 years of commercial-flop albums, unrelenting touring, and, oh, yes, having forever changed the course of rock ‘n’ roll, the Ramones are threatening to hang it up: leader Joey Ramone says he’s exhausted, and to make the point plain, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
It was a beautiful blue-sky Saturday, and the Cubs were playing the Saint Louis Cardinals at Wrigley Field. Around the fourth inning a thirtysomething woman attempted to explain baseball to her Australian date, who was witnessing the game for the first time. “You see, the reason why so many people here cheer for the Cubs […]
Posted inNews & Politics
On Climate, Crocodiles, and the Demise of the Dinosaurs
A Conversation With U. of C. Geologist Paul Markwick, Who Has Controversial New Ideas Involving All Three
Posted inArts & Culture
Scatting Grace: Ten Stories
Raised by Wolves, at Urbus Orbis. Penned by director John Sudar and other members of the Raised by Wolves ensemble, this evening of ten fragmentary, cryptic, despairing tales focuses on weakly articulate, pain-ridden people: a gangster boss haunted by the woman who got away, a hooker and her forlorn john, a south-side con artist who […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Rhinoceros Theater Festival
This is the sixth annual incarnation of the Rhino Fest, a showcase of experimental theater and performance that started as a component of the Bucktown Arts Fest but has since taken on a life of its own. The event’s name is inspired by surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Driven to Exhaustion
In 1991 Morry asked me and my wife if he could park his car in our yard. It wintered there among the snow and a variety of stunted brush and weeds. When spring came, the weeds surrounded the car and reached into the engine, choking it. Morry came for his car in May, but it […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Rag of the Right
Bob Tyrrell’s American Spectator has always looked upon liberal politicians with smug contempt. Now the rest of the country has caught up with it.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
Patrolling the Comiskey Park outfield during batting practice, Mike Pazik didn’t quite seem at home–not yet, anyway. After three and a half years serving as White Sox general manager Ron Schueler’s special assistant, Pazik returned to uniform last week as the team’s pitching coach–the third person to hold the hot-seat position this long, troubled season. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Destroy All Givens
Bruce Goff: Compositions at the Art Institute, through September 4 Two floors below the crowds trooping in and out of the Art Institute’s Monet show, in a narrow room off the photography galleries, are 30 of Bruce Goff’s “compositions,” as he called them. These watercolor, tempera, and ink images on paper explode with radiant abstract […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Day the Sun Turned Cold
A remarkably effective and provocative contemporary Chinese melodrama (1994), based on a recent murder case in mainland China (where much of the movie was filmed), and written and directed by the talented Cantonese filmmaker Yim Ho (Homecoming, King of Chess). Told mainly in flashbacks, the story describes what happens when a worker in his 20s […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
BROOKLYN FUNK ESSENTIALS 8/18, METRO On their forthcoming Cool and Steady and Easy (Groovetown/RCA) Brooklyn Funk Essentials attempt an inclusive street brew that combines hip-hop, jazz, funk, Latin grooves, dancehall, and soul. They alternately suggest acts like US3, the Groove Collective, Guru, Repercussions, Me’Shell NdegeOcello, and Buckshot LeFonque, among others, but never form an identity […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Credit Check
Dear Kristin [Ostberg]: Loved the piece on the Checkerboard Lounge [“Got Them They-Don’t-Play-’em-Like-They-Used-To Blues,” July 21]! I’m hoping to do a TV story on the Checkerboard one of these days myself. I wanted to correct an apparent oversight in your well-researched story: On the reference to bluesman Robert Johnson, the author is Peter Guralnick, not […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey
Apart from Crumb, this film by Steven M. Martin may be the best American documentary feature of 1994. It’s certainly one of the most fascinating, taking as its subject the electronic musical instrument known as the theremin; Leon Theremin, the Russian visionary who created it; and all the remarkable things that have happened to inventor […]