Ennio Morricone A Fistful of Film Music (Rhino) The traditional function of music for films is fairly obvious. Sound tracks heighten emotions felt by the viewer, helping the director suggest horror, suspense, joy, sadness, confusion, or whatever. Operating on an almost psychological level, the effectiveness of the score depends on how it interacts with the […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 46
Issue of Aug. 24 – 30, 1995
Posted inArts & Culture
Street Life: rats and sharks battle in Bucktown
Large yellow signs that say Rat-o-Rama ’95 adorn the fence in front of Diane Wheat’s Bucktown bungalow. A lifelike shark protrudes from the second-floor window. More yellow signs scream “Read This!” and direct your attention to large white boards containing poems and facts about rats and sharks. In back of the coach house, facing the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Trinity Irish Dance Company
Trinity Irish Dance Company At one time, only boys wore the hard-soled boots that produce the tapping of such dances as the hornpipe and reel; they were too expensive for poor Irish families to provide their girls. But now, even at official Irish dance competitions, girls can and do wear such shoes. And so what […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Homer On The Range
The Golden Apple Light Opera Works and Pegasus Players at Cahn Auditorium, Northwestern University In Not Since Carrie, his chronicle of Broadway’s legendary flops, Ken Mandelbaum calls The Golden Apple “perhaps the most neglected masterwork of the American musical theatre.” He’s only half right. Jerome Moross and John Latouche’s musical comedy/folk opera, which humorously resets […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Job-Seeker’s Prayer
In our business-based civilization, the resume is a quasi-religious text, the holy ad with which we sell oursevlves to the gods of capitalism.
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story Russell Herman died of cancer at the V.A. hospital in Marion, Illinois, in August 1994 and left a will bequeathing trillions of dollars to various institutions and people who are now demanding to be paid. Herman believed that he was a “deep cover” CIA agent involved in drug smuggling and that his estate […]
Posted inMusic
Rose Goes, More Power to Tower/Jerry Garcia RIP/Schmitsville
Jim Rose/There goes another retailer.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Rhinoceros Theater Festival and the Bucktown Arts Fest
The Rhinoceros Theater Festival began as a performing-arts component of the multidisciplinary Bucktown Arts Fest. Though over the years the two events have separated–with the Bucktown fest remaining a neighborhood affair while Rhino Fest has moved north into Lakeview and Andersonville–the Bucktown festival presents repeat performances of several Rhino Fest shows, as noted in the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Columnist With Conviction/The Great Man Speaks/News Bites
Columnist with Conviction Diffidence can be such an infuriating virtue. When the Sun-Times’s new occasional columnist, William Rentschler, decided to analyze the Mel Reynolds trial as an “ultra-high-profile prosecution” by an ambitious state’s attorney coveting higher office, he modestly asked someone other than himself to provide the infamous precedent. “Such a strategy,” wrote Rentschler on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
State of Confusion
New Russian Art at the Chicago Cultural Center, through September 24 Russia has lived under despotic rule for most of its history: Soviet commissars readily appropriated the authoritarianism of the czars and the Orthodox church; after the revolution, the holy icons common in workplaces were simply replaced by images of Lenin. But by the 1980s, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Abbie Fest
“Come on, people!” Rich Cotovsky shouts through a black toy megaphone in his distinctive drowsy style. “Abbie Hoffman died for your sins!” But the people passing by Daley Plaza don’t even raise their heads. A few actors are handing out flyers that list all of the shows in the seventh annual Abbie Hoffman Died for […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jerry Lee Lewis
At this cushy Ravinia gig with Little Richard the odds are good that Jerry Lee Lewis, about to turn 60, will heed the lines of his 1969 country hit “Once More With Feeling”: “We’re just going through the motions of the parts we learned to play.” On the other hand, few participants in the history […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Soul Asylum/Matthew Sweet
It’s possible that in future years the debauching of Soul Asylum will become one of rock’s great cautionary tales. In the 1980s the band was a live powerhouse whose winsome, bashy albums certainly deserved wider attention. The Minneapolis foursome agreeably went the major-label route, eventually scored themselves a platinum record (Grave Dancers Union), and became […]
Posted inMusic
Akikazu Nakamura
Infatuated with progressive rock groups such as King Crimson while growing up in Tokyo in the late 60s, Akikazu Nakamura at first took up the electric guitar, but after being introduced to the shakuhachi–an elongated, end-blown bamboo flute dating from 14th-century imperial courts–he decided to devote himself to redefining the ancient instrument’s role in contemporary […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Judgement
The little black-box auditorium in the Hull House at Belmont and Broadway has hosted some of Chicago’s finest acting–by Mike Nussbaum, for example, in Hull House Theater’s 1960s heyday, and the Steppenwolf ensemble of 15 years ago. Add to that group Larry Neumann Jr. in this one-man play, produced earlier this summer in Cafe Voltaire’s […]