Real estate and restaurant folk have always stressed the three keys to success: location, location, location. But a number of successful restaurants run counter to conventional wisdom. Gordon Sinclair opened his restaurant Gordon 18 years ago on what was then a grungy strip of Clark Street, just north of the river; Gordon proved so popular […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 6
Issue of Nov. 17 – 23, 1994
Posted inArts & Culture
Magical Medium
MINUTES AND SECONDS Cook County Theatre Department Twenty years before Einstein revolutionized science with his theory of general relativity, physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, holed up in a basement in Cleveland, split a beam of light into two perpendicular rays, hoping to prove the existence of ether, a mythical substance scientists for centuries had […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Blue Aeroplanes
Over the course of a ten-year career, the Blue Aeroplanes haven’t been a band so much as a large, freewheeling musical co-op. Generally working as a three-guitar sextet, they’ve endured countless personnel changes, and their records have incorporated up to a dozen regular guest artists. The only remaining member of the original band is lead […]
Posted inArts & Culture
F-64
F-64, Bailiwick Repertory. With sexual harassment on campus a hot topic these days, one might hope for some new insight into the subject from Christina de Lancie’s F-64, receiving its world premiere under the direction of its author and David Zak. The title is photographic jargon for an aperture setting that allows one to keep […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Drummed out: candy company bans band
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving hundreds of bands, floats, and marchers will wind their way through the Loop as part of the city’s annual Christmas parade. But the boys and girls in the New Frontier Marching Band, a west-side drum and bugle corps, won’t get to march in the parade. The official reason the band’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Whenever I watch an old Tarzan movie on TV, right when Tarzan and a few of the intruding white guys are worried sick and looking high and low we suddenly hear the drums. Tarzan stiffens, puts a hand to one ear, and announces, “They have the girl. She is well, but they will not give […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Strange Fish
David Hinton’s Strange Fish is a video performance by the DV8 Physical Theater of London, whose members enact mostly wordless dramas. A single pose can suggest a whole story; bodies butt against one another with startling directness. At their best–I was once able to see them live–they are extraordinary; stripped of the usual narrative explanations, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival
THE OLD LADY’S GUIDE TO SURVIVAL, Wisdom Bridge Theatre, at the Ivanhoe Theater. From the category of things that make you go oy: The advertisements for Mayo Simon’s The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival read “Bring Your Parents.” Perhaps the folks over at Wisdom Bridge Theatre, which is producing the show at the Ivanhoe, should […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Can I get one autographed by Paul Sereno? For the person who has everything: a California company is selling fossilized dinosaur dung at $11.95 a poop. Why Daley will win, according to Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (October 31): “Few black leaders in this city are willing to contest the argument that an African-American […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Point of Honor
THE POINT OF HONOR, Single Action Theatre Company, at Greenview Arts Center. Joseph Conrad based his 1907 novella The Point of Honor on a legendary 15-year feud that persisted as doggedly as the Napoleonic wars that barely contained it. Prodded by vanity and their peers, two French cavalry officers, Armand D’Hubert and Gabriel Feraud, fight […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hank Crawford
The sweet, singing alto saxophone of Hank Crawford set the mark for soul hornmen from David Sanborn to Maceo Parker. After stints in the 50s with Ike and Tina and the Ray Charles Orchestra, Crawford cut 12 records of his own for Atlantic in the 60s, choice bits of which have recently been collected on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Romanca
ROMANCA, Chicago Actors Ensemble. The Chicago Actors Ensemble fail on a higher intellectual plane than the one on which most Chicago theater companies succeed. So while Jacek Chmielnik’s Romanca certainly isn’t perfect, it’s unpredictable and challenging enough to keep one intrigued for 75 minutes. Translated from the Polish by Charles Kraszewski, the play echoes Frisch, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cube
The versatile and learned new-music collective Cube is at its funky best in alternative venues like Cafe Voltaire: improvisation-minded and jazz–influenced, the performers–most of them academics–loosen up, ready to turn the space into an intellectual’s cabaret. For this season opener, Cube’s core ensemble–Caroline Pittman (flute), Janice Misurell-Mitchell (voice and flute), Jeffrey Kust (guitar), Patricia Morehead […]