Who Threw That Ham Productions, at the Bailiwick Arts Center. Thanks to the success of Coed Prison Sluts and its many imitators, the gross-out late-night camp comedy has become a fixture. And in many ways Demon Diner is just one more fuck-filled, limb-strewn entry in this gory, lewd contest. The formula is to take a […]
Tag: Vol. 25 No. 1
Issue of Oct. 12 – 18, 1995
Posted inMusic
Air Miami
Perhaps no one recording today has a more eclectic take on pop music than Air Miami singer/guitarist Mark Robinson. His previous band Unrest started out in 1987 as a punk band, yet their odd selection of covers (“21st Century Schizoid Man”) and steadfast refusal to adhere to the genre’s musical strictures put them on the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
The Bears couldn’t be more different this year from last, yet their fortunes remain almost exactly the same. A year ago the Bears were a cautious team that wasn’t going to beat itself; this year the Bears are gamblers willing to risk it all on a big play. A year ago the Bears had a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Watching the Detectives
Victims of Duty A Red Orchid Theatre In this hauntingly peculiar, rarely produced 1952 play, master of absurdism Eugene Ionesco once again tries to break out of the confines of traditional theater. His protagonist Choubert begins with a rather studied criticism of the rote nature of drama: lounging in the tub, he kvetches to his […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: the art of Blab
Since 1986 Chicagoan Monte Beauchamp has been corralling eclectic groups of artists in Blab!, an anthology of deft illustration and discourse that recently received the comics industry’s most prestigious honor, the Harvey Award, named after the late Harvey Kurtzman, creator of Mad. “My idea was to do a one-shot publication focused on comics with a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Freakwater
Freakwater knows it takes more than a pedal steel guitar, a big belt buckle, and a broken heart to make country music. Over the last decade Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean have mastered old-fashioned hillbilly music’s essentials: poignant storytelling, ruggedly congenial musicianship, and an appreciation for life’s endless struggles, basic pleasures, and brief […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Beauty in Bad Taste
Feld Ballets/New York at the Auditorium Theatre, October 5-8 DanceAfrica/Chicago 1995 at the Medinah Temple, October 6-8 Eliot Feld has such good taste sometimes it makes you want to scream. I think it makes him want to scream too. Fortunately for him and us, a man of his experience–he’s choreographed 86 ballets in 28 years […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Gang of Four
Time has not been kind to the Gang of Four, a band whose angular and extraordinarily danceable instrumental attack and rigid polemicism utterly defined, for a while, the promise of postpunk. Their preeminence, for me, was enhanced by the fact that in the town where I lived at the time, the band’s first appearances were […]
Posted inMusic
Pioneers of American Punk
Flipper Sex Bomb Baby (Infinite Zero/American) Effigies Remains Nonviewable (Touch & Go) It’s kind of ironic that punk rock is now as American as apple pie and produces multimillion sellers like Green Day and Offspring, considering that it began as an irksome though negligible force on the cultural margins. Themes of boredom remain the music’s […]
Posted inMusic
A Night of Reckoning
This showcase of artists on Nashville’s Dead Reckoning Records proves that the DIY spirit can flourish even in Opryland, home of stodgy hit-generating formulas. Kieran Kane, Kevin Welch, Tammy Rogers, Mike Henderson, and Harry Stinson started the label so they could make their own records and release them independently. (Kane, Welch, and Henderson have all […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mats Gustafsson
Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s pair of local concerts last year gave plenty of reason for pause. A free improviser with bulldozer power who also pays attention to detail is a rare thing, and his astonishing mastery of both ends of the spectrum never faltered. With complex logic, heart-stopping surprise, and assured fluidity, his dense stream […]
Posted inArts & Culture
No Flying in the House
No Flying in the House, Lifeline Theatre. Though Mrs. Vancourt prefers her expensive windup toys, initially she has no objection to adopting a stray dog, nor does her housekeeper Miss Peach–especially a talking dog only three inches long. But this talented canine, Gloria, also claims to be the guardian of Annabel, a child given to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Welcome to Chicago Land
An urban theme park designed for the delectation of conventioneers and plate-collecting tourists
Posted inArts & Culture
Happy End
Prologue Theatre Productions, at the Theatre Building. Though Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Happy End predates Guys and Dolls by almost a quarter century, it makes that musical look like kid stuff. Charting the now-familiar journey of a sweet Salvation Army worker into the depths of a criminal underworld, Happy End is set in 1919 […]