Posted inMusic

Fuck

Fuck This quartet plays a low-key, shambling variety of pop music that’s less about carnality than about screwing with expectations. Whether it manifests itself as strange packaging (last year’s terrific Baby Loves a Funny Bunny looked like an oversize matchbook) or goofy stage props (bassist Ted Ellison festoons the stage with stuffed animals and windup […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Softcops

SOFTCOPS, Green Highway Theater, at Stage Left Theatre. If you’ve read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, his landmark investigation into the birth of the modern Western penal system, then Caryl Churchill’s Softcops, based on Foucault’s book, won’t offer you much. Lacking the political sophistication and theatrical flair of her best work, Churchill’s play glosses Foucault’s […]

Posted inNews & Politics

News of the Weird

Lead Stories Explaining why he voted against a bill to ban discrimination against gays in June, California assemblyman and rancher Peter Frusetta told his colleagues, “I’ve seen thousands and thousands of [heifers and] three, and maybe at the top, four, that had the hormonal imbalance…that makes them shy away from bulls and take up with […]

Posted inFilm

A Different Kind of Swinger

There’s no getting around it: George of the Jungle is an amiable, highly ingratiating piece of lowbrow entertainment, and the audience of mainly young children and parents I saw it with on Saturday night clearly had a ball. So did I, for that matter. If consumer advice on where to take your kids is what’s […]

Posted inMusic

Trojan Horses

Spice Girls Spice (Virgin) Prodigy The Fat of the Land (Maverick/Warner Brothers) By Jim DeRogatis On the books, England just took a giant step to the left. In May the conservative Tories suffered their worst defeat since 1832, as former rocker Tony Blair became prime minister, the Labour Party took power by the largest margin […]

Posted inColumns & Opinion

Savage Love

Hey, Faggot: This letter is in response to your criticism of the female condom in your reply to “Frisbee of Love.” As the manufacturer and distributor of the Reality female condom, we would like to point out the many benefits of the female condom that you must have overlooked, given your comments. The female condom […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Sister Spit Ramblin’ Road Show

SISTER SPIT RAMBLIN’ ROAD SHOW San Francisco’s radically confessional dyke open mike has gone mobile–and it’s slamming through Chicago, via Las Vegas, Charlottesville, Cleveland, Provincetown, Austin, New Orleans, and Boston. The 12 confrontational all-stars in Sister Spit Ramblin’ Road Show perform stand-up queer comedy, poetry, and performance art from a two-year running gig in the […]

Posted inNews & Politics

Sports Section

Terry Bevington went to the mound to make a pitching change and, of course, was booed. This was last Friday, and as usual he had allowed de facto pitching ace Jaime Navarro to labor too long, into the eighth inning, even though Navarro had squandered an early 2-0 lead and then let the Texas Rangers […]

Posted inNews & Politics

Whine and Cheez

Whine and Cheez The following occurred at “Mr. Beef” on Orleans…. Mr. Beef Guy: Whadya want? My Friend Pat: I’ll take a hotdog and fries. MBG: You want a coke with that? MFP: No, thanks. Can I just get a water? MBG: Water? (PAUSES, LOOKS AROUND IN THAT TOUGH-ROBERT-DENIRO SORT OF WAY) You want WATER?! […]

Posted inMusic

Spot Check

JUNE OF 44 8/1, Fireside Bowl; 8/2, LOUNGE AX I love it when a band can go fluidly from moody and lovely to surreal to downright noisy, and on its new EP, The Anatomy of Sharks (Quarterstick), June of 44 manages to do it all in one song: the glorious “Sharks and Sailors,” which sounds […]

Posted inArts & Culture

A Bedfull of Strangers

A BEDFULL OF FOREIGNERS, Drury Lane Dinner Theatre. Thanks to the shoddy work of Jerry Lewis and a host of other shtickmeisters, everyone thinks of farce as a low, easy form of comedy in which there are no rules and the more chaos the better–in a pinch, all you have to do to get laughs […]

Posted inNews & Politics

Not-So-Strange

By Neal Pollack For months after Jim Williams announced he planned to leave the job of press secretary to the mayor, the Daley administration searched unsuccessfully for a replacement. Winter turned into spring and inched toward summer, yet Williams still showed up spinning at every mayoral appearance. Sometimes it seemed as though he wouldn’t be […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Caligula

CALIGULA, Defiant Theatre, at the Griffin Theatre Company. In its press release Defiant Theatre claims that Albert Camus’ modernist masterpiece Caligula was “tainted” by Bob Guccione’s film of the same name, although from the celluloid evidence it seems unlikely that anyone connected with the film ever cracked the binding on Camus’ work. Defiant hopes its […]