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 […]
Tag: Vol. 26 No. 43
Issue of Jul. 31 – Aug. 6, 1997
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 inFilm
Black Harvest Internation Film and Video Festival
Black Harvest International Film and Video Festival This festival of films and videos by black artists from all over the world–which replaces the Blacklight Film Festival and has a new team of programmers–runs from Friday, August 1, through Sunday, August 10, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $6, $3 […]
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
Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player
Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player By Justin Hayford If you’ve spent any time around Chicago’s cabaret circuit in the last few years, you probably know Honey West. She’s the vivacious, voluptuous drag queen with a tongue like a stiletto and a voice like electrified butter-cream frosting–a true cabaret dream. And then there’s Paige […]
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 […]