Bill Davenport and Donna Kirchman’s new nightclub takes aim at the changing tastes of aging hipsters.
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 5
Issue of Nov. 5 – 11, 1998
Festival Seating: debating Chicago’s sex change
Chicago has never been a shining city on the hill. Growing quickly out of the prairie, fueled by raw commercial interests, the city has always been personified by braggarts, tough guys on the make–for every Jane Addams, a score of Paddy Baulers. But today the city looks and feels different. Former factories and warehouses are […]
Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival
Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival The 18th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, November 6 through 12, at the Music Box and continues Friday through Thursday, November 13 through 19, at the Village. The November 7 free screening of The Times of Harvey Milk will be at the […]
What Farocki Taught
Jill Godmilow describes this recent half-hour short as a precise remake, in color and English, of Harun Farocki’s 1969 black-and-white German film Inextinguishable Fire, and while I have some quarrels with it, this fascinating intervention is bound to generate some interesting debate (at this screening she’ll discuss it with experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, which should […]
Snooty
Snooty, Bailiwick Repertory. Renewing its commitment to the hearing impaired with its “Deaf Bailiwick Artists” program, the company offers the Chicago premiere of this brief, well-meaning script by Raymond Luczak, which won first place in a 1990 New York deaf-theater competition. Set in a school for the hearing impaired, the play follows the trials of […]
His Name is Alive
His Name Is Alive Warren Defever, the restless creative mind behind His Name Is Alive, continues to defy coherent description with his group’s new album, Ft. Lake (4AD). In some ways it’s HNIA’s most conventional effort–although keyboards and snatches of electronics pepper a few tunes, the bulk of the album is built around guitar, bass, […]
No City News Is Bad News/ Losing a Scorekeeper/ The Press Club Is History/ Final Accounting
By Michael Miner No City News Is Bad News Whatever you might have heard about afflicting the comfortable and binding the community, the first function of the journalist is witness. Reporters are our eyes and ears, and whenever they abandon a place things there are sure not to go better. The unsung virtue of City […]
Sorry, Wrong Number and Maternal Insincts
Sorry, Wrong Number and Maternal Instincts, Hidden Stages, at Blackwell Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church. The site for Hidden Stages’ latest venture–a community hall in the historic Bronzeville district–may lack professional resources: closely spaced supporting pillars obstruct one’s view, and the lights are operated by wall-mounted switches. But any drawbacks to the space are more than […]
Major Stars
MAJOR STARS For more than a decade, guitarists Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar have had their controls set for the heart of the sun. In Vermonster and Crystalized Movements they used garage-rock tunes as launching pads for howling, over-amped freak-outs; in B.O.R.B. they wove detuned guitar and droning keyboards into spacey instrumentals; and Magic Hour, […]
I Like Ed Vrdolyak
donahue.qxd Ben Joravsky’s October 30 article on LeRoy Martin’s race for Cook County sheriff gave the impression that I wish to distance myself from Ed Vrdolyak, as Joe Novak and Mike Sheahan have done to avoid their association with Harold Washington’s political opposition. Council Wars was before my time as a political consultant in Illinois, […]
In Print: the individual beneath the leather
“My images are definitely tamer than what people would expect,” says Steve Diet Goedde, a photographer whose work is showcased in a new book, The Beauty of Fetish. “Most fetish photographers shoot either to titillate themselves and their peers or to shock the uninitiated. They forget that there’s a person wearing all that leather or […]
News of the Weird
Lead Stories In September Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi announced that he had given up hope for unifying the Arab world and that he would begin to align his country with Africa. “Africa is a paradise,” he said. “I would like Libya to become a black country. Hence, I recommend to Libyan men to marry only black […]
Neighborhood of Broken Dreams
hoover.qxd To the editors: Your recent article on the Gateway project [October 9] could have just as easily been titled “Field of Broken Dreams.” Anyone can see that the project is not progressing well. The project appears to be rife with one act of mismanagement after another. There has been one lie told after another. […]
Down the Tubes
With the new season’s lineup, TV has hit rock bottom and started digging.
On the Open Road
ON THE OPEN ROAD, Wax Fruit Theatre Company, at Chicago Dramatists. Six years ago Steve Tesich clearly thought he’d written a profound play with On the Open Road, given its world premiere at the Goodman. Borrowing heavily from Beckett and Ionesco, he fashioned a theatrical universe in which Christ’s return engenders vicious religious wars, leading […]