Anna Weiss, Boxer Rebellion Theater. In a healthy American culture (if you can imagine such a thing) the “recovered memory” phenomenon of the late 80s and early 90s would have been laughed off as a particularly bizarre bit of psychosexual kitsch. One more way in which we turn anxiety into sex into TV. But a […]
Tag: Vol. 32 No. 20
Issue of Feb. 13 – 19, 2003
Posted inNews & Politics
How Could He?
Many Lakeview activists saw Tom Tunney as the guy to beat Bernie Hansen, the machine’s man in the 44th Ward, but he always refused to run. Now he’s going for it–as Hansen’s handpicked successor and with Mayor Daley’s blessing.
Posted inArts & Culture
Touchez pas au grisbi
The French title of Jacques Becker’s 1953 gangster thriller translates as “Hands Off the Loot,” but a much better English title used for this film is Honor Among Thieves. Jean Gabin wasn’t yet 50 when he starred as a big-time, high-style gangster hoping to retire, but he still looks pretty wasted, and this pungent tale […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories Radio evangelist Harold Camping recently told his international audience that Satan had taken over all churches and urged people of faith to do their worshiping at home. Angry ministers charge that Camping’s attacks have cost them parishioners, according to the Associated Press. Although the size of Camping’s following is not known, his Oakland-based […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Cabaret Convention
This second annual cabaret showcase hosted by the New York-based Mabel Mercer Foundation kicks off Friday, February 14, with a sold-out black-tie gala at the Palmer House Hiltons’s Empire Room and continues with four concerts at the Park West through Monday, February 17. This schedule includes auxiliary programs at Davenport’s Piano Bar & Cabaret and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: evil in the shadow of progress
Seattle-based author Erik Larson was trolling for material a few years ago when he remembered something he’d come across while researching his 2000 best-seller, Isaac’s Storm. Or rather, someone: Englewood-based serial killer H.H. Holmes. He started to read more about Holmes, a New Hampshire-born ladies’ man whose real name was Herman Webster Mudgett. Before and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Unexpected Man
The Unexpected Man, Apple Tree Theatre. This new play by Yasmina Reza, who also wrote Art, is so slight that if not anchored by substantial performances it will simply float away. Fortunately, William Brown and Peggy Roeder as its two characters–a midlist author and his biggest fan, who happen to share a train compartment–touchingly reveal […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Pelican
A buttload of metal out there, no matter which camp it calls home, still involves a dude with bulging neck veins howling about death or injustice, so hooray for Pelican, who don’t have any singer at all. I’m not saying this local quartet have cast the shackles of genredom aside: their instrumental doom doesn’t drip […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Did They See That?
She’s one of the most exciting high school athletes in the country. But don’t look for Candace Parker on ESPN.
Posted inNews & Politics
Plymouth Myths
Ben Joravsky and his coauthor [Nadia Oehlsen] resorted to fakelore in making the case for preservation of Uptown’s Plymouth Hotel (“Heartbreak Hotel,” January 24). They wrongly claim the Plymouth “served as home to Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and other entertainers when they came to shoot movies at Chaplin’s nearby Essanay Studio.” George Spoor (the S […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Aldermania!
We’re Just . . . Visiting The fastest way to get an appointment with 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis may be to hang up one of his opponent’s campaign signs. Margarita Perez (not her real name) put a sign for Ambrosio Medrano in the window of her home and was promptly visited by two Solis […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: aggression in bloom
“I have a compass which keeps spinning me into zones of conflict,” declares New Delhi documentarian Amar Kanwar in his masterly video essay A Season Outside (1998), and in a country like India he never has far to travel. V.S. Naipaul once called the partitioning of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India “as great a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Let the Destruction Begin
Re “Heartbreak Hotel” [January 24]: According to one of the two “activists” trying to “save” the Plymouth Hotel, he can’t imagine there’s much support for the Freed proposal in the community. He’s wrong. There’s a mountain of support. Had you interviewed anybody else in the community you’d have learned that quickly. Also, as to the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Andrea Marcovicci
Andrea Marcovicci is the finest American cabaret singer of her generation, the baby boomers who came of age during the heyday of folk and rock in the 1960s. The influence of Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez is evident in her direct, openhearted delivery (utterly free of arch pseudosophistication) and in her voice, which […]