Reality is for people who just can’t handle Robyn Hitchcock. He’s been making records that are fantastic in both senses since his early tenure with England’s Soft Boys, whose dark and lovely Underwater Moonlight sounds vaguely like the Beatles undergoing psychoanalysis. His more ethereal Egyptians can out-Sgt. Pepper any band of Beatle wannabes when they want to, but they’d be too bored. Linear story lines in humdrum pop cliches just aren’t Hitchcock’s way....
Two highly original and personal documentaries by Canadian feminist filmmaker Kay Armatage, both of which gracefully fuse traditional and experimental methods of art making to offer passionate views of creativity. Storytelling (1983) intercuts between the performances of several master storytellers, each representing a different style and tradition. Most of the storytellers are women–an old Irish woman tells a folktale, a middle-aged woman tells an Inuit folktale, a very young woman performs in a highly theatrical style, and Constance de Jong tells a postmodern story about stories and their effects–but the film also makes room for a male metis elder, an elderly black man who tells a story gospel style, and a 23-year-old male rap artist....
T BONE N WEASEL T Bone and Weasel are a pair of jailbirds headed down the back roads of South Carolina (not to mention the proverbial highway of life) in a succession of stolen cars. Weasel, the little white guy, is illiterate, idealistic, and gullible; T Bone, the tall, well-built black guy, is somewhat better educated and a whole lot wiser and more cynical. Weasel wants to find a straight job; T Bone, all too familiar with the scraps historically tossed his and his people’s way, prefers to keep his distance from society and plans to float through a career of petty crime....
Zazz, mine makes a strange clunking sound when I try to start him on cold mornings. “When women write, they want to know what makes men tick, and how to ‘fix’ them when things go wrong,” writes Sun-Times advice columnist Jeff Zaslow in Today’s Chicago Woman (May 1989). “Since men don’t come with a user’s manual, women write to me as if I’m the men’s service department.” So far he’s not offering any warranties....
THE LIFE OF TIMON OF ATHENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As usual for his ancient-history plays, Shakespeare drew this one from Plutarch’s Lives. The classical world’s most famous misanthrope, Timon was an extravagant and narcissistic spendthrift who after dispersing his bounty among his so-called friends received nothing from the parasites but ingratitude. Poor and extremely bitter, the ex-prodigal leaves Athens to live in a cave like a beast....
During a break in the first half of last Sunday’s Public League championship basketball game, the public-address announcer read a list of the five previous champions. “Nineteen-eighty-four Public League champion–Simeon Vocational,” he said. Screams, hoots, and applause came from various sections of the crowd. “Nineteen-eighty-five champion–Simeon.” Same response, a little bit louder. “Nineteen-eighty-six Public League champion–Martin Luther King High School.” All the previously quiet areas of the Pavilion at the University of Illinois at Chicago–which is where the game took place–suddenly came alive....
I’ve heard the following expression from people all over the country and on television. It makes absolutely no sense: “That’s the exception that proves the rule.” Is this a bastardization of some other phrase? If not, what does it mean? –Lorraine Nicotera, East Weymouth, Massachusetts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To be sure, a few scholarly types have tried to make excuses for “The exception proves the rule,” as the quotation books usually phrase it....
UNCLE LEMON’S SPRING at the Second City Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steve Totland adapted the book, and Jessica Thebus directed the production. Both are pursuing their PhDs in performance studies with Galati at Northwestern, and both already display traces of the ingenuity and dramatic insight that permeate his own adaptations. Adapting such a story is tricky business. The plot must be condensed, for even a children’s book is too long to enact in full....
In 1964, the year Bobby Greene turned 17, he was hopelessly in love with a pretty 13-year-old named Lindy Lemmon. Day by day in his diary, he chronicled his obsession for her. He has decided to publish his 1964 diary. Titled Be True to Your School, the book comes out this month and has already been excerpted in the Trib, Esquire, and Family Circle. Still, she can’t forget him — he won’t let her....
The seventh annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, runs from Friday, September 27, through Sunday, October 6. An opening reception starts at 5:30 tonight at the First Chicago Center Theater, Dearborn and Madison, with a screening of What Happened to Santiago to follow at 7:30; tickets are $25. Film and video screenings after opening night will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N....
Last weekend we held the first ever North Branch Spring Bird Count. When I say we, I mean mainly my friend David Standish and me, along with Jeff Rovner and Judy Pollock. A couple more people had said they would try to get out to one of the restoration sites along the North Branch of the Chicago River late Saturday afternoon, but they didn’t make it. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Fred Simon is (a) a committed composer who draws equally from jazz, the Beatles, and European impressionism for his inspiration; (b) a strong pianist, with Keith Jarrett sitting on one shoulder and Joni Mitchell on the other; (c) an improviser whose skills continue to sharpen with each new project. After a decade of Chicago visibility (as coleader of the old Simon and Bard group), and with a big-time new album (on Windham Hill), Simon and his music are known quantities to many listeners....
COMMUTER TRIP Every reviewer’s nightmare: the wind chill is 30 below, I’m way the hell west on Grand Avenue, in a neighborhood I never even knew existed, in a gallery I’ve never heard of, with a few folding chairs, a single aluminum scoop lamp clamped to one of the bare ceiling rafters, and no heat save for a grumbling space heater that looks as though it’s been salvaged from the wreck of a DC-10....
Philip Gossett, a world-renowned authority on Rossini and Verdi who teaches at the University of Chicago, used to squirm whenever his school’s alma mater was played at academic functions. “The song has always been, shall we say, problematic,” he explains. “It fails to touch the deeper regions of the heart. Then as a number of us became more and more sensitized to its lyrics, we started saying to ourselves: ‘Can’t we do something about this?...
“Smooth over ice,” reads the banner above the ice at the Lake Forest College recreation center. It’s the slogan for Glayva, the Scottish liqueur sponsoring the ninth World Ladies’ Curling Championship, and a pun on the festivities. On March 22, the first day of competition, about 1,000 spectators shiver in the 30-degree temperature of the ice rink, not a large crowd as world events go, but curling is not a major spectator sport in the United States....
To the editors: Furthermore, Scigliano dismisses lightly the idea that more drug users, which he admits will result from legalization, will lead to more addicts. But the fact is that a certain portion of drug users will always end up, whether for physiological, sociological, or psychological reasons, as addicts, according to all the experts. And while it takes about 15 years to become a full-fledged alcoholic, it only takes 7-15 months to get addicted to cocaine....
“Was he a bad man?” my four-year-old daughter Elly asked after witnessing her first heist. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t think Elly judged his appearance as sharply as I did. Her reference for people in rags comes from the first half of the Cinderella story. Last week, when a friend of ours was over, Elly asked me to tie a kerchief in her hair....
OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL Theatre of the Reconstruction Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Wild Dogs, a production by the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company, two males turn their hostility toward women on each other. In this play by Matt Borczon, a drunken, hyperactive loner named Rex accuses Trevor King, an old high school buddy, of being “pussy whipped” because he let his wife throw him out of the house....
PRIVATE LIVES Of all God’s blunders Noel Coward hated bores the most. Yet A.C. Thomas perversely makes Coward’s best-known comedy a heavy contender for the tedium trophy. Abandoning such baggage as wit and style, Thomas’s mauling aims mainly for the nasty and the smug. Unburdened by any dull desire to ground the dialogue in rounded characters, Thomas treats the lines as if they had been only arbitrarily distributed to the actors....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So that organization called NOW is going to make the Reader and Mr. Nelson apologize for disrespecting the black woman. The insult I felt as NOW stood around posturing as if this foul-mouthed brute represents the black woman cannot be put into words. I will never forget this and neither will any other woman I could ever influence when it comes to NOW....
