THEMICHIGAN DAILY

Saturday, Febriuory 22, 1969

THE MICHIGAN DAILY Saturday, February 22, 1969

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om Rush: Enter shyly, play softly, stay awhile
By DAVID SPUR crowds where most the audience secretly mellow and people stop do it complete justice. But i

't |

We caught each other in good
moods, audience and performer.
Tom Rush almost shyly stepped
up on the stage in Canterbury
House last night and held up his
bright yellow guitar, flashing
in the spotlight. Chords and the
songs came out that way, too.
A lot of them were the old
songs, even some of the funky
rock 'n' roll tunes most of us
remember from the top forty
of the late fifties. Rush believes
in those old tunes, even that
"rock 'n' will never die," and he
does them with the good-na-
tured, unassuming humor that
characterizes his stage person-
ality.
Rush was having a good, time.
He was in his element with the
youthful crowd. The scene
brought back shades of the be-
ginning days at Club 47 in Cam-
bridge, when Rush would play
to warm little coffee house

knew him as a student.A
Perhaps we like Tom Rush
so well because he is one of us.
If his background lacks au-
thenticity when he sings coun-
try tunes like "More Pretty Girls
Than One," Rush makes up for
it in his own relishment of the
lyrics, and in telling the stories
behind the songs.
Laughingly calling it "the
epitome of bad taste," he sang
one good-time oldie-but-moldie
written by Eric von Schmidt
when Herr Schmidt was "Drunk }
on the floor with five-dollar-a
gallon-gin p 1 a y i n g dynamite
mandolin." We laughed.
The other side of Tom Rush
is when the flashing bright
chords suddenly come soft and

stomping their feet and let the
perfect clean notes sink deep in-
to their thoughts.
So it was with Joni Mitchell's
"Circle Game," graced with an
unbelievable performance on
electric guitar- by Rush's rhy-
thm back-up man.
It was the kind of a night
where people propped their
stockinged feet up on the stage
while Rush rattled off funny
stories in his own softspoken
chatter. We hissed when t h e
jokes got too bad.
Maybe Rushbdidn't quite pull
it off as well as we've h e a r d
other singers do "You Can't Tell
a Book by its Cover". That kind
of boisterous, earthy blues needs
to be belted savagely by a 200-
pound born-in-Chicago type to

was all right, anyway, with
Rush.
Even Rush's bad jokes were
all right, anyway, just because
they were Rush's and he never
tried to knock you off your chair.
Rush doesn't need a good
review. You'll go to see h m
anyway, because he's not par-
ticularly cool, protesting, wild,
or showmanlike. He doesn't need
to be.
STONED!!
"stereopticon"
STONED!!
"Marx Brothers"
MAD MARVIN at the
Vth FORUM

Presenting:
REV.
GARY DAVIS
Singer " Composer " Guitar Picker
"Gary Davis is, without doubt, the greatest
living guitar player."
-The Denver Folklore Center
Catalogue and Almanac
At
ALICE'S RESTAURANT
In Alice Lloyd
SUNDAY, FEB. 23
8:00 $1.75
sponsored by:
Alice's Restaurant 0 The Ark * Smitty's

-Daily-Eric Pergeaux

Que-cinema
Queen: Dishonest exploration

BOB SEGER SYSTEM
Original Charging Rhinoceros of Soul
Teagarden and Van Winkle
Fruit of the Loom
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28
8-12 midnight
EMU BOWEN FIELDHOUSE
Ypsilanti, Mich. Adm. $1
TICKETS AVAILABLE: Discount Records, Ann Arbor;
Hudson's; Grinnell's; McKenny Union, EMU
E- -

By GORMAN BEAUCHAMP
Pauline Kael recently wrote in
HJarper's that otherwise soph-
isticated people will think a
movie' "great" if it introduces
them to unfamiliar subject mat-
ter: "thus many mo'vie goers
react .as naively as children to
Portrait of Jason or The Queen."
Certainly The Queen will intro-
duce most viewers to a totally
unfamiliar world - the gay
underground, transvestitism, a
drag ,beauty contest. If each
age.. has a secret taboo which
fascinates it, surely our's is
homosexuality. And in the safe
vicariousness of a movie thea-
tre the repulsion-attraction we
have toward the forbidden can
be indulged.
The Queen is a fascinating .
film;, but not a very honest one,
About the only 'ccaparisons that
can be made are to some of An-
dy Warhol's films}_ Chelsea
-Girls, say, or Flesh - or to Jack
Smith's Flaming Creatures. No
doubt The Queen will appeal to a
much wider audience than these O
films for pretty obvious reasons:
it is -slicker, more' commercial;
it is more traditionally made
and thus more coherent; and,
most important, it is dishonest
enough to fit in easily with un-
ambiguous stereotypes,
3020 Washtenaw, Ph. 434-1782
Between Ypsilanti & Ann Arbor
NOW SHOWING
Feature
Wed., Sat., Sun.
1:30-3:45-6:15-8:30
--Mon., Tues., Thurs., Fri..
7 :00-9:00
JOIN-IN THE DISNEY
FUN-IN! "

The Queen is after the sen-
sational, that little moment
which will titillate us to a shud-
der of revulsion: the queen
plucking hair off his chest just
before going on in the' bathing
suit event. Toput it another way,
both In what it shows and how
it shows it, The Queen is edi-
toralizing in a way that War-
hol doesn't. For him a queen is
no different from the heads and
hustlers that make up his world.
But for the m a k er s of this,
film, the queens are freaks and
thus the film represents them
in freaky ways.
There can be no doubt that
for a straight audience a drag
queen contest is grotesque. But
if it is to be shown at all, it
should be shown honestly. There
are moments in The Queen
where this honesty does come
through, as in the scenes in the
hotel bedroom where the con-
testants sit around talking about
themselves-how they became

the draft board, whether they
would like to -have that opera-
tion. All this is very funny, not
not so much at their expense as
at society's. And with the humor
there is a kind of humanity that
shows us these are people, not
freaks. But these moments are
relatively rare.
The makers of The Queen no
doubt thought they displayed ad-
mirably sophisticated tolerance
toward their subjects, and intel-
lectually perhaps they do. But
on a more basic gut level the
film, 'I think, views them with a
kind of fascinated moralism.
And so, probably, will the view-
er. As I sat watching the audi-
ence for the contest, I was ask-
ing myself what kind of an aud-
ience would go to an event or
movie like this, and why. Why
do you want to see a few
drag queens making a spectacle
of themselves? Perhaps the fact
that there is an audience for this
film is more sick than the film
itself.

gay, what

happened down at

--
0 0
o THE0
oENTERTAINER 6
o byo
00
John Osborne
Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre o
o February 19-22 0
o presented by 0
o Department of Speech 0
University Players
BOX OFFICE
O Feb. 17, 18,12:30-5 P.M. 0
Feb. 19, 22, 12:30-8 P.M.
0 TICKETS 0
Feb. 19, 20, $1.25, $1.75
0 Feb. 21, 22, $1.75, $2.25
ALL PERFORMANCES 8:00 P.M.
o 01,
0- 0 0. 0 0, 0 0 0 0

Lim

I

01

BIG

WALT DISNEY
WinniethePooh
and the bIusterydW
Technicolor.



Are You
Interested
in
Psychology
Existentialism
SEE
Dr. Rollo May

CATHOLIC VOICE
LECTURE SERIES
"The Seculdr Theology
of the Church"
Dr. Rosemary Ruether
February 22, 1969
Natural Science Auditorium
8:00 P.M.

: SPENDER!,
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On the 1969
MIICHIGANENSIAN

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