meyer.qxd Dear Editor: Since the Chicago Headline Club announced plans for an annual journalism ethics award three years ago, the Reader has published a series of snide, poorly supported potshots at the award, its organizers, and its recipients, including me. One Reader piece described the award as a “well-meant gesture…doomed to fall flat.” Meanwhile, the […]
Yearly Archives: 1998
Posted inNews & Politics
Rejecting the N-Word
lee.qxd To the editors: I’ve just finished reading Bennie Currie’s article on the N-word (Essay, December 19). While I was reading it, I was thinking about a line out of a book I had read a while ago written by a black man. I forgot the title, but I remember the line saying, “If whites […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung
balkin.qxd Mike Sula reported inaccurately and did us a great disservice in his reporting about the Sunday Maxwell Street tribute at the Chicago Historical Society in Section One [Calendar] in the 1/9/98 issue of the Reader. He wrote, “And since the Devil paved paradise and put in a parking lot, all that’s left are the […]
Posted inFilm
The Color of Paradise
Jour de fete Rating **** Masterpiece Directed by Jacques Tati Written by Tati, Henri Marquet, and Rene Wheeler With Jacques Tati, Paul Frankeur, Guy Decomble, Santa Relli, and Maine Vallee. By Jonathan Rosenbaum Every Tati film marks simultaneously (a) a moment in the work of Jacques Tati; (b) a moment in the history of French […]
Posted inFilm
Jackie Brown
Jackie Brown Adapting Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch for his third feature, Quentin Tarantino puts together a fairly intricate and relatively uninvolving money-smuggling plot, but his cast is so good that you probably won’t feel cheated unless you’re hoping for something as show-offy as Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. A flight attendant (70s blaxploitation queen […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Impassioned Embraces
IMPASSIONED EMBRACES, Paz/Suarez Bubblegum Productions, at Heartland Studio Theater. It’s a surprise to learn that John Pielmeier, author of the theological thriller Agnes of God, also invented these ten playful sketches and monologues, a keen showcase for seven actors full of the same knowing twists and absurdities that fueled David Ives’s All in the Timing. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Limits of Infallibility/ A Reporter’s Concealed Weapon
Last week’s New Republic remembered a horrendous event–the 1858 seizure by papal police in Bologna, Italy, of a six-year-old Jewish boy whose nanny had sprinkled him with water behind his parents’ back. The church, which had encouraged the “baptism,” refused to return the boy, and he grew up to become a monk. The story is […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Wilde at Heart
The Importance of Being Earnest Fabulous Monsters at Bailiwick Repertory By Albert Williams A would-be heckler was turned away from the triumphant premiere of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, on Valentine’s Day 1895, before he could make a scene. He was the Marquess of Queensberry, outraged that Wilde was having an affair with […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Politics of Necessity
How did such a backward-looking guy wind up so far ahead of his time?
Posted inArts & Culture
Pennies From Heaven/ Sweet Home Athenaeum/ Picking Up The Stagebill/ Fading Beauty
After years of heartache, the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts may have found a knight in shining armor.
Posted inFilm
The Codes
The Codes Wojciech Has directed this 1966 Polish film in which a father’s search for a son arrested in 1944 becomes a moving meditation on the irreversibility of time and the impossibility of fully knowing the past. Tadeusz has lived in England since before World War II while his wife and two sons remained in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: Steve Chiapetti’s triple threat
“You need to love what you’re doing,” Steve Chiappetti repeats like a mantra. “You don’t need to be a genius to cook–you need passion.” Chiappetti’s passion has made him, at 30, one of the city’s most honored chefs–as well as one of the busiest. He develops recipes and creates the ever-changing menus for all three […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Gallery Tripping: a guerrilla TV guide
Art historian Deidre Boyle picked up her first video camera in 1972 while in graduate school. Four years later she decided to write about the medium instead. She began researching video collectives, eventually viewing hundreds of tapes in archives around the country and interviewing more than a hundred pioneers–and finally writing a book, Subject to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Following Function
A Basketmaker in Rural Japan at the Field Museum of Natural History, through February 8 A Game of Chance at Printworks, through February 7 By Fred Camper Viewing the 100 some elegant handmade baskets and other objects in the Field Museum’s “A Basketmaker in Rural Japan,” I was struck at first by their repeating geometrical […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Anastasia File
The Anastasia File, Illinois Theatre Center. The greatest unsolved mystery of the 20th century may be the story of Anastasia, the woman who was perhaps the sole surviving heir to Russian czar Nicholas II. At the very least it’s a tale that long ago became fodder for made-for-TV movies, pop biographies, and of course most […]