Last week, amid the usual tsunami of grim news about inflation, mass shootings, pandemic, and war, came word that the New York Court of Appeals is considering whether the Bronx Zoo is violating the rights of Happy, an Asian elephant who’s lived there for more than four decades, by confining her to a portion of […]
Category: On Culture
Posted inOn Culture
The end of Roe
Regarding the recently revealed U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade: WTF? Because, it’s the F we’re talking about, right? That little itch we’re biologically programmed to scratch and its inordinate, inequitable aftermath? As I’ve opined here before, if cisgender men were the ones carrying a pregnancy for nine months, suffering through an […]
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Chicago’s blessed with a motherlode of stunning churches
What kind of God allows a church to burn down on Good Friday? That’s the question that came to mind when the 130-year-old Antioch Missionary Baptist Church at Stewart and 63rd Street went up in flames earlier this month, followed by a familiar answer: the same god that has allowed slavery, Holocaust, plague, war, and […]
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Bleacher bummed
Something else took me to Arizona last week, but on what the locals considered a pleasant Tuesday afternoon I was in Surprise Stadium, in the Phoenix suburb of the same name, for the Cubs’s final preseason game. They were facing the Texas Rangers. Both teams were wearing Cubbie blue. The temperature on the field was […]
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Coming of age in an ordinary and dangerous place
Journalist Charles M. Blow once wrote in his New York Times column that he “likes to think of himself as a Southern writer.” His childhood in Gibsland, Louisiana, shaped his writing, and in the south, “you don’t so much say words as sing them.” Now, at Lyric Opera, his own story is literally being sung. […]
Posted inOn Culture
A resonant Tosca
There’s a war raging in Europe. A brutal clash that includes an entrenched repressive autocracy and ordinary civilians determined to fight for their freedom. Tyrannical power is vested in one man—a deranged “security” professional who cares only about his own twisted agenda. He decides who lives and dies; everyone trembles before him. Someone needs to […]
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‘Are we calling this an invasion? It’s really a war.’
There were two crowds in front of Saints Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church in Ukrainian Village on a frigid afternoon last week. One was the medieval crowd that’s always there, on the church’s iconic mural—a depiction of the baptism of the Ukrainian people. The other consisted of several hundred live and livid Chicagoans reacting […]
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Offense intended
A couple of couches and a video player have been set up in the little balcony lobby outside the fourth floor exhibition hall at the Chicago Cultural Center. If you plop down there for a few minutes before entering the galleries to see “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott,” a retrospective spanning […]
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A survivor’s tour of Auschwitz
She didn’t want to talk about it. Fritzie Fritzshall survived Auschwitz, came to Chicago, and built what most of us are lucky enough to think of as a normal life, with work and marriage, a child and a home. She did it by putting her Auschwitz experience in a mental box and shutting it away. […]
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Arts folk: what would you do with $20 million?
How bad is COVID-19 damage to the arts sector? Arts Alliance Illinois says it’s been researching that question and will be releasing the results any day now. I didn’t have them by press time, but it’s safe to assume they’ll be brutal. The heads of both the AAI and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and […]
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Thompson Center survival is glad tidings
Everybody knows, especially at this season of the year, it’s a bad idea to look a gift horse in the mouth. But what if he opens it? What if he flashes you a great big horsey smile? And you just can’t look away fast enough? I’m asking because we got a wonderful gift last week, […]
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The verdict on Chicago’s endangered Thompson Center is imminent
Trudging east on Randolph toward the Siskel Center on a gloomy, COVID-depopulated early evening last week, I heard something that stopped me in my tracks: “Mom, mom, what’s that building?” I turned to see the source. A boy of ten or so was pulling at his mother’s arm as they walked south on Clark. With […]
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‘Misinformation in listicle format’
I was spending a day in bed with a laptop when I got an e-mail from a reader linking to an article titled “20 Essential Studies that Raise Grave Doubts about COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates.” It got my attention. After a Moderna booster the day before and a restless night, I’d awakened that morning woozy and […]
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‘Undying Love’: the Opera
Composer and tenor Steve Wallace says the first time he heard the Nas song “Undying Love,” the final track on the rapper’s 1999 album I Am . . ., “I immediately saw it as a verismo one-act with chamber orchestra, but I stored it away for a later time.” It wasn’t until 2014, when Wallace […]
Posted inOn Culture
‘The narrative was the key’
Reader cofounder and original editor Bob Roth had some radical ideas about editors. He didn’t want them to prescribe what went into the paper, or to solicit it. He wanted the stories to crop up like some natural urban flora and make their way on their own to the Reader office. The editors’ jobs would […]