If your objection to Dirty Dancing is that it’s just not dirty enough, don’t miss the chance to see two purveyors of sweat-soaked primal raunch get scuzzy and fuzzy on one double bill. The suavely unkempt Tav Falco, who resembles a used-car salesman stepping out of a John Waters film festival, is the rockabilly equivalent […]
Tag: Vol. 17 No. 13
Issue of Jan. 14 – 20, 1988
Write on Rosenbaum
To the editors: Reading Jonathan Rosenbaum’s retrospective on 1987 [“Ten From ’87,” January 8] reminded me of how much I’ve been enjoying his film reviews since he joined your staff. Somehow I haven’t managed to get to as many movies over the last year as I’d have liked to, so I didn’t catch a lot […]
On Exhibit: a gallery full of flowers
Shivering, huddled by the heater, wrapped in scarves and afghans. Renting movies, checking the windchill factor, ordering out, cursing and whining, buying Chapstick. These are the popular methods of fighting extreme cold. Another possible antidote: stop by your local florist and rush home with some fresh-cut tulips, roses, or irises, shipped from a more humane […]
Movie Politics
To the editors: If “overt politics of any kind in a movie are deemed suspect,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum writes [“Our Man in Nicaragua,” December 4], it’s no less true that some movie reviewers find the covert sort in every other film with an ease that, in truth, makes it covert only to a person who […]
The four phases of Pink Floyd
There are at least two fun ironies in the rather ugly dispute that has separated leader-songwriter Roger Waters from his erstwhile teammates in the greatest dinosaur rock band of them all, Pink Floyd. The first is that Pink Floyd wasn’t really Roger Waters’s group at all: it was the conception and (originally) the execution of […]
A strip mall in Edgewater: class warfare, or small-time tiff?
They’re building a strip mall on the old, deserted blacktop lot–now covered with ice–out behind the Berwyn Avenue elevated stop in Edgewater. It’s nothing fancy, really, just a small and simple stretch of shops. It’s the kind of project they build all the time in the suburbs, where most folks undoubtedly would pay it little […]
The Boys of Winter
We lasted many years, Billy and me, all those hours and days and winter months spent out in a smoky pale world that no one had told us yet was cold enough to kill us.
Stage Notes: Frank Galati conducts an affair
Frank Galati stands in the middle of what he aptly describes as “a sort of derelict loft.” Gray and bleak, it looks like a deserted artist’s studio. Strewn about the sprawling space are paintings and pieces of sculpture–some impressionism, some cubism, and a striking minimalist work, a square canvas painted nothing but yellow. Depressing and […]
In Search of the Suburban Reader/Cooperative Cartooning
In Search of the Suburban Reader It was Pat Colander who spotted the eerie parallels: this paper’s readers and the inhabitants of Naperville, the DuPage County suburb 35 miles to the southwest, show up in the computer readouts as peas in a pod. An erstwhile Reader staff writer who made a name for herself chronicling […]
Environment: Waukegan’s Toxic Waits
The endless battle over PCBs in Waukegan Harbor is poisoning the city’s plans to become the “Coho Coast.”
They Even Recycle Publicity
To the editors: Thank you for the October 30th Neighborhood News article about Uptown Recycling Station. We appreciate Ben Joravsky’s story about our buy-back center at 4716 N. Sheridan and our weekly routes in Rogers Park and Lakeview. In response to the article, over 100 north-side residents called for more information (our number is 769-4488) […]
Vapid Pap
To the editors: You will be well within your rights to take Hot Type columnist Michael Miner’s own advice (December 11) and to evaluate whether or not it is cost-effective to keep that column around. A full page of ads . . . for that matter, a blank page, would be more refreshingly honest and […]
Desperate Women
TALKING WITH . . . Heroes Inc. Ensemble at the New Lincoln Theatre While hitchhiking across the country, I discovered that my silence could elicit startling stories and disclosures from the people who gave me rides. Something about the monotony of the road, the intimacy of the automobile, and my own willingness to listen triggered […]
Playing at Theater
To the editors: Charley Custer’s article, “Look What They’ve Done to My Play” [December 18], paints a fairly clear picture of the hell that is new play development. It also presents a convincing argument for the reason there is so little dramatic writing of value being done in this country today. We are presented with […]