Don’t think for a minute that Robert Seltzner was some hack that Eddie Vrdolyak kept around to hold his coat. Seltzner is a tough guy too, and he was a big shot down on the East Side of Chicago when Vrdolyak was a nobody lawyer hustling personal-injury cases. As editor of the local paper, the […]
Tag: Vol. 17 No. 35
Issue of Jun. 16 – 22, 1988
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
The latest thing in business suits? DesignMarks Corporation on Irving Park reports that it designed the current annual report of ESI Industries, Inc., “in a cover which represents gray flannel enhanced with two red stripes.” Your tax dollars at work, sooner or later. From an Illinois EPA announcement of May 20: “Ekco Housewares, Inc., 1949 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Music Notes: some string quartets can play what they like
Last month at their Chamber Music Chicago “Outreach Series” concert for children, a young girl stood up and asked the Kronos Quartet why they don’t play Mozart. “Don’t you like him?” she asked, sincerely puzzled. “Yes, yes, very much,” David Harrington, Kronos leader, founder, and first violinist, answered. “He’s a real nice guy!” “Didn’t he […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Sins of the Church
To the editors. Robert McClory’s excellent overview of conservative Catholicism (“The Divine Right,” May 6, 1988) left the mistaken impression, in its necessarily brief description of church history, that the Catholic Church was the undisputed driving force in European civilization until the Protestant Reformation when “it all fell apart.” Both Catholic and Protestant historians generally […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
The ideal way to learn about birding is as the pupil of a master. Sixty some years ago, the young men of the Bronx County Bird Club, a group that included Roger Tory Peterson among its members, had Ludlow Griscom as idol, teacher, and gadfly. Griscom was the first master of birding, the first ornithologist […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Hooked on Filing
To the editors: “Inside the Clip Joint–The Inky Underside of the PR Business” (May 20) was made to sound so very dark. I worked there during my early college days. It was the finest thing I learned in those college days. It taught me (forced me) to think and learn on the spot. Immediately. No […]
Posted inArts & Culture
J.J. Johnson
It’s reasonable to think that had J.J. Johnson not abandoned the bandstands of America and Europe for the soundstages of Hollywood (yes, he did do the scoring for The Mod Squad), he would still be a familiar name in even non-jazz households. Like Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, and a few others among his […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Slanting Toward Palestine
To the editors: As an avid reader of the Reader I was dismayed and disappointed at Patricia Stoll’s article “Demonstration” (May 6, 1988). Not only was this article irresponsible journalism, but Ms. Stoll’s perception of the Israeli-Palestinian problem is shamefully skewed. It is clear that Ms. Stoll is “on the Palestinian side” in this troubling […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Killers
KILLERS Steppenwolf Theatre Company Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer. –Harold Ross, original editor of the New Yorker. The time is the mid-1950s. The scene is a seedy boardinghouse. Somewhere in the background a saxophone wails its lonely complaint about the human condition. Hacking away at his typewriter […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lovers and Keepers
LOVERS AND KEEPERS Blind Parrot Productions Near the end of the first act in Maria Irene Fornes’s Lovers and Keepers, the couple on the stage is watching television in content resignation. “At first you were mean,” the woman tells the man, “then you were nice.” “At first you were incredibly stupid,” he answers. “but then […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Shut Up and Dance
MAKING DANCES MoMing Dance & Arts Center June 10 and 11 The purpose of the annual “Making Dances,” according to MoMing’s artistic director Jackie Radis, is to “educate audiences” about modern dance, which she says the general public sees as aloof, incomprehensible, and elitist. The argument is that artists and audience members need to be […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Momix With Shadowfax
MOMIX WITH SHADOWFAX Auditorium Theatre June 10 With a dance-theater company like Connecticut-based Momix, once you’ve seen their imaginative and whimsical tricks, you seek them out again and again, as an addict seeks the assured immediate pleasures of his drug. The dancers have many sleights of hand (and foot) to offer, dancing on stilts or […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A cabbie’s conundrum: Friday night, drug night, on the far south side
It’s a Friday night and cool outside. Harold Fox picks up his cab at Sauk Trail Taxi in South Chicago Heights and, still learning his trade, does a little mental preparation to be robbed. It’s first-come, first-served here, and Fox is early enough to select the best of the six cars on the lot. With […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Applause
APPLAUSE Apple Tree Theatre Company In Applause, Eve Harrington, the understudy for the famous actress Margo Channing, finally gets a chance to go onstage. She is a sensation, and when she returns to her dressing room, a star herself now, Eve credits her director for her performance. “You said, ‘The only thing that makes an […]