WHO SHOT JFK? at the Roxy “There were no fingerprints on the murder weapon.” –Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, shortly after Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest “The thing I am most concerned about . . . is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” –J. Edgar Hoover, November […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 22
Issue of Mar. 16 – 22, 1989
Posted inArts & Culture
Smooch Music
SMOOCH MUSIC at the Goodman Theatre Studio Love stories are just propaganda for an idealized notion of romance. According to this propaganda, two people in love are united by some sort of mysterious, erotic attraction that transcends all other human activity. Love is pure; love is sweet; love conquers all. But the romantic entanglements I’ve […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Music Notes: Peter Kubelka’s quest for essences
Peter Kubelka hates recorded music. “I am not opposed to electronic music, to music created to be heard on records,” he explains. “But the performance of music written to be performed on wood or animal parts or the human voice on electronic equipment results only in an imitation–a ‘photograph’ of music. Recorded music is very […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Smokey Smothers
Smokey Smothers is a gentle, profoundly resilient man with a deep, abiding love for the blues and an ability to overcome personal setbacks that have endeared him to a new generation of blues fans in the 1980s. Featured for some years with his band, the Ice Cream Men, Smokey is currently working in a solo […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Missing the Point
To the editors: I was disappointed in Steve Bogira’s February 17th article, “The Press: Beautiful Women.” Mr. Bogira related a conversation with a friend over an article in the Tribune titled “Chicago’s Most Beautiful Women.” The intent of the article was to show that women who donate time to help others have beautiful inner qualities. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
For years I’ve been hearing about fantastic carburetors that can give your car up to 200 mpg. But supposedly the automakers and Big Oil won’t allow them to come to market because they’d wreck the industry. The people who tell you this are usually conspiracy buffs who offer it as an example of how the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Dead Sea Scrolls
To the editors: Let me set Cecil Adams straight on something: In the 20 January 1989 “The Straight Dope” you say, regarding the Dead Sea scrolls, that they “contain copies of major chunks of the Old Testament (although nothing of the New) . . .” The “scrolls proper,” i.e., the Qumran library, is as you […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Want to avoid cancer? Shrink. Men’s Health (February 1989) reports that a recent study showed that the shortest 25 percent of the more than 12,000 people studied had only half as much cancer as the tallest 75 percent. The laziest alderman award goes to Victor Vrdolyak of the Tenth Ward. According to Dick Simpson and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Satanic Reviews
To the editors: My amusement and alarm at the outraged fluttering of feathers over Tom Boeker and his theater reviews, as chronicled in 3 and 24 February Readers, prompt me to offer a few observations on the spectacle of the Critic Criticiz’d. Nothing is more galling to theater folk than unfavorable reviews. After all, being […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
After two weeks of fluffy contemporary repertoire led by yuppie guru Christopher Keene, the CSO gets back to serious business this week with a program of meaty contemporary works led by the always interesting music director of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin. Of particular interest is the most important orchestral work of the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
School Reform, Chicago-Style
To the editors: I was glad to see Grant Pick’s article on Hammond’s school-based management program [February 24]. It was an informative piece on what’s happening there and what implications Hammond’s experience might have for Chicago’s schools. Some things need clarification, however. Hammond’s school-based management was not a model for what finally passed in our […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar
Friday 17 “The tradition of music in barbershops goes back to Elizabethan times,” says Joseph Schlesinger of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America. But, he says, what Americans recognize as barbershop harmonizing is an indigenous American style from the turn of the century. Tonight, one of the society’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Long, Strange Trip: A Brief History of Psychedelic Drugs in America
Our Trip Guide: Jay Stevens, Author of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
Posted inArts & Culture
Lawrence of Arabia
David Lean’s 70-millimeter spectacle about T.E. Lawrence’s military career between 1916 and 1918, written by Robert Bolt and produced by Sam Spiegel and released in 1962, remains one of the most intelligent and handsome of all war epics. It is also one of the most influential–films as diverse as Patton and Apocalypse Now, and even […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Power and Beauty
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: THE PERFECT MOMENT Museum of Contemporary Art Robert Mapplethorpe first made his mark in the art world in the early 70s with brutally honest photographs of a sexual underground few Americans had seen or even heard of. His depictions of the gay, sadomasochistic demimonde explicitly explored the dynamic of pleasure and pain–and power. […]