“An iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Imagine Winston Churchill in his study. Behind him, just visible in the dim evening light, four brocade curtains stand immobilized by their own weight, blocking the windows from floor to ceiling. They hum, gently shimmering, and as Churchill contemplates the world to be, they momentarily transform into […]
Tag: Vol. 19 No. 18
Issue of Feb. 15 – 21, 1990
Posted inArts & Culture
Bobby Shew, Johnny Frigo & Fred Simon
They’re calling this show the “Chicago Jazz Triple-Header,” probably as good a way as any to describe a concert that collects a west-coast trumpet ace, a septuagenarian violin master, and a respected contemporary keyboardist/composer: eclecticism reigns. Trumpeter Bobby Shew has impeccable credentials–as reliable and resilient in a big band, but also as a fiery and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story Macio Aquino, 20, had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .25-caliber pistol in Redwood City, California, in December. He decided that appearing to be a victim of a shooting would defuse his girlfriend’s wrath after he had forgotten to pick her up as promised at a doctor’s office. A police […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Be Kind to the Poor
To the editors: There are two kinds of poor people in this world: 1) those limned in “Getting Through the 80s” [February 2] and 2) many of those who read your “news”paper including the editors who approve and “improve” its articles before publication. The gulf between the two is a yawning chasm that can be […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Do the Shoe You Drew
Gillion Skellenger teaches her design students to walk a mile in a shoemaker’s shoes.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Works
The teenage girl ringing orders at Al’s #1 Italian Beef is questioning the man ahead of me in the lunch-hour line. He looks puzzled, an expression of passive amusement slightly lifting the corners of his mouth. The guy is mum. Froze solid. “What you want on it,” she says rather than asks. A black cashmere […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Clean Air Action
To the editors: On February 1, 1990, fine arts radio station WFMT abandoned its policy prohibiting prerecorded advertisements [Hot Type, February 2]. Until the day before the new policy was announced, station officials tried to pacify concerned listeners–who had heard rumors of plans to gradually destroy the format which had made WFMT a nationally renowned […]
Posted inFilm
Hard Buddies
TANGO & CASH ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky Written by Randy Feldman With Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell, and Jack Palance. The penis, when in the hands of an actor, never amounts to much more than comic relief, even when it is only wielded metaphorically. Though the penile jousting in Tango & Cash is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Polkow’s Story
To the editors: Dennis Polkow tells an interesting story about his qualifications to review opera [Letters, January 12]. I’m sorry, I missed the autobiographical music reviews he talked about because (as I said) I have not been in town very long. I do not read his reviews very often anyway, because he barely knows a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
360 Degrees: A Play for Lovers in the Age of Global Warming
360 DEGREES: A PLAY FOR LOVERS IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL WARMING Cloud 42 at Puszh Studio When Arthur Schnitzler’s play Reigen (“Round Dance”)–best known as La ronde, Max Ophuls’s 1950 film adaptation–was first performed in Vienna in the late teens (after having been suppressed by the author for nearly two decades) it provoked terrible […]
Posted inNews & Politics
White Crane’s Trained Seal
To the editors: Ben Joravsky should be congratulated on his article “White Crane Senior Center: a health-care concept that didn’t fly,” which appeared in the Reader on January 12, 1990. It was as well-researched and balanced a presentation of the facts in the matter as I have read in all these months of so-called “negotiations” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Wilde Coward
THE WILDE COWARD Absolutely Scandalous Productions Any company calling itself “absolutely scandalous” has set itself a pretty lofty goal, as has any playwright who invokes the names of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. Unfortunately, The Wilde Coward is more scurrilous than scandalous and absolute only in its excess. Wilde and Coward were very much part […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Not the News
To the editors: For such a good newspaper, I found the Reader’s December 22nd front page story on the events of 1989 sadly cynical in light of the year’s happenings. For those of us who disregard the wealth of sleazy talk show hosts, the television commercials, and the “Batman” merchandising craze, 1989 was a year […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Story of Women
A bit mislabeled–the French title is Une affaire de femmes, which translates better as “Women’s Business”–Claude Chabrol’s accomplished and generally uncharacteristic period film (set in World War II occupied France), loosely adapted from a nonfiction book by lawyer Francis Szpiner, gives a plausible and wholly unsentimental account of a housewife and mother (Isabelle Huppert at […]
Posted inNews & Politics
WFMT Sells Out–and CSO Is Buying
To the editors: Who would have thought that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra would be leading the parade to trash the civilized standards that have made radio WFMT so listenable for the last 35 years [Hot Type, February 2]? But sure enough, the very first prerecorded advertising spot to be broadcast under the station’s lamentable new […]