Has Sun-Times music critic Robert C. Marsh jumped off the Ardis Krainik bandwagon? With all that money, he asks, why isn’t Lyric Opera making better music?
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 13
Issue of Jan. 10 – 16, 1991
Posted inNews & Politics
“I Can Do Anything”
Meet Alfonso Segovia, the Manicurist Who Would Be Famous
Posted inNews & Politics
Alice Maskowski Is Not a Baby-Sitter.
She’s a home day-care provider. There’s a difference.
Posted inMusic
Slugs
The last time the Slugs played Schubas, everything came together–the natural warmth of the room, with its ornate wood proscenium; the good-natured friendliness of the typical Slugs crowd; and the band itself, an almost casually proficient threesome. Leader Dag Juhlin has a lanky, offhand charisma, and the band–with brother Gregg on bass and Mike Halston […]
Posted inFilm
Sex Is Difficult
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS *** (A must-see) Directed by Tim Burton Written by Burton and Caroline Thompson With Johnny Depp, Dianne Wiest, Winona Ryder, Alan Arkin, Kathy Baker, Vincent Price, and Anthony Michael Hall. Although nostalgia for childhood, particularly boyhood, underpins many a Hollywood extravaganza, that longing is not usually loosed with any emotional restraint. Perhaps that […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lit: a multicultural neighborhood in print
“In academia, we tend to think of writers as a bunch of dead people–mostly dead white males. My goal as a teacher is to make these dead writers real,” says Fred Gardaphe, an English professor at Columbia College. “We can’t meet Theodore Dreiser or Nelson Algren, yet these people have such an impact on the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Flight Training
For $295, American Airlines offers a two-day course designed to alleviate fear of flying. They call it “AAcheiving Flight,” which probably gets them a good listing in the yellow pages.
Posted inArts & Culture
My Brother’s Wedding
My favorite of Charles Burnett’s three features (the other two are Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger) focuses on the family pressure exerted on a young man in Watts (Everett Silas) who works at his parents’ dry cleaners–pressure to abandon his disreputable ghetto friends and adjust to a more middle-class existence. This struggle […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Postgame
You had to know there was going to be a fight. The Blackhawks had just gotten spanked, 5-4, by the Philadelphia Flyers. The Sunday-evening contest was unsatisfying to the Chicago Stadium crowd for a variety of reasons. First, the Flyers were Blackhawks coach Mike Keenan’s old team. This night, too, the Flyers net was minded […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Zeena Parkins
Zeena Parkins plays the harp, and she’s no angel. Using a unique electric instrument–which she designed and built with new-music cellist Tom Cora, incorporating elements of classical and folk harps as well as electronic-effects pedals and a vibrato bar more commonly seen in the company of guitarists–Parkins conjures a menagerie of unexpected sounds. Few people […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Sun-Times: The Novel/WFMT: The Parable
Sun-Times: The Novel A whiff of scandal sells books. Unfortunately for Charles Dickinson’s new novel, Rumor Has It, now at your local bookstore, its whiff is pretty much undetectable beyond the confines of the Chicago Sun-Times. And the scandalized there all read the book last fall in galleys. “There must have been a dozen people […]
Posted inArts & Culture
What the Butler Saw
WHAT THE BUTLER SAW Effective Theatre Company at Sheffield’s School Street Cafe Thus spake Nietzsche, by means of Zarathustra: “And when I beheld my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn. It was the Spirit of Gravity, through him all things are ruined. One does not kill by anger, but by laughter. Come let […]
Posted inNews & Politics
First Person: I Want to Go to Sleep
The curse of insomnia: even when you sleep you dream that you’re awake.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
When I was in an artillery unit in Vietnam, we were told that each shell we fired cost the taxpayers several thousand dollars to manufacture, disregarding the cost to develop the weapon itself or the cost of training the manpower to shoot it. We speculated that, considering the great number of rounds we fired, the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
How Did the Conservatory Cross the Street?
To the editors: In the calendar of events in the December 14 Reader, it says that the Lincoln Park Conservatory is at 2400 N. Stockton. Given that this is the correct address, why did the park district see fit to place the Conservatory at the southeast corner of Fullerton and Stockton, where you’d expect to […]