The bomb craters and twisted metal and spattered mud create a landscape of devastation. You can imagine the screaming explosions and you can imagine what is there now, the silence of the desert.
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 16
Issue of Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 1991
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: the agony of the refugee
Six days out of port their food and water ran out. Like thousands of others, they had fled their native Vietnam on makeshift barges only to have their exodus threatened by starvation. Nearly a meter of water stood in the bottom of their boat, but they had grown too weak to continue bailing. Thong Quang […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Blasted Word
ADAM BROOKS at the Abel Joseph Gallery Big red letters spelling the word “LOVE” beckon from one wall of the gallery. They lead the gaze to a pair of binoculars clamped to the wall’s freestanding edge. The binoculars are aimed at a nearby window that looks out onto the Damen/North/Milwaukee intersection, now dark and desolate […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cane
CANE Victory Gardens Theater A deep rumble coming from the core of the earth. The deep rumble of an underground race of people.–Cane The powerful yearning for identity in a land that denies it pulses through the 1923 novel Cane. Considered the gem of the Harlem renaissance, Jean Toomer’s free-form work combines disconnected short stories, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art Sales Fall in River North/Henry Hanson Wants an Arts Center/They’ll Take Chicago/Disaster Movies/Blueprint Theatre Takes a Bow
Splitting amicably over cutting-edgeness: Ralph Flores and Tom Carroll (left) and Karen Pratt and Keith Miller (right) of the soon-to-be former Blueprint Theatre Group.
Posted inArts & Culture
Ethnic City: tribute to a Grecian poet
“The deep voice was heard in the deeper night,” wrote Yannis Ritsos in his poem “Toward Saturday.” “Then the tanks went by.” Ritsos is describing the 1967 coup that brought Greece under a right-wing dictatorship that lasted till 1974. The dictatorship brought suffering and oppression to many Greeks; to others, such as Ritsos, it brought […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Freeze–Die–Come to Life
Vitaly Kanevski spent eight years in a Soviet labor camp on unspecified charges, attended film school, and worked as a production assistant on many films. He based this, his first feature, on his own youth in Siberia during World War II. Made on a minuscule budget, it deservedly won the Camera d’Or for best first […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Belle of Amherst
THE BELLE OF AMHERST Body Politic Theatre Emily Dickinson has always presented problems for scholars. The egalitarian precepts of the romantic movement in literature introduced the thitherto-unknown (or long-forgotten) notion of a female poet, although they saddled this innovative creature with the potentially ridiculous characteristics of the genre–the egocentric hypersensitivity, the charismatic antirationalism, and the […]
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Uncommon Ground
UNCOMMON GROUND Northlight Theatre Jeremy Lawrence’s play about the political upheaval in the U.S. and Poland in 1968 opened as U.S. bombs rained on Iraq and Scud missiles hit Israel. During intermission, at least one couple was listening to the news on the radio, and some people in the audience actually brought Walkmans. Yet the […]
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Chicago Chamber Musicians
When Stravinsky wrote L’histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) in 1918, Europe was deeply mired in the Great War. Stranded in neutral Switzerland and despondent over reports of senseless brutalities from the front, the youthful (36-year-old) composer–with the help of Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz–came up with this morality play, a combination of music, dance, and […]
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Speeches and Dreams
CHICAGO PERFORMS Michael Zerang and Kaja Overstreet at Randolph Street Gallery January 25 and 26 Michael Zerang’s Hot Sands and Kaja Overstreet’s Moonlight are the two works making up this double bill, and they couldn’t be more oddly matched. Zerang’s piece uses broad, grotesque, cartoonish strokes to indict our country’s swaggering military posture in the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
While trying to figure out why our troops are in Saudi Arabia recently, I looked up the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia-Iraq area in my 1966 atlas. I found two large areas along the border called “neutral zones.” What does this term mean? Do Romulans live there? Do the zones have any relevance to the current conflict? –D. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Strike Force From NY/Leaving Chicago
Strike Force From NY The fear and loathing at the New York Daily News spread to Chicago last week. Seven of that tabloid’s 2,300 striking workers announced that the war had come home to headquarters and began picketing the Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. They also took their campaign to the Gold Coast, marching outside […]