“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” says Huckleberry Finn at the end of the novel that Mr. Mark Twain wrote about him. In 1861, Twain himself, then still known as Samuel Clemens, lit out for the Wild West with his brother Orion, whom President Abraham Lincoln had […]
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 20
Issue of Feb. 28 – Mar. 6, 1991
Posted inArts & Culture
The Work of Art
TOM FRIEDMAN at the Rezac Gallery It must have taken Tom Friedman thousands of chews to meld individual pieces of Bazooka gum into the marble-smooth softball-sized sphere on display in a corner of the Rezac Gallery. This untitled piece paradoxically combines refinement and irreverence, surprising us with its use of a pop-culture substance to create […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Much Ado About Nothing
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Shakespeare Repertory I always find myself laughing harder at the few comic bits Shakespeare uses to lighten up his serious plays than I do at any of the Bard’s comedies. Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that bits like Polonius’s foolish blatherings in Hamlet or the Fool’s bubble-bursting quips in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
War Without Grief/War Without History/War Without Women
War Without Grief The second son of an old friend we’ve known since high school disappeared over the Persian Gulf three weeks ago. His Navy bomber was blown out of the sky. No one saw a parachute. Before the war began, we advanced the idea that this was one the White House would find easy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
American Ballet Theatre
AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE at the Civic Center for Performing Arts February 12-14 Beautiful dancing is seductive. Watching American Ballet Theatre perform Jiri Kylian’s Sinfonietta is a pleasure: the dancers’ lightness and ease in Sinfonietta’s lightning-fast leaps and changes of direction inspire a sense of wonder. Joop Caboort’s warm lighting and Walter Nobbe’s idyllic costumes and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
All About Bodies
UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS AND THE TRUE NATURE OF LOVE Halsted Theatre Centre I know I’m expected to take the long view on Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love: to look past the shocking bits to the sober message about How We Live Today. But the fact is, the shocking bits […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Everywhere I go these days I see yellow ribbons tied around oak trees, light poles, small animals, etc. These supposedly are to show concern for our troops in the Middle East. However, as I recall, in the song (you know, “Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree, blah blah blah”) the guy in […]
Posted inMusic
The unbearable lightness of being Jimmy Johnson
It’s something of a mystery why Jimmy Johnson hasn’t achieved greater popular success. Johnson is blessed with one of the most distinctive voices in modern blues–a keening high tenor that some say evokes a bluesier Jackie Wilson but always reminds me of the late blues shouter Roy Brown. His guitar work is a pastiche based […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Hey, Bossy, did you see this week’s Straight Dope? The state Department of Energy and Natural Resources has given the downstate city of Princeton $31,500 to start turning old newspapers into animal bedding for local dairy farmers at the rate of 110 tons a year. “The so-called ‘property tax revolt’… is in fact a tame […]
Posted inNews & Politics
WFMT: Public Trust, or Private Club?
To the editors: I guess I must be one of WFMT’s 300,000 [Hot Type, January 11]. I can do without the dippy English muffin commercial, but I’ll live with it and the other canned blather, if the station continues to deliver Brahms and Terkel. I don’t know much about music, but I know what I […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Accidental Death of an Anarchist
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST New Crime Productions at Chicago Actors Ensemble What is an anarchist? Does the term apply only to someone who propounds a specific political theory, or can it describe any person who in action, words, or thought defies the established order of a society? If an antigovernment leftist blows up a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Department of Political Incorrectness
To the editors: The February 1 issue of the Reader contained a review of a double bill at the Steppenwolf Theatre. My name is Leelai Demoz and I was one of the actors who appeared in Tennessee/Bite the Hand. Anthony Adler said of me, “Wildly inappropriate in his short dreadlocks and coffee skin, Demoz nevertheless […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Paintball Is for Pansies
To the editors: Real soldiers shoot real bullets and really get hurt when they get hit, while suburban chickenshits play bang-bang with spitballs and call it “instinctive male aggression.” Do they jerk off in front of G.I. Joe dolls, too? Paintball and the people who play it [“War Is Swell,” February 15] are an obscene […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ethnic Heritage Ensemble
These days, it’s no surprise to find unusual groupings of instruments–sometimes so odd you’re hard pressed to call the resulting configuration a “band” at all. But even against this backdrop, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble gets points for iconoclasm. Most improvising ensembles supply at least one of the following instruments to tie together the music’s threads: […]