To the editors: As one of the attorneys representing Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) residents in a recent federal civil rights class action lawsuit challenging the CHA’s “Operation Clean Sweep,” I read with great interest your October 5 cover story. There are, however, several matters about the litigation concerning Operation Clean Sweep that were not mentioned […]
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 3
Issue of Nov. 1 – 7, 1990
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Please don’t slam-dunk my eyeball. According to UIC’s Eye Facts (September/October 1990), basketball and baseball resulted in nearly one-third of the 31,000 sports-related eye injuries in the U.S. during 1988. It’s not clear, however, whether these two sports cause more eye injuries because they are actually more dangerous, or simply because more people play them […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Wild About Walter
To the editors: If Bryan Miller is the Reader’s token right-winger, at least she’s a better writer than her New Yorker counterpart Bill Buckley. But when Don Rose used to profile his candidates in the weeks before an election, he’d explain his campaign connections. Why is Miller so passionate about Dudycz? In particular, why doesn’t […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cloud 9
CLOUD 9 Barto Productions at the Project Caryl Churchill, I have concluded, is a playwright one either loves or hates. Many theater scholars declare her to be an unmitigated genius; just as many dismiss her as a gimmick-stringing hack. What is apparent from Michael Barto’s production of Cloud 9, currently playing at the Project, is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Where Dudycz Went Wrong
To the editors: Like Mr. Dudycz I have an ethnic background. Like Mr. Dudycz I am the son of immigrant parents and was raised in poverty (I apologize for not having a rat scar on my face). Like Mr. Dudycz I was in public service (35 years) and like Mr. Dudycz I served in the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Detective Story
DETECTIVE STORY Mary-Arrchie Theatre Sidney Kingsley’s 41-year-old melodrama about life in a detective squad room seems an odd choice for a company as daring as the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company. These are the same folks, after all, who sponsored last summer’s second annual Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins Festival, the same folks who keep reviving […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Why Hartigan Won’t Do
To the editors: Neil Hartigan and his campaign staff must be delighted with Florence Hamlish Levinsohn’s article (“What’s the Deal With Neil Hartigan,” 10/26/90). Laboring mightily to paper over the many significant flaws in Hartigan’s record, Levinsohn’s piece seems intended to convince “left/liberal” voters that there are valid reasons for supporting the Democratic ticket in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
M: The Murderer
M: THE MURDERER Organic Theater Company Greenhouse The day I saw M: The Murderer, Bob Meyer and Jack Clark’s adaptation of the 1931 Fritz Lang movie, I read a newspaper article reminding readers that daylight saving time was about to begin. The article noted that the decision to turn clocks back one hour as winter […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jacob’s Ladder
A bold, powerful psychological horror film about a recently returned Vietnam vet (Tim Robbins), apparently working as a postman in New York City, who’s plagued by nightmarish paranoid visions. Thanks to a remarkable script by Bruce Joel Rubin (who also wrote the script for Ghost and the original story for Brainstorm) and the directorial skills […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mojo Nixon
Mojo Nixon has the rough personal presence of a friendly but not-quite-housebroken German shepherd–he means well but tends to make a mess, and he’ll bite your leg if angered. His musical shtick is to take half-remembered (or -received) roots-rock moves and set ’em to key components of his personal etiological analysis of society, which has […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Where’s the Party?
The good news is that this year you can tell the Republicans from the Democrats. The bad news is they’ve switched sides.
Posted inNews & Politics
Beating the bad guys: how one block dealt with its dealers
They used to gather under the streetlight with the shot-out bulb–looking tough, blocking traffic, selling drugs. There were about a dozen of them, most younger than 21, and they acted as though this little chunk of Humboldt Park near the intersection of Pierce Street and Kedzie Avenue belonged to them. No one challenged them, no […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
Like most Chicagoans who entertain an interest in the city’s sporting events, last Sunday morning we rolled out of bed, turned on the television, and watched the end of the Chicago Marathon. We stayed near the television, because the marathon course no longer runs through our north-side neighborhood. It used to be we’d wake up, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
History in the Taping
A round bald man spent the morning in a crouch, repeatedly inflating a bicycle tire that kept going flat before its rider could pedal 50 feet. The man was from the Schwinn History Center, the bicycle from 1894; both were part of a Chicago Historical Society effort to reinvent the past. Some 30 people hovered […]