To the editors: I would like to applaud Bill Wyman on his review of Madonna’s Truth or Dare [June 21]. Siskel and Ebert take note! I have always felt that Madonna’s “talent” has been her minimal skills as a dancer, every time I hear a tune of hers with her overproduced, oversynthesized vocals, I cringe. […]
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 40
Issue of Jul. 18 – 24, 1991
Posted inArts & Culture
Machinal
MACHINAL Fly’s Eye Theatre at Theater Oobleck Machinal vaguely resembles that famous cartoon in which one goldfish says to the other, “So if there’s no God, tell me who changes the water?” A grim example of dramatic determinism, this relentlessly punitive play undermines any illusion of free will. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment or […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Department of Bitter Disappointments
To the editors: No more pictures in the Adult Services section of the Reader? So much for the openmindedness (HYPOCRISY!) of leftist liberalism! Yours is a dinosaur very rapidly dying. Thank God! Anonymous Chicago
Posted inNews & Politics
Out of the Blue
It was morning downtown and the sidewalks were nearly empty except for a few solemn shoppers and people late for work. I was walking east on Adams when a heavyset woman, strolling in my direction with a friend, stopped in her tracks and began to pull violently at her hair. She staggered like a drunk, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Chiropractic Is as Good as Sex
To the editors: After reading Bryan Miller’s story about chiropractors [June 28], I, like the unnamed orthopedist, am appalled that reputable hospitals find it profitable to allow such individuals to practice on their premises. Any person who enters a profession which is based upon the belief that all illnesses result from misaligned vertabrae is either […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
Last Sunday morning, as I was out for a constitutional (suited to my kind of constitution, complete with cigar), I was met on a shady side street by the scraping, jangly noise of an aluminum baseball bat being dragged on the sidewalk behind a medium-size boy of about ten. The boy came on, shoulders slumped, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Heroes
At 6:30 AM on July 12, at exactly the time they are supposed to, a line of men files out of the Holiday Inn across from the Merchandise Mart and into two borrowed CTA buses. They are wearing polo shirts and T-shirts and khaki pants and jeans and caps and windbreakers. Some have potbellies, and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In March Anthony Zeigler, 20, of Minneapolis, got into arguments at two different parties on consecutive nights in unrelated disputes and wound up being shot both times (in the leg at the first party and in the back and arm at the second party). He was treated and released at the same hospital […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Coolest Place in Town
It’s one of those days during the heat wave after you’ve lost count of how many it’s lasted. Da Mare requests that people conserve water, but in his usual Republican way, he doesn’t issue any orders. Fire hydrants are open all over the city as kids seek relief. The water pressure is low and tap […]
Posted inMusic
Misery loves Morrissey
Johnny Marr discovered Morrissey—sometime after, one assumes, Morrissey invented himself—in 1982. Within a couple of years, Morrissey’s strangled romanticism and Marr’s extremely pragmatic guitar playing made the Smiths one of England’s most celebrated bands. Besides the press’s absolute infatuation with the enigmatic Morrissey—heightened by his refusal to cop to being either gay or straight, claiming, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Opera Notes: music from Monastero’s, the fund-raising restaurant
Eighteen years ago the Monastero family–owners of Monastero’s Ristorante at 3935 W. Devon–decided to hold a contest in their restaurant to give young singers a chance to perform before an audience. To fund the prize–an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy to study opera–they charged their dining clientele a fee to watch the contest. The event proved […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Losing Headstart: city, school board, and federal government fumble while poor neighborhoods howl
For 25 years, North Lawndale’s three- and four-year-olds have learned their ABCs at Howland Elementary, a public school at 1616 S. Spaulding. The preschool classes they took were part of the federally funded Headstart program, one of the few Great Society initiatives to survive nearly 20 years of mostly Republican rule. But come September there […]
Posted inFilm
The Black Man’s Burden
BOYZ N THE HOOD (Has redeeming facet) Directed and written by John Singleton With Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, Larry Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Nia Long, and Tyra Ferrell. It’s been estimated that at least 19 pictures by black directors will be released in the U.S. this year. That’s less than 5 percent of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Law of Incest
A new trend in litigation: Women abused in childhood are suing their parents.
Posted inArts & Culture
Cookie Crumb Club
COOKIE CRUMB CLUB at Organic Theater Company Greenhouse At 11 AM on a Saturday the last thing most healthy children want to do is sit still and shut up. Veteran folksinger Jim Post knows better than to expect them to, and so participation is the order of the day at the Cookie Crumb Club. However, […]