An Encounter With the Caped Crusader of Cartography
Tag: Vol. 21 No. 10
Issue of Dec. 19 – 25, 1991
Posted inNews & Politics
Waiting for the Millennium
Why is everyone picking on America? Don’t they know what time it is? It’s the fin de siecle, that’s what time it is, the fin de millennium for that matter. A time when life is supposed to get a little exhausted and overripe, sort of like a bowl of grapes in December when they’re all […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
The Bulls have embarked on the 1991-92 season as the defending champions of the National Basketball Association, and it shows. That’s not necessarily a compliment, however. They began this season, as every season, looking ahead to their early west-coast road trip as a test of how good the team was. In the first couple of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Watched Women
MUNA TSENG DANCE PROJECTS at the Dance Center of Columbia College December 5-7 Muna Tseng’s dances recall the subtle eroticism of Chinese portraits of women, which expose in minute detail such small, personal moments of everyday life as grooming and solitary eating. Both these portraits and Tseng’s dances sometimes give the impression we’re observing something […]
Posted inArts & Culture
RM 1348
If Charles Addams had been a performance artist, he would have been Matthew Owens. This self-described insomniac fills his work with the kind of terrifying surreal images one usually sees only in nightmares: burn victims, rotting cadavers, recently hacked-off body parts. But his sensibility is more comic than Grand Guignol; his aim is not merely […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fred Hopkins, Diedre Murray & Newman Baker
One of Chicago’s special contributions to the jazz heritage is a line of unique bassists that stretches from the earliest years of the art form up to today. Most famous are probably Milt Hinton in the swing era, Wilbur Ware in the bop era, Malachi Favors and Fred Hopkins today; all have played or are […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Double Life of Veronique
An exquisite enigma by Krzysztof Kieslowski (Decalogue) following the parallel lives of two 20-year-old women, one in Poland and one in France, both played by the beautiful Irene Jacob. The Polish Veronika is a talented singer with a heart condition; the French Veronique quits her voice lessons and gets involved with a puppeteer who writes […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Locking up the landlord: west-side neighbors win a small victory in a long, long, war
In the battle against negligent landlords, west-side resident Mary Johnson won a small victory last month when a Cook County judge sent the owner of a building in her neighborhood to jail. The landlord didn’t stay locked up long, and his building is still a boarded-up firetrap. But Johnson’s small victory is remarkable given the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
City Seekers
PARIS–NEW YORK: PHOTOGRAPHS BY EUGENE ATGET AND BERENICE ABBOTT at the Kelmscott Gallery I suppose everyone has a catalog of memorable scenes: the way a childhood home looked on coming home from school, or the site of a memorable kiss, or a favorite view on the walk to work. You bring such scenes to mind […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In October the Ottawa Civic Hospital, anticipating a long-awaited visit by Princess Diana to its heart-patient wing, newly constructed and as yet without patients, gathered former patients who had been treated in other parts of the hospital to come to the heart wing, put pajamas on, lie in the beds, and greet the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
New Dances ’91
NEW DANCES ’91 Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble at the Dance Center of Columbia College December 13, 14, 20, and 21 Two years ago the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble collapsed under the weight of its own talent. This year artistic director Tara Mitton has re-formed the ensemble with dancers in their early 20s–dancers who are eager […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: Vietnamese bistro does it up royal
I never imagined that a little French Vietnamese storefront restaurant could make me feel like a member of the British aristocracy. I’ve always wanted to be waited on like one of the upstairs crowd on Upstairs Downstairs. I wouldn’t even mind being a royal. So what if Charles is a bit of a twit? I’ve […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Heroes’ Welcome
HEROES’ WELCOME New World Repertory Company at Theatre Shoppe In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language” George Orwell stated that writers often use cliches not as expressions of original thought but as substitutes for thinking. Something similar, I suspect, happened during the creation of Heroes’ Welcome, the premiere production of the New World […]