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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]