It’s mighty cold down on the Maxwell Street Market these days, and it isn’t just the winter weather bringing the chill. The University of Illinois was recently given the go-ahead to purchase most of the land in the area: vacant lots have been fenced off, most of the few remaining buildings have been demolished, several […]
Tag: Vol. 21 No. 14
Issue of Jan. 16 – 22, 1992
Posted inArts & Culture
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
A fascinating postmortem on the making of Francis Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, mainly consisting of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola in the 7Os that has been intelligently selected, augmented, and arranged by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. Like the Coppola film itself, this documentary at times seems to value self-styled profundity and rhetoric over observation […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Reel Life: a romantic exulting in purified light
Perched on the bow of a freighter, 18-year-old Peter Hutton peered into the dark skies over the Gulf of Siam. Looking out for storms on night watch, the merchant seaman schooled his eye in the drama of light. Thirty years later the filmmaker says, “It was a huge influence to really pay attention to the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Cartoon: How Black Journalists Saw It/Local Boy Makes Good
The Cartoon: How Black Journalists Saw It We dimly remember an upper-story window of the Justice Department in Washington some 20 years ago, behind which it was possible to discern a line of gray officials–and wasn’t one of them the attorney general himself, John Mitchell?–staring at the spectacle below, our sea of hippies, revolutionaries, and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ice Cream Men With Smokey Smothers & Jimmy Lee Robinson
It’s nice to know there’s still room for low-key, tasteful presentations like this one in today’s frenetic blues environment. The Ice Cream Men, featuring WBEZ blues deejay Steve Cushing on drums, are an earnest group of young aficionados dedicated to preserving traditional Chicago blues and showcasing the living representatives of that legacy. Smokey Smothers, an […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Let the Sun Shine
To the editors: Hey Mike [Hot Type, January 3] you watch too much TV, get out after work and play some softball or go cross country skiing. Chicago has been in the dark too long. Screw this New York bull you’re pushing. I want more after work sunlight any way I can get it. I […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Attacking Beneath the Clothes
To the editors: The standards of the Reader were lowered by the publication of the pornographic, racist, and sexist depiction of the honorable Alderman Dorothy Tillman [December 20]. That cartoon goes far beyond political humor. It circulates the fallacious rumor that she was brandishing a weapon where factual evidence proves the contrary. This cartoon is […]
Posted inMusic
Pop ’91: a top-ten list, plus notes on music-industry weirdness
The most important stories in music this year all concerned the industry. Nineteen ninety-one was a financial disaster for the record companies–sales were off about 10 percent across the board–and they moved in typical fashion to identify the problems. Was the $4 billion-a-year monolith worried about the decline in the CD catalog sales that have […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Film Facts
To the editors: Clearly Jonathan Rosenbaum doesn’t believe in fairies! In both the stage play Peter Pan and in the movie Hook, which he reviews in your 12/20/91 issue, it is very clear that you prove your belief not by shouting but by clapping. I guess he grew up and forgot. John Stevenson [“It’s a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Worth Seeing
TURANDOT Lyric Opera A conundrum lies at the center of the operatic form: What is more important, the ideas contained in the libretto or the beauty and richness of the musical invention? Salieri decided it was Prima la musica, poi le parole (first the music, then the words). With its new production of Giacomo Puccini’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Official Organ of the Catholic Church
To the editors: I know a priest who might be better suited as a nun, but he would never make such a demand nor would he agree to be the cover story (“A Silenced Woman”) of the Reader [January 3]. The saga of Sister Teresita Weind is simply another manifestation of penis envy. Jack Hughes […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: What We See and What We Get
The most indelible images from the gulf war, to my mind, were the famous video views of a “smart bomb” at work; time and again that bomb sought its bunker target, plummeting hour after hour through the endless present of CNN newscasts. For some observers the video views showed that we had managed to sanitize […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Club Dates: Arson Garden’s strange new mix
I can tell you that Arson Garden may be the only North American art-rock band that matters, and I can tell you that they come from Bloomington, Indiana, but after that I can’t tell you much. Sometimes they sound like a punk band–like a tightly controlled Mission of Burma, for example, when they cover Burma’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Disrespecting Civil Rights
To the editors: I wholeheartedly support you in the matter of the political cartoon which allegedly “disrespects” Dorothy Tillman [December 20]. Given her past conduct Ms. Tillman has earned some “disrespect.” We did not support the civil rights movement of the 1960s so that freedom could be redefined to the satisfaction of Lu Palmer and […]