The language of sensuality, the sensuality of language–French writer Marguerite Duras has mastered both. She pulls at the boundaries of erotica and art, revealing everything about the sexual act while hinting at it in the most minimal terms. When her fiction and essays are read aloud they take on an added intensity, as demonstrated by […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 19
Issue of Feb. 18 – 24, 1993
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
If a match is lit in an atmosphere like earth’s but outside of gravity’s pull, will it suffocate? Will it snuff out from its own gases faster than if it had a steady earthbound updraft to refresh it with more oxygen? I heard the space shuttle astronauts were doing tests with fire in microgravity. I […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Porn Is Not the Problem
To the editors: [Re: “Against the Law,” February 5] There are many flaws with the puritanical antipornography branch of the feminist movement. One of the biggest being that it fails to put pornography in the context of the media as a whole. The problems of sexually explicit books, magazines, and films are extremely similar if […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
This is the Chicago premiere of a first-rate, 167-minute Canadian documentary by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick about the brilliant linguist and radical political commentator Noam Chomsky, probably the best living critic of American foreign policy as viewed through the media. He’s so articulate and intelligent that this extended look at his thought remains compulsively […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
States we never expected to have a good word for. From the Kentucky Supreme Court’s September decision striking down that state’s anti-sodomy laws as unconstitutional: “‘Equal Justice Under Law’ inscribed above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court, expresses the unique goal to which all humanity aspires. In Kentucky it is more than a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Who’s Afraid of the Wild Hare?
To the editors: As a neighbor of the Wild Hare reggae club and a resident of Lakeview and the 44th Ward for the better part of 12 years, I would like to add my observations to Ben Joravsky’s Neighborhood News piece of February 5. Many of us who live in this neighborhood are proud of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Cambodian American
In 1991 I had the opportunity to photograph at Site 2, a sprawling refugee camp along the Thai-Cambodian border. Having seen films, photos, and news reports showing Cambodians only as helpless war refugees, starving victims reaching out for western aid, I was surprised to discover a people deeply concerned with rebuilding and upholding their cultural […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Losers Alias
LOSERS ALIAS Curious Theatre Branch Clean, coherent, conventional narratives have never been Curious Theatre’s strong suit. Or their cup of tea. Like Theater Oobleck, with whom they have become increasingly allied, this collective of actors and musicians seems less interested in creating carefully balanced story lines than in being allowed to make plays any damn […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Steppenwolf’s “Crisis”: Too Busy for Shakespeare?/Projectionists Settle for Cineplex Contract/Theatre Festival Plans Its Off Year
Frank Galati’s production of As You Like It, Steppenwolf’s first stab at Shakespeare, has been canceled due to lack of actors.
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
For the past few weeks I’ve been spending as much time as I can afford studying the birds of the oak savannas of the midwest. This is a bookish enterprise. All but a few tiny, degraded remnants of our native savannas vanished before the end of the 19th century, so there is no place I […]
Posted inFilm
Wallflower’s Revenge
THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL ** (Worth seeing) Directed and written by Aki Kaurismaki With Kati Outinen, Elina Salo, Esko Nikkari, Vesa Vierikko, Reijo Taipale, and Silu Seppala. By Jonathan Rosenbaum Here’s what Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki has written about The Match Factory Girl: “Suddenly, last spring, I was running aimlessly around the city, talking too […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Notes on the End of Art
You might regard the prospect with disquiet, if not alarm, but critic-philosopher Arthur Danto is delighted.