Posted inNews & Politics

Another Incorrect Usage

To the editors: I thought Reader staff writers were a cut above the educational and literary level of most other Chicago journalists, but after your reference in Calendar (March 12) to a lecture to be delivered in “Farsi,” I’m beginning to wonder. You mean Persian. “Persian” is the proper designation in English of the language […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Sunken Land

SUNKEN LAND Stage Left Theatre Sometimes a program tells you more than its producers intend it to. The one for Jeff Mangrum’s Sunken Land describes the play as “a futuristic drama where women & men struggle against a government that has gone out of control.” Not surprisingly, the play isn’t any more subtle than this […]

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News of the Weird

Lead Story Among the abstract watercolors chosen by England’s Manchester Academy of Fine Arts for its prestigious annual show in January was Rhythm of the Trees. The show’s judges said the painting’s “certain quality of color balance, composition and technical skill” earned it a place among the 150 works that were selected from the 1,000 […]

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Department of Crawling Flesh

To the editors: I enjoyed reading the newsy bits Mr. Henderson gathered for his column, the City File [March 19]. Especially interesting to me was the news that “stop” is now officially a French word in Quebec. It was in that article, however, that Mr. Henderson (inadvertently?) succumbed to a colloquial usage where only the […]

Posted inArts & Culture

An Artist Beginning

ALONE OF YOUR SEX Susan Abelson at Randolph Street Gallery, March 26 and 27 Susan Abelson, a young performance artist who was last seen in Robert Metrick’s O’klahoma! and has been collaborating with others for the past few years, recently presented her first one-person show, Alone of Your Sex. According to a press release, her […]

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The Straight Dope

Aerosols I’m confused about aerosol sprays. They have been labeled one of the worst enemies of the ozone layer, producing nasty destructive chemicals by the truckload, and yet there are now aerosol cans that specifically say “environmentally safe.” How can this be? Are there different kinds of propellants used? Two related questions: Why can’t aerosol […]

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Films by Michaelangelo Antonioni

The Film Center’s ongoing retrospective of the work of Italy’s greatest living filmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni, offers two noteworthy programs this Friday night. First is perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Antonioni’s early features, Lady Without Camelias (La signora senza camelie, 1953), a caustic Cinderella story about a Milanese shop clerk (Lucia Bose) who briefly becomes […]

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The City File

Don’t get hungry in 2143. The Illinois Natural History Survey Reports (January-February): “Illinois has enough coal to satisfy its present rate of consumption for 1,000 years, enough oil to meet its own demand for only 1 year, and enough topsoil to last 150 years at the present rate of erosion.” The Municipal Reference Library closed? […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Billboards

BILLBOARDS Joffrey Ballet at the Civic Opera House, March 16-21 When MTV meets pointe shoes, look out. Brash, fast, and fashionable, Billboards is probably the sexiest work ever performed on the Civic Opera House stage. The Joffrey’s new evening-length ballet set to music by Prince stands conventional thinking on its head. Not the idea that […]