Reflections on Urban Infrastructure Occaisoned by the First Anniversary of the Great Leak
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 26
Issue of April 9, 1993
Casino Gambling: Aurora Gets Its Bet Down/You’ve Bought the Play, Now Dread the Movie/If You Missed Warhol…/CSO and Lyric Take the Daleys to Dinner
Bill Weidner and the Pratt Hotel Corporation are betting $65 million that riverboat gambling will turn Aurora into a tourist destination. The gaming begins in mid-June.
Pointless Pedantry
To the editors: What I am pleased to call Wyman’s First Law of Language Stupidity states that the lack of social grace that allows someone to correct another’s language is invariably accompanied by ignorance of the issue in question. Since John Perry took the time to write a lengthy letter of complaint (April 2) about […]
The City File
“Estimates rank marijuana as the state’s leading agricultural commodity, even ahead of corn and soybeans,” according to the Compiler (Winter), published by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. “The estimated street value of marijuana eradicated through Illinois’ Operation Cash Crop in 1991 was $3.1 billion, compared to a 1991 estimated harvest value of $2.9 billion […]
Deconstruction
House recycling with Patrick and Jodi Murphy: “Bring your own tools, cash only, and let’s clear this baby out!!!”
Mother Courage
MOTHER COURAGE Touchstone Theatre In Anna Fierling–Mother Courage, who supports herself and her family by selling supplies during the Thirty Years’ War–Brecht created a character infamous for her contradictory nature: a capitalist and a nurturer, she was driven to the first role by the second and driven back again. She is known as “Mother Courage” […]
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Joan Tower is among the select circle of women composers increasingly favored by the musical establishment. The favoritism is due in part to concert-world politics and to the enlightened embrace of minorities, but Tower and her colleagues in the circle–Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Shulamit Ran, and several others–deftly craft works that are at once accessible and […]
Salute to Dizzy Gillespie
The tributes to John ” Birks” Gillespie started well before his death in January–a full year earlier, in fact, in a series of jam-session concerts at New York’s Blue Note nightclub (captured on two Telarc CDs, Gillespie’s last recordings). But not even those gala lineups, filled as they were with talented younger musicians, had the […]
Social disease: a surgeon fights the trauma epidemic
The Fire Department ambulance sped across the city on a Friday night, headed from Albany Park to the Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Lakeview. The cargo was a 25-year-old man who had been shot in the head. The ambulance could have put in at hospitals nearer Jesus Garcia’s home, which is where he had been […]
The Universal Prison
THE JUDGMENT OF PAINTING Elizam Escobar at Prospectus, through April 18 Mainstream art has become increasingly concerned with educating the public on the social and political issues of the moment. In such a climate it may come as a surprise that an artist who is also a committed political activist might see the function of […]
Out at Sea/The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
OUT AT SEA European Repertory Company at Cafe Voltaire THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS Odessa Group at Cafe Voltaire Recent events in Russia make you wonder whether it was premature to pronounce communism dead in 1989; Yeltsin’s proliferating enemies show that an old guard remains aggressively nostalgic for those May Day military […]
Fluid Measure Performance Company
Fluid Measure began when two choreographers who like to talk met up with a storyteller who likes to move. Kathleen Maltese, Donna Mandel, and Patricia Pelletier are all hyperintelligent in body and mind, making them great fun to watch as they move in perfect synchronicity, then break; stylize a hand gesture that seems to wave […]
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
As Russia struggles toward a stable democracy against a reactionary communist backlash, here’s a potent reminder of the bad old days. Inspired by the cases of dissidents Victor Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, Tom Stoppard’s intense, dazzlingly witty one-act concerns two prisoners–sorry, make that patients–in a Russian insane asylum. One is an outspoken foe of Soviet […]
Black Metropolis
35th and State was the cultural and financial epicenter of black Chicago. Could it be again?