Charley Chase and Max Davidson, who starred in silent comedies produced by Hal Roach, lack the formal precision of Buster Keaton or the humanism of Charlie Chaplin, but they’ll remind you of what’s exciting about American silent comedy. Though the films’ loose plots are often little more than a framework on which to hang sight […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 18
Issue of Feb. 9 – 15, 1995
Posted inNews & Politics
Oh Joy!
Oh Joy! To the Editor: Just wanted to tell you that I’m really glad you picked up Kaz’s “Underworld” comic strip [January 13]. I’ve caught it now and again in various independent publications, and I’ve always enjoyed it. Between Kaz’s “Underworld” and Derf’s “The City” you finally have a comic lineup on par with New […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
“When I started out fifteen years ago, it was almost like finding a baby on the doorstep, or seeing a wounded animal or a wounded person,” local Nature Conservancy prairie and savanna restorer Steve Packard says in one chapter of the new book Green Means: Living Gently on the Planet. “It just called to me. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Remembering Ron
Ron Vawter (1948-1994), who died of AIDS, was one of those rare actors who, like Tilda Swinton in England and the late Delphine Seyrig in France, remained equally active in commercial and experimental productions. He played the psychiatrist in sex, lies, and videotape and appeared in such Hollywood features as The Silence of the Lambs […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Don’t Look at Me
Don’t Look at Me Attention “Bobwatch”: For the record, I am not the “Ed Gold” whose name appears at the bottom of “Bobwatch” on page one, Section Four, of the January 27, 1995, Chicago Reader. Edward G. Gold Evanston
Posted inArts & Culture
Kevin Salem
Although he served three years in Boston’s great pop failure Dumptruck and has played and/or recorded with, among others, Yo La Tengo, Syd Straw, Freedy Johnston, Pooh Sticks, and Miracle Legion, chances are you’ve never heard of Kevin Salem. That’s OK, he’s probably never heard of you either. But after a couple of listens to […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest
Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest Mr. Editor (Yeh, you): Your review of Dumb and Dumber [January 13] was even dumber!! Your devotion to it is such a waste of newsprint, human energy, even celluloid, it makes one wonder just “who’s home” in the heads of such movie witnits, and likewise your staff. Even the quality of the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
I’m a strong believer in sociobiology, in the idea that our everyday actions are motivated by our genes’ desire to reproduce themselves. But I’ve never considered the link between this genetic desire and what happens in our real lives to be a simple one to track. People perform actions every day and make many choices […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Highland Park Strings
Cellist Wendy Warner is poised for a big-time career. Since winning the Rostropovich Competition in 1990 and the Avery Fisher career grant the following year, the 22-year-old Wilmette native has appeared in most of the world’s musical capitals. This Sunday she returns to the midwest to play with the Highland Park Strings, an orchestra that […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Setting Us Straight
Setting Us Straight Dear Reader, Please correct your movie review on Vanya on 42nd Street [Listings, January 27]. I may be a bit anal, but the New Amsterdam has not been renovated yet. It is still in the planning stages to be restored. Also, when and if it is restored, it will NOT be by […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Nobody’s Fools
The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show Chicago Theatre Company Dreamgirls Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre We tend to think of 19th-century minstrel shows as white actors wearing blackface and acting out reconstruction-era stereotypes of “darky life on the Old Plantation,” in the words of one old playbill. But by the 1870s, as Allen Woll notes […]
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Whisper Into My Good Ear
Shattered Globe Theatre. From the first moment of William Hanley’s one-act, when two old men meet on a park bench, you settle in, thinking you know this scene. The men are shabby, they speak of wives long gone and children who don’t seem to care, they wrap their arms around their own chilled bones as […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments
Amid the twisted Columbus punk-rock renaissance spearheaded by New Bomb Turks, Gaunt, and V3, no band is more absurd than Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, which has been churning out a terrific, if erratic, stream of outsider punk rock for almost five years and earning complete indifference from all but the most fervent record collectors. Not […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Beauty of the Nature Conservancy
The Beauty of the Nature Conservancy Thank you. Ben Joravsky’s Neighborhood News story (January 13) presented a refreshingly balanced picture of the concerns raised by current mountain bike use on forest preserve lands. I would like to underscore two points that were mentioned: First: We in Cook County are uniquely blessed among metropolitan areas because […]