Lead Story In September the Houston Chronicle reported that there was growing support among American Muslims for Sadri Krasniqi, an Albanian-American who was accused of child molesting. Krasniqi was arrested in Plano, Texas, in 1989 after witnesses reported seeing him fondle his four-year-old daughter under her dress. State authorities then placed the girl and her […]
Tag: Vol. 25 No. 7
Issue of Nov. 23 – 29, 1995
Posted inNews & Politics
Lawyers’ Ethics
Congratulations to Erin Hogan for sticking to her guns through her Kafka-esque experience in the American legal system, a world of incompetence, dishonesty, disrespect, and an overarching belief that legal advocacy is a war game. The fact that the word “intimidation” is apparently considered a legitimate courtroom tactic speaks volumes about the disintegration of a […]
Posted inMusic
Urge Overkill
A number of things conspire to make Urge Overkill’s new album Exit the Dragon the perverse, irritating, compelling, and scabrous mess that it is. One is the decline of National Kato, one of the band’s two key songwriting forces. Where his decrepit but oddly irresistible ideas of rock songcraft ignited tracks like “Sister Havana” and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
From Beyond
From Beyond, Transient Theatre. I thought I’d seen it all onstage. I’ve seen people take their clothes off, have sex, shoot up drugs, torture and kill one another, go to the bathroom–and now, thanks to this Grand Guignol exercise, I’ve seen someone undergo radical brain surgery. With a local anesthetic yet! The operation is performed […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Understanding Improv
Dear Reader: I would like to respond to Lawrence Bommer’s review of Frank Booth in the Blue Velvet Lounge [October 27], and to improv reviews in general. With all due respect to Mr. Bommer, I believe that many reviewers simply do not understand what improv is all about. The underground art form is still not […]
Posted inMusic
Brilliant Heresy
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra Bach: Matthaus-Passion (EMI Classics) Wilhelm Furtwangler was the great live act in classical music. During his decades of conducting the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, he became famous for his peculiar, improvisatory take on the standard repertoire. He would have had no use at all for the current fascination with “authentic performance,” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Glenn Horiuchi
Jazz has always adapted its tools and elements to telling personal stories; when those stories stem from a largely self-contained ethnic community, all of jazz expands as a result. Pianist Glenn Horiuchi–like his contemporaries Jon Jang and Fred Ho–has become a leader in using jazz to express his identity as an Asian-American. Horiuchi’s best-known album, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Roads Take Their Toll
Dear Editor: Ben Joravsky’s piece titled “Road to Ruin” [October 20] correctly identifies the publicly financed superhighways as a major contributor to the decline of Chicago and other large metropolitan areas. Unfortunately while citing the historical outflow of jobs and people to the suburbs, Joravsky failed to mention the history of urban Democrats demanding that […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Prisoners of Abuse
Behind many women on welfare stand men who want to keep them there.
Posted inNews & Politics
Rewarding Ethical Journalism–Whatever That Is/The Babble Battle, Round Two/News Bites
Rewarding Ethival Journalism–Whatever That Is “Quite frankly,” said Casey Bukro, discussing the ethics award he’s founding for Chicago journalists, “this comes at the right time.” Just a few days earlier, he explained, the general counsel at the Tribune, where Bukro works, held a seminar on legal trends and “pointed out that the issue in journalism […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
This question has been keeping me up all night. What is the difference between jam, jelly, marmalade, preserves, and butter as in apple and peanut? Why don’t we see any peanut jam or orange jelly? –Claudia Cipriani, Hackensack, New Jersey What I love about this job is that it lets you know the hot-button issues […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Dead Drives Kids to Drugs
In Defense of Bill Wyman, I trust Bill Wyman isn’t losing any sleep over all those pathetics writing in defense of “poor old Jerry Garcia.” Brother, do they need a life! The only thing I ever found remotely interesting about the Dead was why they were associated with acid rock in the first place. The […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: Glenn Wexler’s house of screens
Artist Glenn Wexler says he can’t look at anything without imagining a screen print on it. He’s silk-screened pictures on cast cement, brushed steel, marble slabs, enlarged photos of old paintings, a variety of found objects, and on canvas too. He’s even cropped and printed images from Renaissance art on cutaway sections of tree trunks. […]