Dear Reader, Peter Margasak, huh. He’s Wyman’s replacement, right? Yeah, “Post No Bills,” that’s really clever. Peter, was that your brainstorm or your editor’s? I guess it really doesn’t matter, unless of course your life is so lame that you actually rely on Critic’s Choices to give you something to do. But I do have […]
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 16
Issue of Jan. 21 – 27, 1999
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: David Wakler’s mysterious ways
From priest to attorney to mystery novelist–you wouldn’t describe David Walker’s resume as typical. But there is a certain continuity to his vocational history: an interest in language, the study of character, and the truth behind things. Walker mentions one thing that priests and attorneys have in common: both spend their time “dealing with people […]
Posted inArts & Culture
True Books
All You Need is Love…and 99 Other Life Lessons From Classic Rock Songs, by Pete Fornatale and Bill Ayres (Fireside, $11). SYNOPSIS: The Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes” and 99 other popular tunes are plumbed for life lessons and deep emotional truths. Includes questions to guide self-analysis. Representative quote: “When you sense that someone has lying eyes […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Points for AYSO
To the editor: I am aware of letters, phone calls, and E-mails that friends important to me have been receiving since the Reader’s article about me and my soccer team was published [January 8]. I feel I must reply. I have learned that in life the good and bad go hand in hand. So it […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Waiting for Godot
WAITING FOR GODOT, Goodman Theatre. “Birth was the death of him”: terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett devours the human experience in six words. His minimalist masterpiece takes nearly three hours to achieve the same result, but Beckett succeeded in his lifelong task: to “find the form that will accommodate the mess” of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Kick in the Teeth
Dear Sir/Madame, As both a member of the girls’ traveling soccer team and as assistant commissioner of the AYSO region mentioned in your “Kick Start” article of January 8, I feel that I must respond to the innuendo that we regard AYSO as a negative experience for our children. Quite the contrary, we are very […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Caught in the Net
Captured at www.cybereditions. com/aldaily/bwc.htm Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest (1998) The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years. Entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Young Playwrights Festival
YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL, Pegasus Players. For the first time in recent memory, the professionals outnumber the amateurs in this, the 13th annual Young Playwrights Festival. Noncommittal performances and perfunctory production values have been replaced by sophisticated acting and lively direction, making this two-hour-plus evening whiz by (as long as you don’t get bogged down trying […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Junky of Lincoln Park
The Junky of Lincoln Park, Beatnik Theatre, at Live Bait Theater. There’s no place to go but up for the young folks toiling at the Apartment Discovery home finders service. Not only does their work require them to deal patiently with distasteful customers–a lonely matron who wastes her agent’s time socializing, a borderline psychopath banished […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Dept. of Amazing Coincidences. Brian Rogal writes in the Chicago Reporter (December) that over the last three and a half years the Chicago Housing Authority has evicted more families from developments it planned to “revitalize” than from developments not slated for revitalization. Why the difference? Perhaps because evicted tenants need not be provided with replacement […]
Posted inFilm
The Way We Are
Is Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore the end of something, or just the beginning?
Posted inMusic
Puppet on a String
The phone is no friend to Curt Kirkwood. Too often the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; she’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. Your brother showed up at my […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cube
CUBE Composer, flutist, and CUBE cofounder Janice Misurell-Mitchell had a breakthrough in 1991 with After the History, a ten-minute solo for flute and voice that combines her radical politics and restless virtuosity. A provocative piece of agitprop inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, it updates the Schoenbergian speech-song to incorporate extended flute techniques […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: paintings of an Amazon woman
On a warm afternoon in 1988, a tippy double-decker boat poked its way through a narrow channel in a Brazilian forest flooded with runoff from the far-off Andes. The trees in this pristine swamp were lush with colorful plants. The most tantalizing was a swatch of flat red leaves clinging to a trunk about ten […]