Dear editors: I have a few things to say about your article “Cat Fight” [August 27]. First, has no one considered the fact that responsible pet owners keep their pets indoors? This is the city of Chicago, not the middle-of-nowhere farmland. In this city, a loose cat or dog is a danger to itself and […]
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 48
Issue of Sep. 2 – 8, 1999
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories Scottish murderer Noel Ruddle, who had been in a mental hospital in Glasgow for eight years, was released in August because the hospital hadn’t found a successful treatment for his paranoid schizophrenia. British law prohibits a prisoner’s hospitalization if it does not result in any improvement of his condition. Various officials and psychiatrists […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Savage Love 101
To the editor: Although I’m an avid fan of Dan Savage’s Savage Love in the back of Section Four, I feel an informational tidbit in his August 27 column may have misled all three of the Reader’s readers in Kansas and the half dozen or so who were planning to move there. The item in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Bozo Chronicles
In 1968, one of the most awful years in the history of America, Dick Richards donned a red nose and red hair. He became Bozo. In Michigan. Well, in Grand Rapids. “It is a bit of a dinosaur,” says Richards, “something whose time has passed. But when I go out there like I did the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
David Olney
DAVID OLNEY Singer-songwriter David Olney favors brooding, bass-heavy minor-key melodies; he populates his vignettes with vagabonds, outlaws, and losers in search of their souls; his voice goes dry at the top of its range, and he tends to mutter or speak the tail ends of his verses–in other words, he might as well have Townes […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Interior Motives
Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through October 10 By Fred Camper Pollock, Rothko, and even pop artist James Rosenquist search for the beautiful, the sublime. If you don’t love their paintings, you don’t “get” them. But Roy Lichtenstein, another founder of pop, is different. His cool, measured, precise pictures, painted to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: Terra Brockman’s organic brain food
Terra Brockman describes her new quarterly newsletter, “Food & Farm Notes,” as a “sort of virtual dinner party–a mingling of people and thoughts, food and conversation.” In the first issue, an expanded version of the one-page weekly newsletter she’s been handing out at her family’s stand at the Evanston farmers’ market, she promises to write […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
We realize you’re gay and everything, Dan, but whatever happened to pussy? You used to write about women’s genitals once in a while, and then you were my hero. I still have the column you wrote about the importance of the clit, and I give it to every new boyfriend. But I don’t think you’ve […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Morning, Noon, and Night
There have been solo performers since at least the ancient Greeks: it’s likely Homer delivered his epics himself. But today no one has done more to popularize the form than Spalding Gray. His autobiographical narratives–about growing up in a Christian Science family, living in boho New York in the early 80s, or killing time on […]
Posted inMusic
A Different Shade of Blue
Kevin Coyne Sugar Candy Taxi (Ruf) By Alec Hanley Bemis “I don’t think it’s a put-down to say that a white kid can’t sing black man’s music,” former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman recently told the Oxford American. “I don’t think it applies. You can usually see that, if you go to both shows, you […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
ANSON FUNDERBURGH & THE ROCKETS 9/3, BUDDY GUY’S Legends This fine Texas-based blues band gives its guitarist top billing, but he’s not the hoary grandstander that might suggest–the recent Change in My Pocket (Bullseye Blues & Jazz) is dominated by Sam Myers’s distinctive stuffy-nosed bellowing and Delta-learned harp blowing and the lively tinkling of pianist […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From the Zoo
ORGASMO ADULTO ESCAPES FROM THE ZOO, at the Theatre Building. There’s something inescapably slipshod about this production of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s vicious feminist commedia, written in 1977. Actually, there are many things: the random assemblage of set pieces, the broad washes of unfocused light, the clunky scene changes, the overall lack of visual […]
Posted inFilm
A Breakthrough And A Throwback
Mr. Zhao Rating *** A must see Directed by Lu Yue Written by Shu Ping With Shi Jingming, Zhang Zhihua, Chen Yinan, and Jiang Wenli. All The Little Animals Rating *** A must see Directed by Jeremy Thomas Written by Eski Thomas With John Hurt, Christian Bale, Daniel Benzali, James Faulkner, and John O’Toole. By […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Site Seeing: tales from the crypts
In the days after the bloody confrontation between labor and police at Haymarket Square in 1886, John V. Farwell and his brother Charles B. were reminded of their return home from a hunting trip out west during a railroad strike nine years earlier. They were traveling on a troop train bringing federal soldiers from Fort […]