Chicago Reader editorial staff and Jonathan Rosenbaum, I found the film review for Pumpkin in the July 26 issue of the Reader atrocious. Rosenbaum gives a digest version of the plot but never explains why he gives the film three stars. The last sentence of the article is the only value judgment in the whole […]
Tag: Vol. 31 No. 44
Issue of Aug. 1 – 7, 2002
Posted inArts & Culture
Jeff Watts Quintet
Next week, 42-year-old drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts will release Bar Talk (Sony), only his second album as a bandleader in a career that spans nearly 20 years. This slim discography notwithstanding, during that time he’s been one of the busiest drummers in jazz, appearing on more than a hundred recordings with such leaders as Michael […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Haymarket Forces
It was great to see your listing of the centenary of the death of John Peter Altgeld (“Eagle Forgotten”) in your calendar [July 26], but unfortunately you repeated a critical error about the Haymarket anarchists. They were not executed “for detonating a bomb and inciting a riot.” The prosecution which railroaded them stated explicitly that […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Way We Wore
The Evanston Historical Society has been calling its costume collection the second largest in the state (after the 50,000-odd pieces at the Chicago Historical Society) for a long time, but it was just a guess. Now, having completed an inventory that tallied more than 10,000 items–80 percent of them women’s wear–EHS can make the claim […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Sports Section
Deep in the winter that preceded the 1999 season, his second as White Sox manager, Jerry Manuel was plotting his pitching strategy for the midseason series against the Cubs. The Sox won the series, and the Cubs, who’d reached the playoffs the previous year, began tumbling, while the Sox began their rise toward the division […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Bean Soup Times tastes a little like Onion
Exclusive: “Father R. Kelly? Cardinal Persuades Singer to Enter Priesthood….Believes Kelly could lift moral standards of wayward priests by persuading them to take advantage of drunk teenage girls instead of sober young boys.” News brief: “[W]hite people from across the country gathered in the rubble of Robert Taylor Homes to reminisce on their past drug […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Gentrification? Bring It On!
I’m trying to figure out exactly what aspect of the old Lincoln Park Carlos Flores is nostalgic about (“Puerto Rican Days,” July 12). A place with peeling paint, boarded-up windows, For Rent signs, and garbage in the streets? A place where “a shove, a step on a sneaker, or a sideways look could provoke a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
“Pledges of allegiance are marks of totalitarian states, not democracies,” Brown University anthropologist David Kertzer told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently. “I can’t think of a single democracy except the United States that has a pledge of allegiance” (reprinted in the “Progressive Review,” July 2). Gone with the trends. In 1997 a record number of companies […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
TAMI HART 8/2, FIRESIDE BOWL What Passed Between Us (Mr. Lady) is the second album from Portland-based artist Tami Hart, who blew out some ears last year with her performance at Ladyfest Midwest. She comes out of a queer indie scene that’s in some ways a logical successor to the “womyn’s music” movement of the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Julie Comnick
Order seems to be disintegrating in the face of threatening apocalypse in Julie Comnick’s seven paintings and six large charcoal drawings at Zg Gallery. She writes in her statement, “Alert to the variety of signs and symbols in their surroundings, animals are inherently prepared for impending change,” yet in Habitat I the rodent that tries […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Du Sable Myth
To the editor: Harold Henderson’s fine article about recent archaeological findings in Peoria (May 31) describes what must have been Louis Chatellereau’s farm. This prominent French-Canadian, who also lived at Cahokia, had an Indian slave, Pointe Sable, whom he mortgaged to the trader Gabriel Cerre, along with his other property, in 1792. This slave became […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Crooked Fingers
If Eric Bachmann’s work as lead singer and songwriter of the great 90s band the Archers of Loaf was a way for him to vent at the world, then his present incarnation as front man of Crooked Fingers allows him to step back from that anger and take a more reflective look at his surroundings. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Truck in Pieces
Truck in Pieces, Curious Theatre Branch, at the Lunar Cabaret. Notwithstanding its central character’s mantra–“I’m not going anywhere; where’m I gonna go?”–Beau O’Reilly’s new play tells the story of a journey. O’Reilly’s Bloom, like Joyce’s before him, spends a long day traveling on the fringes of the urban landscape as he struggles to square his […]