Is This Column Politically Correct? “9:45 a.m. Arrived at home of complainant. Asked her, ‘Ma’am, did you see the perpetrators?’ She said she got a glimpse of two men running through her back yard. Asked her: ‘Be’s ‘dey Naugahyde?’ She said: ‘What?’ I said: ‘You know, be’s ‘dey Negrohide.’ She asked if I meant African-Americans. I asked my partner if African-American meant the same as monkeys. He said he believed so....
Andrew Dice Clay wasn’t invited to be in this month’s edition of the popular off-the-wall country-western vaudeville show, so I guess it’s safe to assume Nora Dunn will show up as announced. The comedy monologuist famous for her appearances (and nonappearances) on Saturday Night Live will take on the persona of an unemployed scat singer to duet with Milly May Smithy, the teased-hair hostess with the mostess played by Brigid Murphy....
Lead Story Police in Birmingham, Alabama, responded in April to a woman’s plea to save her estranged boyfriend, who was threatening suicide in her apartment. When the man failed to drop his suicide pistol, they shot and killed him. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October, the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, school committee adopted a plan to allow 11th- and 12th- graders to get credit for mandatory physical-education classes merely by reading materials on exercise concepts....
Lead Story A physician in Daly City, California, writing in a medical journal in March, told of a patient who got relief from lower back pain by flying upside down in an open-cockpit biplane. The patient belts himself in tightly and says the only problem is that the engine stalls after about ten seconds, sending him into a dive during which he must restart it or crash. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
OEDIPUS REQUIEM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In reshaping these three plays into a single play, David Perkins might seem to be defying disaster with an ambition Oedipus himself might have feared. And by employing the form of a memory play, in which the story is related in hallucinatory, fragmented flashbacks, Perkins’s Oedipus Requiem certainly goes against the structure of Greek tragedy, with its chronological unfolding of narrative....
Proust had his madeleine, and we have Elysee, a new French restaurant on North State Street. About halfway through my first meal there I was suddenly transported back to the Paris I had first visited 20 years earlier. My husband and I were just out of school and felt recklessly extravagant in the possession of a few surplus dollars. What else to spend them on but food? La Tour d’Argent and Maxim’s would have been too extravagant, so we went often to a small family establishment near the Ecole Militaire, where the wiry proprietor welcomed regulars by name and led them to their special tables, while his wife sat watchfully at the cash register, scowling as she counted up the day’s receipts....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Film is surely the most effective modern propaganda tool as well as the most readily accessible artform, when we add movies on TV, cable, and VCR to those at the movie theater. I would suggest then that high quality film criticism is vital to our need to understand our lives and thereby possibly change them, and in social terms, at least as important as clean air and water....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Please be more careful with terminology that tends to exclude. By using “the Church” (as in “Insubordination”‘s subtitle) to identify the Roman Catholic Church, you may be unconsciously espousing a very specific doctrinal position. Such a usage effectively excludes non-Roman Catholic groups from “church” status, and it implies that there is, indeed, only one normative path for Christians....
MY THING OF LOVE Steppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much like the aimless narcissists and ex-potheads who populate Ann Beattie’s fiction, Jack drifts through his life, into adultery and out of his marriage, without regard for the consequences. And though Elly has a strong desire to keep the marriage together, she too seems to act out of instinct. (If she really thought about her shallow prick of a husband, she’d drop him in a second, or make it clear that she’s staying only for the children....
December 2. I’m at what I call “The Pie House,” actually the Bakers Square at Harlem and Foster, with my mother, who’s been reading the pie menu throughout dinner and still can’t decide. “No, Ma. Probably just in certain states.” “Two bananas?” asks the waitress. “If your parents weren’t here I’d kick the shit outta you!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The restaurant’s host, male, Asian, almost a head shorter than the madman, grabs his arm, begins leading him to a table, as if nothing were going on....
Budding herpetologists take note. On a recent field trip to Spears Woods in the south suburban Palos area, a group of grade-school children found an unusual creature: a Graham’s crayfish snake. Asked how they could have found the rare prairie-wetland snake, the Chicago Herpetological Society’s Ken Mierzwa said, “Because kids are low to the ground and because they look in stupid places.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If every fetus is a fully human being, a woman who procures an abortion is exactly like someone who hires a gunman to murder her child,” writes Michael Kinsley in the New Republic (July 15 and 22)....
Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn’s free and liberating (as well as liberated) 37-minute adaptation of Georges Bataille’s untranslated story “Le morte”–made in 1989 and now receiving its belated Chicago premiere–is the most exciting and accomplished experimental film I’ve seen in ages. It charts the adventures of a nearly naked heroine who leaves the corpse of her lover in a country house, goes to a bar, and sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die....
THE SCHOOL FOR WIVES Perhaps the ultimate erotic fantasy is to establish complete power over another, body and soul. In Moliere’s knowing comedy The School for Wives, this fantasy takes an especially pathetic form: a lonely, wealthy bachelor rears a pretty girl in ignorance and isolation in order to train her to be his “perfect” wife–docile, adoring, amorous on demand. Why play a dead-end singles game when you can create the woman of your dreams?...
As the Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second week, there are still a lot of interesting and exciting movies to be seen. I feel compelled to note that none of the 16 features on this week’s program that I’m familiar with are as beautiful or as potent as Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle vague–one of the 39 films shown in Toronto last month that Chicago festival director Michael Kutza boasted to the press about having rejected....
WFMT’s Uneasy Truce Terkel stopped there. A lot more troubled water will have to flow under the bridge before the amity extends to the board of the Chicago Educational Television Association, which owns WTTW and also WFMT, and in particular to William McCarter, who’s president of CETA’s board and general manager of WTTW. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The music you don’t like has got to be on there, too,” a musicologist decreed....
Friday 19 Saturday 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in November the National Endowment for the Arts withdrew a $10,000 grant for an exhibit in New York that dealt with AIDS; after some controversy, they reinstated it. Susan Wyatt, the director of the New York gallery where the exhibit was eventually shown, is one of the speakers at today’s conference at the Public Library Cultural Center, Artists’ Voice on AIDS....
TRUST ME This story encapsulates Brown’s simple but wholly effective approach in Trust Me. While he spends some time poking at death, he’s more attentive to life’s directive to open one’s eyes and look. Fortunately for us, his vision is crystal clear: equipped with a keen wit, an expressive physical grace, and a seemingly endless capacity for empathy, he weaves life’s insignificant details into a colorful fabric at once dazzling and familiar, containing moments of great human drama....
Atom Egoyan’s striking and haunting Canadian feature concerns family ties and video technology, and the strange relationships between them. The plot concerns an alienated young man (Aidan Tierney) who lives with his father (David Hemblin) and his father’s mistress in a fancy high rise full of video equipment. The young man becomes increasingly worried about the fate of his grandmother, whom the father has shunted off to a convalescent home. At the institution he becomes acquainted with an ailing woman and her daughter (Arsinee Khanjian), an equally alienated individual who works as a purveyor of phone sex, which his father uses as a stimulus for his lovemaking....
PS ’91 Last year’s “Dark Nights” series presented over 130 artists, both emerging and established talent; it was so popular that this year music and dance series have been added. The first dance event offered a mixed bill of local dance companies and choreographers, featuring works from Emergence Dance Theatre, Winifred Haun, Joel Hall, and independent choreographers Christopher Rutt, Brian Frette, and Denise Gula. Despite the unseasonable heat wave, the place was packed....
A few years back, the duplex condominium in the turn-of-the-century Astor Street mansion would have sold only days after its owner put it up for sale. After all, the upscale real estate market was sizzling then, and the unit is a perfect location for any social climber eager to broadcast his rise to the top. There’s no question that the condominium–the largest and most prestigious in a nine-unit building designed by Stanford White–is valuable....
