Ad creep advances
It’s now officially true: Nothing is sacred. Advertising — the ubiquitous bane of our corporate world — has continued its relentless creep through American culture and has now found its way onto the stage. Yes, having conquered movie theaters, ads are now entering the sanctum of the live theater. I don’t mean the printed ads…
Keep it cool upstairs
Dear Gene: We live in a two-level house with most of the living space on the upper floor. The air-conditioner thermostat is on the upper floor, which gets very warm in hot weather. We are thinking of having a couple of electrically powered attic fans installed to help cool the upper floor. What is your…
Listen to me!
Historians Against the War has just published a 24-page pamphlet titled “Join Us? Testimonies of Iraq War Veterans and Their Families,” edited by Carl Mirra, of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. The complete pamphlet, a project of HAW’s Oral History Working Group, includes testimony from veterans of the Iraq war,…
Caging the beast
“Kill every buffalo you can . . . every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” — Col. R.I. Dodge, Fort McPherson, 1867 “We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture them or . . . kill them until we have imposed law and order in this country.…
American life in poetry
Storytelling binds the past and present together, and is as essential to community life as are food and shelter. Many of our poets are masters at reshaping family stories as poetry. Here Lola Haskins retells a haunting tale, cast in the voice of an elder. Like the best stories, there are no inessential details. Every…
Jacqueline Jackson
I put money in the meter but it just kept on blinking zero
A hodgepodge of heads-ups
The near future is plumb full of live-music goodies, starting Friday, June 30, with Dreaming in Colour, a longtime local favorite, back onstage with a performance in the Club Room of the Hoogland Center for the Arts (420 S. Sixth St., 217-523-2787) at 9 p.m. The jazz-fusion combo goes beyond that meager description and enters…
Newman’s own
Paul Newman recently announced that he would star in one more movie before ending his extraordinary career. What a relief! No screen legend should end his career as a cartoon voice. He’s upped the ante of expectations by wanting Robert Redford to co-star. The greatest pairing in movie history made only two films, Butch Cassidy…
Welcome to America
Beardstown and surrounding communities in west-central Illinois have taken on a surreal international air of late. A community of African immigrants has quietly been building in the area for the past few years, on the heels of a Hispanic migration that began in the 1990s. The immigrants are drawn by jobs at the local Cargill…
Matters of the heart
As long as there are girls who are suckers for sad boys, there will be a place in the global economy for the likes of Syd Matters. You won’t hear me complaining. If those girls can be blamed for The O.C. and James “Rhymes With” Blunt, they also deserve the credit for Wuthering Heights and…
Cap City
BALANCING ACT Presbyterians now say investing makes more sense than divesting when it comes to matters of peace and justice in the Middle East. A new policy, adopted June 21 in Birmingham, Ala., by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), requires that the church’s investments in Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West…
Kiss your ash goodbye
Just two weeks ago, the Illinois Department of Agriculture announced that it had identified an emerald ash borer in Kane County, in the northeast corner of the state. It was not good news. This destructive nonnative pest (Agrilus planipennis) feeds on North American ash species (Fraxinus sp.), including white ash and green ash, both common…
The price of citizenship
The image of the United States is of a country that provides refuge for people who desire freedom and opportunity — yet the latest round of immigration “reform,” which targets “unwanted” or “undesirable” immigrants from south of our border, reinforces a history of immigration practices that have been filled with hostility toward those wanting to…
Unlikely hero
Dear “Earth Talk”: Do houseplants really help to clean indoor air? — Jackson Schlemmer, London, England One positive result of the 1970s energy crisis was the development and widespread adoption of improved insulation materials to maintain indoor energy efficiency. Unfortunately, many of these materials have compromised indoor air quality because of their tendency to release airborne…
Back, just in time
Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, the latest entry in the last son of Krypton’s exploits, has one foot firmly in the past as it looks confidently into the future. Everybody knows the Superman saga, so Singer and screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris waste little time before dropping us right in the middle of things. Having…
Summer on a stick
Modern-day calendar-keepers may tell us that summer begins with Memorial Day weekend, but if you’re an astronomical diehard you know it really didn’t kick off until June 21, when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. The day was long, the night was short, and some of earthlings acted crazy. If you…
The great debate
Dear Gene: We live in a condominium with a deck that has wood railings that are in need of replacement or repair. The condo association wants us to replace the wood railings with vinyl, which is supposedly maintenance-free. What are the pros and cons of wood versus vinyl? — M.E. Vinyl isn’t maintenance-free, of course,…
Goodbye, old friend
GOODBYE, OLD FRIEND: The news was posted, and Vinyl Static heard the line of dominoes fall — furious message-board posts, the rat-a-tat-tat of stunned bloggers, and a collective gasp — as the short and sweet announcement sank in: Sleater-Kinney is calling it quits. If you aren’t familiar with the Olympia, Wash., trio of punk rioters…
Man’s best friend
The menu board listed them as “Garbage Trucks,” which was a pretty fair description. The place was Abe’s, a dingy, grungy dive a few steps down from the street in the University of Illinois campus town in Champaign-Urbana. The walls at Abe’s were covered with graffiti, and every surface was stained with oily smoke from…
