I recently heard about an American teenager visiting Wales who insisted on calling the Welsh people she met English. When it was pointed out to her that the Welsh didn’t like being identified that way, she said she was sorry but that’s what she’d been taught in school–and it would be too complicated for her to change what she called them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet if you look at what’s been happening lately in world cinema–a subject most American critics aren’t much interested in, apart from publicity stunts like the Dogma 95 manifesto–there are signs that the bullying dominance of Hollywood is beginning to encounter some healthy resistance....

By Susan DeGrane Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A school social worker, Haynes has helped raise nearly 600 monarch eggs and caterpillars in the last decade. With its orange and black markings, the monarch (Danaus plexippus) is among the most widely known butterflies; it lives in the city or the country, wherever milkweed grows, though it migrates to warmer regions for the winter. Unfortunately, global warming has caused severe weather changes and unusually cold weather in Mexico, one of the monarch’s winter habitats....

The theater was still officially closed, but about 100 people were already taking their seats in black box number two at Northbrook Court’s General Cinema at 9:45 on a recent Saturday morning. They’d forked over an $18 onetime admission charge or shown their series tickets, helped themselves from the big pots of free coffee in the lobby, and perused the flyers that told them–for the first time–what they’d be seeing. An anticipatory buzz hovered in the dimly lit screening room: the film was Dancer in the Dark, the latest work of Danish director Lars von Trier and winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which had been shown only once in this country–at the New York film festival the night before....

BookExpo: The Abridged Editon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The massive three-day trade show has traditionally allowed booksellers and publishers from around the world to meet and schmooze, to learn about upcoming book releases, and to–perhaps–talk business. Then last year the ABA, a group mostly made up of independent bookstores, lost Random House after suing the giant publisher for allegedly offering sweetheart deals to the larger chains....

Duo With Yu, Nishijima, and Makiko Watanabe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that I’ve seen Duo a third time–on video, a far from ideal way to view a film that depends on visual nuance–the importance of Tamura’s personal camera style in this stirring and volatile experiment is fully evident to me. His way of shooting an informal political discussion in Narita: Heta Village sometimes involves panning away from the person speaking–displaying an attentiveness to group interaction that finds responses to talk as important as the talk itself....

Theory and practice. “The rector of two Episcopal churches, one Hispanic, one White, perceived ethnic differences in the way homosexuals are treated,” reports Paul Numrich of the University of Illinois at Chicago in Second Opinion (January). “Although Hispanics are doctrinally more conservative than Whites, the strong family bonds of Hispanic culture make them more tolerant in practice. He characterized the response of his Hispanic members as, ‘Okay, you’re gay, we don’t like it, but you’re family....

Not long before embarking on his comedy Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas directed this powerful 1994 feature about doomed teenage love as part of the excellent French TV series All the Boys and Girls in Their Time, in which various filmmakers (including Andre Techine, Chantal Akerman, and Claire Denis) dramatized stories set during their teenage years, scoring them with the pop music of the period. Assayas’s contribution, perhaps the most affecting in the whole series, takes place on the outskirts of Paris in 1972, and having lived in France during that period, I can report that his grasp of its countercultural lifestyles is uncanny....

Sundance may be the most powerful festival devoted to American independent films, but in recent years it’s become a careerist’s stepping-stone to Hollywood. Fortunately there are still insurgent showcases like the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, which remains committed to exhibiting unknown and unheralded artists. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With its traveling “Spotlight Series,” the LA festival turns up here with a screening of Kevin Fitzgerald’s impressive hour-long hip-hop documentary, Freestyle, which won the best sound track award at the March event....

File Under Anglo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gospel Morning, a collection of decidedly retro but well-executed melancholy Anglophile pop, is Junior’s most accomplished recording yet, and he’s hardly a newcomer to the Chicago music scene. Between 1987 and 1993 he fronted the glam-rock outfit Mystery Girls, then spent two years with the Rosehips, who were heavily influenced by the romantic, boozy folk-rock of England’s Jacobites....

JAZZ PASSENGERS WITH DEBORAH HARRY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just along for the ride? The Jazz Passengers toss enough irony and lighthearted lunacy into their music to give that impression, but their careful arrangements, clever compositions, and bristling front line–alto sax, trombone, vibes, and violin–suggest otherwise. In all their lower-Manhattan splendor, the members of this sextet lace their infectious hyper-bop with a wiggy humor and silly bits of theater, both of which have been enhanced lately by the semisincere vocals of that old Blondie, Deborah Harry; as a result, the spotlight tends to reflect off (rather than shine on) their musicianship....

Jour de fete Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jacques Tati’s first feature, a euphoric comedy set in a sleepy village, was meant to be the first French feature in color; it was shot in 1947 using two cameras, one color and one black-and-white. But the new Thomson-Color process failed to yield results that could be printed, so in 1949 the film was released in black and white....

carson.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was furious when I read Edward H. Kim’s letter to the editor in your November 14 issue. How could any Northwestern student, who is surrounded by hundreds of arguments pro and con on this issue [Neighborhood News, October 31] in every paper he looks at every day (this is getting unbelievable coverage up here), totally ignore the biggest complaint of the Evanston taxpayers: who is paying for this development?...

SELF HELP, OR THE TOWER OF PSYCHOBABBLE, Bailiwick Repertory. LA playwright Clark Carlton’s rather overwritten dating comedy–the latest installment in Bailiwick’s gay-themed “Pride ’99” series–indulges in a lot of analytical excesses for a play that purports to ridicule our dependence on shrinkspeak and talk therapy. A sensible 35-year-old gay screenwriter cursed with half-baked relationships cures himself of needing a cure, yet the play is burdened by references to codependency, narcissism, passive aggression, fear of intimacy, mother complexes, a sense of victimization, lack of boundaries, identity insecurity, and other pathologies....

ETERNALS 6/11, EMPTY BOTTLE This local trio–Wayne Montana on bass, melodica, and keyboards; his former Trenchmouth bandmate Damon Locks on vocals and more keys; and Dan Fliegel, who most recently displayed his skill with exotic rhythms in Tom Ze’s backup band, on drums–has just released its first record, a three-song 12-inch called Chapter and Verse (Thrill Jockey). Thanks to mixers Casey Rice and John McEntire, the recordings are somewhat trippier (dubbier?...

Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The late-90s reappearance of trombonist Roswell Rudd–who retreated to academia in the 70s and the Catskills in the late 80s–is one of the happier chapters in recent jazz history. And it’s not just that he’s finally earned some long-deserved recognition for his contributions to free jazz in the 60s–the guy sounds as good as ever....

SUGAR PIE DESANTO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sugar Pie DeSanto first hit the national R & B charts in 1960 with “I Want to Know,” a single for Oakland’s Veltone label, but she’s best known for her later work on Checker, a Chess subsidiary. “Slip-In Mules,” her sassy reply to Tommy Tucker’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” lasted 14 weeks on the Cash Box chart in 1964; subsequent outings like “Soulful Dress” and “Go Go Power” also sold well, but after 1966’s “In the Basement,” a feisty bad-girl anthem that paired her with Etta James, DeSanto faded from the national scene....

This has probably been answered somewhere before, but I was getting my teeth drilled that day. Just what does kumbaya mean? –F. Pierson, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh Lord, kumbaya. Also spelled kum ba yah, cumbayah, kumbayah, and probably a few other ways. If you look in a good songbook you’ll find the word helpfully translated as “come by here,” with the note that the song is “from Angola, Africa....

Eve Ensler’s play is a raucous, funny, wide-ranging demonstration of women’s refusal to be silenced. (If you wonder whether anyone’s still trying to silence us, consider that WXRT won’t accept advertising for the piece so its listeners won’t have to hear that word.) The evening is vulnerable to the critique that it pays too much attention to the sexual and too little to the reproductive function of vaginas; but hell, even the most fecund among us won’t employ our vaginas for childbirth more than eight or ten times while the simple possession of one in a misogynist society constrains a woman’s opportunities that many times a day....

An intelligent and informative feature-length documentary by Canadian filmmaker Nettie Wild about the Zapatista movement and uprising in southern Mexico, concentrating on events that occurred between 1994 and 1997. The film focuses mainly (and cogently) on the struggles of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico and in cyberspace, but it also allows the government-allied, paramilitary group north of Chiapas, which calls itself Peace and Justice, to speak on its own behalf (when it isn’t assaulting the film crew)....

By Ben Joravsky In 1988 Simmons decided the city ought to honorarily name 71st Street for Emmett Till, the south-side teenager lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. (Till was dragged from his uncle’s home late at night, beaten, shot in the head, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River; two defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After months of lobbying, she won support from the six south-side aldermen through whose wards 71st Street passes, and Emmett Till commemorative street signs were installed at major intersections along a seven-mile stretch from Lake Shore Drive to Kedzie....