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Beer, tobacco, and guns “are products with very long histories that are risky if misused,” muses Joseph Bast in the “Heartlander” (June), newsletter of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. “We used to tolerate that risk in exchange for the benefits derived from their proper use. To encourage proper use, we held individuals responsible for their actions. As a society, we now seem to take those benefits for granted, and we run to government for help when the benefits no longer rise to meet our needs....

Dallas Doll Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1994 feature is much too goofy to qualify as an absolute success, but it’s so unpredictable, irreverent, and provocative that you may not care. Australian writer-director Ann Turner has a lot on her mind, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to plot out many of her quirky moves in advance. Imagine Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (with Sandra Bernhard in the Terence Stamp part, seducing most of a bourgeois Australian family and enough other country-club notables to wind up as mayor) crossed with Repo Man and you’ll get some notion of the cascading audacity....

SEPTEMBER The U.S. is home to six million undocumented immigrants, some 300,000 of whom live in Illinois. Today a coalition of groups will march under the umbrella of the Grassroots Collaborative in support of a proposed federal law that would grant amnesty and legal standing to these immigrants, who “pay taxes and fill many key roles in our economy, yet are subject to abuse and exploitation in the workplace due to their lack of status....

Friday 11/21 – Thursday 11/27 22 SATURDAY If you’ve seen any of the Fox network’s When Animals Attack programs, you know it’s no roll in the hay to be a circus animal. Long hours, cramped and dirty quarters, and liberal beatings have caused more than a few performing animals to turn on their handlers. Animal-rights advocate Kelly Tansy, who saw it all firsthand working as a clown for several circuses, finally quit the industry in disgust....

Breakdown With Kurt Russell, J.T. Walsh, Kathleen Quinlan, M.C. Gainey, Jack Noseworthy, Rex Linn, Ritch Brinkley, and Moira Harris. By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Breakdown opens with percussion and electronic whines and tonalities behind the credits, as if to alert our nervous systems to the troubles ahead. Then we see a couple from Boston, Jeff and Amy Taylor (Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan), driving through the scenic southwest in a brand-new bright red Jeep Grand Cherokee, en route to San Diego....

Various Artists Whodunit: Chicago Knows Who (No Cigar) They had a good thing going, with their own sound, lighting, and technical crew, not to mention all the freshman girls they could wish for. But Durante wanted to play punk–in fact, he’d recruited the like-minded Lescher hoping to force the issue with the rest of the band. Eventually Lescher and Durante quit to form the Next Big Thing, which soldiered on until 1983 but never really found an audience....

The Films of Christopher Maclaine Christopher Maclaine, a beat poet of the 1940s and ’50s living in San Francisco, made only four films in his lifetime; the first and longest two–The End (1953), which is 35 minutes, and the 14-minute The Man Who Invented Gold (1957)–present the profoundest challenge to viewer identification I know of. Avoiding the extreme (though brilliant) conceptual anticinema of such filmmakers as Maurice Lemaitre, Maclaine tells stories based in social reality but in a manner so profoundly fragmented, so unnerving, as to give even viewers who’ve seen the works many times a series of perceptual shocks....

MATS GUSTAFSSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve written frequently about Swedish saxophone improviser Mats Gustafsson and his amazing flexibility–how he can veer from bulldozer blats to pin-drop whispers in a single, supremely logical heartbeat. But only recently have I realized just how flexible he is on a larger scale–how he can adapt to just about any musical situation without surrendering an iota of personality....

Nervous Breakdown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Syskas say that when they sat down with the bill, they determined that the figure they were looking at was for the entire three-story building, which stretches from 4600 to 4612 N. Lincoln. Their understanding had been that they were to pay in proportion to the amount of space they rented, so they calculated that amount and paid it....

PHAEDRA’S LOVE, Defiant Theatre, at American Theater Company. If you think simulated blow jobs, make-believe disembowelment, and people saying “cunt” are provocative, you’re Sarah Kane’s kind of audience member. In her 1996 Phaedra’s Love she transforms the mythological queen into a modern-day, libidinally rapacious royal and recasts her stepson Hippolytus–traditionally a chaste devotee of Artemis–as a channel-surfing, amoral slug. But despite concerted efforts at salaciousness, including copious quantities of pretend sexual violence, Kane can’t seem to create any meaningful dynamic between her two main characters....

As the Chicago International Film Festival draws to a close this weekend, the remaining schedule includes plenty of things worth seeing. Most of these, however, will open here in the weeks or months ahead: 4 Little Girls (to be shown at the Music Box and eventually on HBO), The Sweet Hereafter (expected to open around Christmas), Voyage to the Beginning of the World (sometime next year), and Love and Death on Long Island (February)....

Letters to the editor: More to the point, he is one of the most assiduous scholars of folk music I have ever encountered. I first met Pete 60 years ago come September. As a member of the Almanac Singers (his colleagues: Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell), he stayed with us for a couple of weeks. During that time he and his buddies were singing Child ballads and their Appalachian variants and adapting them to the situations at hand....

Headline Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What Felshman avoided revealing was that Meites actually was the perpetrator and bragged about the unethical practices which he falsely ascribes to others. Thus, in the matter of fake sample ballots, Meites persuaded his chapter of IVI-IPO to let him take their sample ballot for the March 1992 primary election to the printer. Before it arrived, Meites deleted the name of Jim Gierach, the IVI-IPO’s endorsed candidate for state’s attorney (but disapproved of by Meites)....

Cecil, how can dogs walk around in snow and subzero weather without getting frostbite on their feet? (2) They do not either. Once again, it seems, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Heading up the do-not camp was Stuart Nelson Jr., head veterinarian for the famous Iditarod dogsled race currently under way in Alaska. This 1,100-mile event lasts two weeks and features several dozen dog teams and their mushers racing from Anchorage to Nome in some of the most grueling conditions imaginable....

Chicago Symphony Orchestraat Orchestra Hall, November 27, December 3, and December 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I’ll be fair. Orbital Beacons isn’t worthless. It does have an interesting gimmick: a reshuffling of the musicians onstage into smaller groups that function something like competing chamber orchestras. (If I understand the schematic correctly, there are seven groups, plus a squad of percussionists.) This may not sound like a big deal, but the sonic texture of a symphony orchestra is so complicated that even the smallest repositioning of the musicians can cause curious acoustic effects....

BREAKBEAT ERA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The name of Roni Size and DJ Die’s new project had me excited: frankly, I was hoping they’d stood up the double bass of their previous project, Reprazent, like a bad date and made a messy, exciting album of old-style rolling jungle breaks, riffing pianos, synth blats, screaming divas, absurd low-frequency oscillations, the works. Instead they’ve made–who’d have guessed?...

Judith Schulz’s most impressive trick with tops involves flinging them across the display area at the Spinning Top Museum in Burlington, Wisconsin, and hitting small landing platforms more than 15 feet away. “This is a rare skill to master,” she says, “even though it’s within anyone’s ability to pick up if they just try it enough.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Schulz’s obsession with tops began in 1975, when she was visiting the Soviet Union and bought a wooden doll that had a top inside rather than the usual family of smaller dolls....

By Ben Joravsky “We’re confused about it too–it doesn’t make any sense,” says Loida Mojica, a parent with a child at a Belmont-Cragin school. “Why would you bring more kids into a neighborhood that’s already overcrowded? Why would you take a problem and make it worse? Where are we going to put all these kids? What about the kids we already have?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charter schools can design their own curricula, hire their own staff, and choose their own specialties (African-American culture, say, or the arts)....

This past summer Daniel John Sobieski wrote a letter about one of my columns. I felt honored. For those of us who regularly read the letters to the editor in Chicago newspapers, Sobieski is a household name. If memory serves, he has been a regular contributor for at least 30 years. Jerry Sullivan writes about “the beneficial effects of the ban on DDT,” a ban largely brought about by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring....

I. Second City Martin De Maat (director of the Second City Training Center): I met and talked to Del when I was a little boy. I was, what, four? I was at a Second City show. I remember my feet were dangling in the chair. And after the show I said to him, “I thought you were very funny in the show tonight.” And Del said, “I hate children.”...