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Friday 6/11 – Thursday 6/17 This weekend’s Robert Lepage Film Festival kicks off with an opening reception hosted by the Canadian consul general at 6, followed by a 7:30 showing of 1998’s No, which juxtaposes the 1970 world’s fair in Osaka with the separatist crisis in Quebec. Tickets are $10. Tomorrow at noon Reader contributor Ted Shen, Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington, and Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss will lead an hour-long panel discussion on Lepage’s films; the festival continues with The Seven Streams of the River Ota at 1....

In Daley we trust. “For the first time, no outside agency is analyzing the [school] board’s budget,” writes Veronica Anderson in Catalyst (September). “In 1995, the [state] Legislature suspended oversight by the Chicago School Finance Authority. Since then, the Civic Federation, the Chicago Urban League, the Chicago Panel on School Policy and the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform have all dropped their scrutiny.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Can Dialectics Break Bricks? With Pai Paiu, Chan Hung Liu, Ingrid Wu, and the voices of Jacques Thebaut, Patrick Dewaere, Michelle Grellier, and Dominique Morin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know much about the situationists, but according to critic Peter Wollen they formed out of a split within an earlier radical artistic and political group, the lettrists, who sort of took over the mantle of the French avant-garde from the surrealists after World War II under the leadership of Isidore Isou....

[Re: “Their Own Worst Enemies?,” June 25] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To wit, that one gay politico may attempt to run against an elected straight friend of the community; that said gay politico has no support; that the elected straight friend of the community brokered an important deal on behalf of the community, using gambling as a bargaining chip; that the brokered deal was brokered not by the straight friend of the community but by a gay elected official who is also a friend of the gay politico and supports the gay politico’s run; that neither the gay elected official nor the straight friend of the community brokered the deal but, instead, did the bidding of the Righteous Feudal-nation for Illinois Humans; that said gay elected official suffers from various forms of dementia brought on by HIV or Hyper-Garcia-ma; that the Feudal-nation leadership (Prince Richard the Wrong and King Arthur of Alcohol) are actively spreading rumor and innuendo about the health and mental status of Sir Larry the Likable; that Prince Richard and King Arthur support the gay politico privately; that Prince Richard and King Arthur do not support the gay politico privately; that Prince and King will, in any case, withhold support for Sir Larry’s election, or actively oppose it; that the gay rights bill has been doomed by Sir Larry; doomed by Sir Larry at the urging of Prince Richard; doomed by Prince Richard at the hand of Powerful Pate; doomed by all parties at the hands of all involved; and, that no one in the community, neither publisher, politico, politician, nor person(s), can overcome their fear of Prince Richard and King Arthur, smite them generally, or stop the feast of their own making, in which they and all of us are currently eating our own....

KATHY KOSINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Relatively few jazz vocalists write much of their own material. The treasure troves of American popular song, augmented by the blues and by a separate storehouse of jazz tunes that began as instrumentals and have accumulated words over the years, provide plenty to work with–and besides, jazz melodies tend to be more complex than most modern pop vehicles, making it difficult to write appropriate and meaningful lyrics....

60 Minutes was always theater. We knew that, right? We never really thought those blow-dried, million-dollar correspondents did the real work of researching and reporting their stories. And we never thought those watch-’em-sweat interviews were anything like real-time, real-life encounters. If a 60 Minutes crew came into our neck of the woods, we could also see that the stories weren’t necessarily original. Many are slick retellings of material that has been doggedly covered by the local press before it drifts up to the 60 Minutes editors and is anointed for a national audience....

Prog Spring Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He pooled resources with a handful of fellow prog fans to present Present with an acceptable figure, and, after getting no response from the Empty Bottle, his first venue choice, he persuaded Ray Quinn, who owns Martyrs’, to host the show. “The turnout was decent considering that there was a Bulls playoff game that night,” says Eisenberg....

DICTATORS, GAZA STRIPPERS 11/12, EMPTY BOTTLE The Dictators are legendary not because they were the best New York punk band or even the first New York punk band, but because they were the first New York punk band to put it to wax. With The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, released in 1975 by Epic to a less than enthusiastic buying public, these savants kicked off an aborted official career that in the 80s came back to life as a string of semiregular reunion tours....

THE ROARING GIRL, Shakespeare’s Motley Crew, at Bailiwick Repertory. Lean, playful, witty, and energetic, Jeremy Wechsler and Penny Penniston’s not particularly faithful adaptation of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s 1611 play suggests what might have happened if William Shakespeare and Alexandre Dumas had joined forces to create a vehicle for Mae West. This comic swashbuckler takes place in the raucous alehouses of 17th-century London, where the title character–a ferociously independent and sexually liberated thief and con artist–is enlisted to help trick a nobleman into allowing his son to marry a frumpy but lovable barmaid....

TIME CHANGES EVERYTHING, Saint Sebastian Players, at Saint Bonaventure Church. There’s something sweet and appealing about this new play, in which two brothers–one a slick Chicago lawyer, the other an unpolished dirt farmer–are reunited when their mother dies. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It isn’t the story. Chicago playwright Jonathan Hagloch lets his plot wander and amble too long before settling down late in the second act to the play’s most compelling dramatic issue: should the brothers keep or sell the family farm?...

WHERE MEN ARE EMPTY OVERCOATS, 6 Players Productions, at the Theatre Building. Likable but lame, Eric Pfeffinger’s forced comedy, produced by a troupe from Bloomington, Indiana, depicts with thudding predictability a gay man’s coming out to his repressed Cincinnati family. Right from the clumsy start this stiff script lurches into sitcom mode, each character defined by two quirks only (dad is a right-wing foot fetishist, while the constantly embarrassed mom is a secret sybarite)....

There’s plenty worth hearing this week as the Chicago Jazz Festival enters its 20th year, but it’s clear that the programmers at the Jazz Institute of Chicago could only stretch the city’s budget, which has remained nearly flat for the past few years, so far: as fine as Randy Weston’s closing-night performance of his “African Sunrise” promises to be, it’ll still be less impressive than the piece’s debut in Grant Park 14 years ago, and this year’s only new commission, by Ed Wilkerson’s Shadow Vignettes, wouldn’t have been possible without an NEA grant....

Another Store Bites the Dust Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Since alternative rock became a household name there’s been an oversaturation of records out there,” says proprietor Jillian Matson, who opened Blackout in June 1992 by buying out the stock and taking over the lease of the Pravda store, which she had managed for a year. “I can’t stock them all and keep up with it, and it’s really dampened my enthusiasm....

Friday 10/9 – Thursday 10/15 10 SATURDAY The underground nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan last May emphasized that while the cold war may be a thing of the past, the threat of destruction certainly isn’t. It’s estimated that there are 35,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Whether they’re ever used “is not a matter for prediction; it is a matter for choice,” writes the Nation’s Jonathan Schell in the introduction to his book The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now....

Alice Kreiman wasn’t happy manning Down Home, the handicraft shop she owned in Evanston for a few years in the mid-1970s. “I felt like a prisoner,” she says of her short tenure as a shopkeeper. Running the Evanston Art Center’s annual Holiday Market was another matter. In the 17 years she’s served as its volunteer chairperson, the market grew from a modest adjunct to the center’s gift counter to a three-and-a-half-week extravaganza that takes over all four galleries in the lakefront mansion, involves 150 volunteers, offers work by 200 artists, and grosses $200,000....

Circle Perhaps it’s a delayed reaction to the innovations of combative visionaries like Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman, but current stand-up comics have begun to resemble prizefighters. Some, like Chris Rock, conquer through brute force, battering their opponents into submission. Others, like Robert Schimmel, favor finesse and structure, dancing around their subjects before moving in for the kill. But the best comics, like the best boxers, succeed with a balanced attack....

By Michael Miner What Rhoades actually said, according to the report of his official debriefing, was this: “We’re going to have to resurrect Norman Maclean to tell this story.” Norman Maclean was the author of the classic Young Men and Fire, and he was the father of John Maclean. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Death came in 1990 when Norman Maclean was 87. His son divided the manuscript into chapters and added three brief transitions, and Young Men and Fire was published to enormous acclaim in 1992....

“The American Chestnut is a tree that was once the most abundant tree in America,” writes performance artist Karen Finley. “A blight during the early part of this century has given an illness to practically all American Chestnut trees. The suffering trre [sic] stays in an eternal limbo of never developing to maturity–or either they die.” The passage is quintessential Finley: messy, repetitive, guileless, resonant. As an artist, she’s drawn to the rot, decrepitude, and trauma of our rotting, decrepit, traumatized society....

Help! Help! I Know This Title Is Long, but Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me! Clowns scare or amuse kids at birthday parties and cheer up the infirm at hospitals, right? So it’s no surprise that Drew Richardson would call himself a “dramatic fool.” No red nose. No mention of the C-word. Still, it’s obvious that he’s pushing the limits of contemporary clowning even as he takes on the venerable title of “fool,” inevitably conjuring up a long line of clowns in theater, including Shakespeare’s wise fools....

Heartbreak House ShawChicago Written in 1897, when Shaw was in his early 40s, The Devil’s Disciple focuses on two men, seemingly polar opposites, who exchange places after each recognizes his true self in the other. Reverend Anthony Anderson is a pacifist Presbyterian parson in 1777 New Hampshire, a seat of colonial conflict that for Shaw was a thinly disguised surrogate for British-occupied Ireland. Dick Dudgeon, the “devil’s disciple,” is a scoundrel who delights in mocking conventional morality....