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Facets Multimedia Center, in collaboration with the French embassy of Chicago, presents a program of contemporary French films, running Friday through Thursday, December 5 through 11, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets for all programs are $7; filmmaker Jean-Francois Richet will attend the festival Friday through Sunday. For more information call 773-281-4114. Full Speed Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A feature by Diane Bertrand (1996) interweaving two stories–one about an unhappy wife, the other about a man obsessed with a murder in his family’s past....

Dan Addington By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Addington, 33, a Chicagoan, cites painterly influences from Jim Dine and Larry Rivers to Rembrandt and Caravaggio, but this series has its roots in a trip to Ireland last year, when he spent two weeks driving around looking at ruins. “In continental Europe,” he told me, “the Gothic cathedrals are still being used, still beautiful, still kept up....

Friday 12/17 – Thursday 12/23 Music critics have waxed hyperbolic about “techno fox” DJ Rap, who before becoming a spinning and singing sensation was a London paralegal named Charissa Saverio. After her first rave experience she chucked the straight life and joined the techno revolution. Tonight she’ll be at Aura, 640 N. Dearborn, to promote her debut album, Learning Curve. Doors open at 10 and the cover is $15. Call 312-266-2114....

Friday 7/2 – Thursday 7/8 When printmaker Ed Colker was head of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Art and Design, he often collaborated with local poet Michael Anania. “Colker’s prints–fluid, metamorphic, largely non-referential and freely played–offer themselves as the poems’ complements, a visual activity of sense,” writes Anania in the catalog notes for Five Decades in Print: Ed Colker. The exhibit includes nearly 50 of Colker’s “illuminations” of poems by Anania, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Kathleen Norris, and others....

Love (Can Sometimes Be) a Real Read By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The revival-meeting format favored by the group is at once its strongest asset and greatest drawback. With 20 pieces on the program, it’s easy to envision a performance that splinters into 20 unconnected vignettes. After all, being black, gay, and in love is hardly a unifying theme, given the multiplicity of experiences and points of view that category might include....

His Name Is Alive Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Warren Defever, the restless creative mind behind His Name Is Alive, continues to defy coherent description with his group’s new album, Ft. Lake (4AD). In some ways it’s HNIA’s most conventional effort–although keyboards and snatches of electronics pepper a few tunes, the bulk of the album is built around guitar, bass, and drums. But since Defever’s toyed with everything from goth to experimentalism to chopped-up Beach Boys tributes on his way here, sounding conventional is as strange as anything he’s done....

As a child in the south suburbs, Barry Kaufman was fascinated with operating toy trains–until he discovered even greater pleasure in destroying them. “When I was six years old, I saw a movie on TV called The Giant Gila Monster,” says the 32-year-old Kaufman, owner of Wicker Park’s new horror-movie memorabilia store, House of Monsters. “There was this scene where the creature destroys a train trestle and eats the train. The special effects weren’t terribly convincing, but I thought it was pretty ingenious, even though I knew it was a toy train....

When Loser’s Alias premiered 11 years ago, the Curious Theatre Branch occupied a cramped North Avenue storefront, where it produced intricate, frenzied extravaganzas at a furious pace that left little time for revision. If a play didn’t work, if its ideas were dense and muddled, the company was too busy with the next show to worry about fixing it. The rock-and-roll comic saga Loser’s Alias was one of Bryn Magnus’s more confused epics, although the story held great promise....

By Sridhar Pappu Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the years since, the situation worsened. George Steinbrenner and Ted Turner became baseball’s gaudy avatars, simply spending their way to the World Series. Last season the three highest-salaried teams in each of the three American League divisions won their titles, and three of the five best-paid teams in the National League won theirs. In 1999 the top ten teams spent an average of $70,800,000 on salaries....

Fool for Love Perhaps it was the beautiful but fleeting warm summer evening that induced melancholy. As I stood on the sidewalk outside Stage Left’s semidumpy storefront facade–with its childishly bright colors splashed beneath sepulchral black roofing tiles, a hash of ill-conceived, well-intentioned design failures belittled by the well-marketed upscale Italian eatery that’s sprung up next door–I couldn’t help but feel a debilitating sadness at the impending death of Chicago theater....

SANDRA HALL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sandra Hall spent over two decades scuffling on the southern blues and R & B circuit–until, in the late 80s, she landed a few gigs at Blind Willie’s in Atlanta, an international mecca for blues fans. She parlayed that exposure into a series of festival bookings and European tours, and in 1995 she finally recorded her first CD, Showin’ Off (Ichiban)....

By Nadia Oehlsen Basem says Broderick denied the conversation took place, though he says several nurses overheard it. Larry Volkmar, a hospital vice president and chief nursing officer, responds that Broderick spoke to the nurse because she was caring for the only patient approved for discharge that morning. “They needed that nurse to come back to discharge that patient,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Basem wrote a letter to Diane Samuels, director of labor relations, claiming that putting in the locator system without first notifying the nurses was an unfair labor practice under the National Labor Relations Act....

BEST OF THE FEST, Factory Theater. The two winning entries in this year’s “Shut Up and Laugh!” comedy festival may be a bit more restrained than last year’s, but they’re packed with substance. Gail Stern, victorious for the second year in a row, takes the proto feminism she toyed with last year and focuses it into a viciously funny lecture-demonstration called Merge. She’s here to answer one critical question: how do you date Gail Stern?...

[Re: Post No Bills, April 14] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » WBEZ has assiduously dismantled a knowledgeable staff of great DJs (Neil Tesser, Steve Cushing et al) and replaced it with a tasteless stew of corporate mush, a perfect diet for a soulless didactic academic such as Davey Kemper [Letters, April 28]. Mark Ruffin has consistently shown a superior knowledge of jazz, and obviously lives and breathes his craft....

Executioners Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set in a chaotic, futuristic Hong Kong, where business and the military oppress the populace, this 1994 follow-up to The Heroic Trio is an exuberant and touching paean to female bonding. Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, and Michelle Yeoh–cleverly cast to subvert audience expectations of their star personae–return in a convoluted plot that interweaves attempts on a political chieftain’s life with the search for clean water being hoarded by a deformed madman....

Getting Airborne Later I asked Kenner about the story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What made the story believable was that Wham-O, which makes Frisbee discs, used to sponsor demos by two early free-style champions during halftime at NBA games. One of their best tricks was to stand on one baseline and throw huge, curving shots that turned upside down before they went into the basket at the other end of the court....

By Michael Miner In the eyes of a voracious conglomerate, the Daily Herald is an especially delectable meal. It’s a thriving daily with a circulation of about 150,000 that reaches a perfect audience–the suburban well-to-do. Even better, the family that owns it might be ready to abandon ship. The above letter was written to me in late summer. The Herald’s future became even more conjectural on October 4, when Robert Y....

When guest artists visit Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, they’re treated to a preperformance ritual: a hearty dinner of homemade soup and pie at the home of the center’s founders, husband and wife Karl Gartung and Anne Kingsbury. After the meal, each dinner guest is presented with an unfired white ceramic tile, and encouraged to fill the space as he or she sees fit. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

George Strait Latest Greatest Straitest Hits (MCA Nashville) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If it were only bitter young upstarts who had a beef with the country music industry, the trend could be explained away as sour grapes. But as Jon Langford put it in the Waco Brothers’ “Death of Country Music” a few years ago, living legends like George Jones and Johnny Cash can’t get on the radio either....

There’s no meaning–no story line, no social commentary, no subject at all–to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s hour-long piece Drumming, set to Steve Reich’s 1971 composition of the same name. But the 12 dancers of her Brussels-based troupe, Rosas, transform De Keersmaeker’s abstract movement into a musical and emotional revelation. Seemingly engaged in the deadly serious play of children on a playground or of dancers in a class that’s going particularly well, the performers carry out their tasks with an air of intense but joyous concentration, their occasional intersections seeming almost accidental....