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Cruel Intentions By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last two adaptations, both in English and in period costume and settings, came out ten years ago, a few months apart. Dangerous Liaisons was an adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play directed by Stephen Frears and starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Keanu Reeves; Valmont was adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere, directed by Milos Forman, and starred Annette Bening, Colin Firth, Meg Tilly, and Fairuza Balk....

The Black Test Car Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this 1962 follow-up to his hit satire Giants and Toys, Yasuzo Masumura fires another salvo against Japan’s emerging class of corporate warriors. The tone here is grimmer and more cynical, adding a fatalistic irony to this topical story about two rival auto companies trying to best each other in designing a sports car for the masses....

stoyonof.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel compelled to respond to Michael Miner’s article, “Something’s Cooking at In These Times,” June 20, as I believe Mr. Miner, Mr. Obis, and Mr. Weinstein (former publisher of In These Times), could use a dose of reality. Mr. Miner’s concern that Paul Obis might be too “squirrelly” to take over as publisher of In These Times, due to his past way of eating, is absurd....

There are two theories as to why house speaker Michael Madigan is working to elect his daughter to the state senate. There’s the southwest-side theory, which says that Madigan is a loyal father helping his daughter’s career. Then there’s the north-side theory: white south-side political bosses are losing their home turf to blacks and Latinos, and are looking to the white wards of the north lakefront to continue their families’ political dynasties....

The most powerful Iranian film I’ve seen is this 20-minute black-and-white 1962 documentary made by Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), commonly regarded as the greatest 20th-century Persian poet. It’s her only film and its subject is a leper colony in northern Iran. Part of what’s so special about it is its seamless adaptation of the techniques of poetry to the techniques of film, in which framing, editing, sound, and narration all play central roles....

Kazuco Takemoto Takemoto first trained in Japan, then in New York, then returned to Japan to perform. Her dance technique is Western, incorporating Graham and Limon release techniques, classical ballet, mime, and something called “modern ballet,” an English term for the early results of Japan’s grappling with ballet, beginning in the late 40s. But butoh–which Takemoto asserts cannot be understood as a single entity–has no real voice in her work, which is not about shadows but about the full experience of the moment....

AMERICAN ANALOG SET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their third and best album, The Golden Band (Emperor Jones), this Fort Worth quintet’s fragile pop songs–constructed of gently strummed guitars, brittle but uncluttered bass lines, brushed drums, hushed organ chords, pretty piano arpeggios, and the occasional cool vibraphone riff–float comfortably between the obvious reference points. Even the 60s nods that speckled the last two albums have been laid to rest....

BUDDY AND JULIE MILLER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Country music has had its fair share of husband-and-wife teams over the years–Hank and Audrey, George and Tammy, Merle and Bonnie, and Waylon and Jessi, to name a few–but it’s hard to think of one whose talents are as balanced as Buddy and Julie Miller’s. The vast range of their singing and songwriting, both solo and as a duo, makes them a country equivalent of Richard and Linda Thompson, minus the suffocating discord....

CESAR ROSAS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soul Disguise (Rykodisc), the solo debut from Los Lobos cofounder Cesar Rosas, reveals who’s been fighting hardest to keep the roots showing on the veteran East LA group’s increasingly multifaceted records. In fact, if David Hidalgo had only chipped in some vocals here and there, I could easily file this album among middle-period Lobos gems like By the Light of the Moon and The Neighborhood....

At the age of 32, Nana Shineflug did a crazy thing: she decided to become a professional dancer and choreographer. True, she’d studied ballet as a child, but she’d come to realize she was no ballerina and so earned a degree in math, got married, and had two kids. She was inspired to take up modern dance after seeing the Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham companies in the 60s, even pursuing her career briefly in New York–with her children (she’d divorced by then) and no money....

JOHN DIGWEED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though he’s best known as the second half of Sasha & John Digweed, the world’s most famous pair of trance DJs, this red-haired Londoner is hardly a second banana–if anything, he’s the more talented of the two. This summer the duo played to the suburban trance set with a mix CD called Communicate (Kinetic), but over the past year Digweed has also issued several mixes under his own name and made a cameo as himself in Greg Harrison’s ravesploitation flick, Groove....

Stephen Little points to a craggy, dark gray rock that’s about two feet tall. “Look at this one,” he says. “Its bizarre, dynamic, abstract shape is typical of the sort prized by collectors past and present. For the Chinese, it embodies the qi, pure primordial energy.” The rock stands in a display case, part of “Spirit Stones of China,” the Art Institute’s exhibit of unusually shaped stones revered by the Chinese for their eerie beauty and their role in Taoist cosmology as mediators between heaven and earth....

The Mandrake–a Renaissance Musical Niccolo Machiavelli would seem an unlikely source for a witty, good-hearted comedy–much less one enlivened every ten minutes or so by a showstopping musical number. But here it is, a rollicking comedy by Machiavelli, translated by Christopher Tiffany, with music by Andrew Hansen and a cast of adept comic actors wringing every laugh they can out of the material. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But much of the vilification of Machiavelli may simply be a case of killing the messenger in the hope of killing the message....

By Jeffrey Felshman At 48, Kolb is that rare thinker whose discourse is equally accessible to technicians and laypeople. He’s fluent not only in math but in plain English. At the University of Chicago he teaches cosmology to nonscience majors, and for 15 years he’s given public lectures to general audiences. He serves on the editorial board of the nontechnical magazine Astronomy and appeared in the Imax film Cosmic Voyage. “A cosmetic voyage for me,” he recalls....

By Michael Miner Vallas continued, “You claim that the high school dropout rate is ‘climbing’ when you know perfectly well it has actually been declining in our general high schools.” He went on to accuse Catalyst of accusing but overlooking, of ignoring and not acknowledging, of contradicting itself. And that was just paragraph two. The third paragraph asserted that the Catalyst reporter “knew and understood the data, but chose instead to pen an unwarranted and false attack....

By Michael Miner A Royko column last month told the tale of Melvin and Frank. Melvin is a bankruptcy attorney, and Frank is the mope. Royko did Frank the kindness of withholding his last name and the further kindness of not repeating the message Frank left on Melvin’s office voice mail one night last autumn. “I very often omit names if I think there’ll be pain to the family,” Royko told me last week....

Stereolab Days passed without the appearance of Physical Graffiti. Then the first shipment arrived late one Thursday. The fans descended on Marty’s Records downstairs from CREEM like dragonflies, clustered around the cash register, furtively clutching the album to their heaving bosoms, slobbering and drooling down the shrinkwrap. Worried parents contemplated a vaccine, but once Physical Graffiti touched the turntables the mysterious malady subsided. The stricken nodules were lulled into a state of tympanic euphoria....

Tango x 2 at the Harold Washington Library, October 10 and 11 By Laura Molzahn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At least a Shubert ticket is cheaper than airfare, and you can drink the water. There are other advantages to concert performances as well. The dance is distilled and perfected, if somewhat stylized and artificial, placed on display by artists with an agenda that goes well beyond finding a partner for the night....

Having spent 30 years behind a camera, Rockford photographer Lynn Sanders knew a prince when she saw one. At a family outing at Medieval Times in 1993, she found herself riveted by a face she knew the camera would love: high cheekbones, straight nose, and strong chin, set off by green eyes and a mass of black hair. When she realized this chiseled head was attached to a great body, Sanders did something she’d never done before: she pressed her card into the palm of jouster Cherif Fortin and gasped, “I’m a photographer....

TAPE-BEATLES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After a few years of operating as Public Works, these longtime collage artists have gone back to using their original, much more provocative name. Actually, calling what the Tape-beatles do “collage” is putting it nicely–they build their work entirely out of pieces of other people’s music, film, and video, and their motto is “Plagiarism.” But Ralph Johnson, Lloyd Dunn, and John Heck have usually employed their plundered treasure in the service of some greater sonic or visual or political point–not just as smirking commentary on the source material....