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Struck Down Tamney, who was 36, had dedicated 14 years to storefront theater, appearing with companies like the Curious Theatre Branch, Oobleck, Redmoon, and the Neo-Futurists. A talented physical comedian and a devotee of David Mamet–who’d once visited his acting class at the Goodman theater school and advised them all to drop out–Tamney consistently turned in some of the most inventive, convincing performances on any stage in the city. But after years without commercial success, New York beckoned....

Suffering Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A girl and her horse may not be the most original subject for a film, and this 1961 Czech feature by Karel Kachyna isn’t wholly original in style. But Kachyna has a rare feel for his main character’s relationship with nature, a relationship the film’s adults have lost. Twelve-year-old Lenka succeeds in taming a horse after others have failed and tries to save him from whippings and slaughter; Kachyna gently defines her through the smallest physical details–a close-up of her bare feet in the mud, reaction shots of her horse that suggest he understands her despite his blank expression....

BILL FRISELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When guitarist Bill Frisell started showing up on ECM albums in the late 70s, behind Norwegian saxist Jan Garbarek, he already had the quirky, spacey style and total timbral control that would make him one of the three most influential jazz guitarists of his generation. (Metheny. Scofield.) Frisell plays with a monk’s patience, letting each note ring longer than anyone else in the genre to create his signature swaths of sound, sometimes gothic, sometimes romantic, and often countrified....

SEPTEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1909, Italian futurism hit Russia like a sack of spuds, and within no time cutting-edge writers and artists in the major cities were painting their faces, giving confrontational performances in cafes, and creating outdoor spectacles while wearing flamboyant outfits. Their manifesto, “Why We Paint Ourselves,” explained that “art is not only a monarch but also a newsman and a decorator....

One of the most remarkable things about Eiko & Koma’s very remarkable Memory, performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the spring of 1997, was the degree of control they exerted: control over their own bodies, control over the environment (most notably a chain-link fence and reflective pools of water), control over the audience–I felt pinned to my seat by this exquisitely painful and beautiful piece. But with The Caravan Project: When Nights Were Dark the Japanese-born husband-and-wife team relinquish much of their control....

Chorus frogs are singing. Even after cold nights that leave a skin of ice on the breeding ponds you can hear this lovely sound of spring as the sun begins to do its warming work. The songs of chorus frogs–to be precise, our local animals are western chorus frogs–are like the rasping noise made by somebody dragging a thumbnail across the teeth of a comb. This is a generalized description. According to Conant and Collins’s A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, the “sound may be roughly imitated by running a finger over approximately the last 20 of the small teeth of a good-quality pocket comb, rubbing the shortest teeth last....

Four Corners I’ve been brooding a lot lately about the way in which many of the best movies around have been ravaged by “narrative correctness.” This is the notion fostered by producers, distributors, and critics–often collaborating as script doctors and always deeply invested in hackwork–that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of telling stories in movies. And woe to the filmmaker who steps out of line. Much as “political correctness” can point to a displaced political impotence–a desire to control language and representation that sets in after one despairs of changing the political conditions of power–“narrative correctness” has more to do with what supposedly makes a movie commercial than with what makes it interesting, artful, or innovative....

By Frank Melcori Bacarella became a Chicago police officer in 1969, and for the next three years he walked a beat at night while attending classes during the day at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, where he met his wife, Lois. Encouraged by her support he quit the police force to pursue his dream of working in motion pictures. The pair moved to Los Angeles, and Bacarella made the rounds for seven months before finally being taken on as a makeup man at NBC....

After six months at the gloriously restored Oriental Theatre (officially the Ford Center for the Performing Arts), Livent’s Tony-winning musical is getting a transfusion. The pivotal role of Sarah is now taken by Grammy winner Stephanie Mills, the original star of The Wiz. Sarah, the pregnant lover of Harlem pianist Coalhouse Walker, incarnates unconditional love, and Mills delivers powerful renditions of the heartbreaking “Your Daddy’s Son” and the soaring “Wheels of a Dream....

By Michael Miner But the byline was a mistake, and financial editor Dan Miller corrected it. When Milloy returned to the Sun-Times last week, an editor’s note at the end of the article told us that he’s “a Washington-based business writer specializing in science. He holds advanced degrees in health sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from Georgetown University.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Something else Sun-Times readers might like to know about Milloy is that he’s an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute....

Buffalo ’66 With Gallo, Christina Ricci, Anjelica Huston, Ben Gazzara, Kevin Corrigan, Mickey Rourke, Roseanna Arquette, and Jan-Michael Vincent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the face of it, the plot makes no sense. Billy Brown (Gallo) gets out of the state penitentiary after taking the rap for a crime he didn’t commit in order to pay off a $10,000 bet on the Super Bowl....

By John Sanchez Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barrett first became active in the fight against AIDS after the 1984 death of his friend and onetime companion Bradley Scott Reimer. “I kind of quit the rat race and didn’t know what to do with myself,” he recalls, “and so I decided to dedicate a year or two of my life in AIDS prevention, thinking that by a year or two it would be under control....

I recall reading an article in the Bodega Bay Navigator by one of their staff columnists who is a minister. He said there is some evidence that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were husband and wife. This does seem to make sense. Is it true? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, Mary Magdalene–there’s a topic we can go to town on. For the benefit of you heathens, Mary Magdalene is one of only a handful of female figures in the New Testament....

Voyage to the Beginning of the World Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in 1908, Manoel de Oliveira is the only working director anywhere in the world who started his career in the silent era. For this meditative feature he enlisted the somewhat younger Marcello Mastroianni–in what proved to be Mastroianni’s last performance–to play someone very much like de Oliveira, an aging film director named Manoel setting out on a car trip with a few of his coworkers....

ANN HAMPTON CALLAWAY & LIZ CALLAWAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago’s anemic cabaret scene gets a welcome transfusion from its native Callaway sisters–truth be told, either one could provide a significant boost on her own. The daughters of public-TV journalist John Callaway, each established herself in New York’s overpopulated show scene before teaming up for this revue, Sibling Revelry (available as an in-concert recording on DRG Records)....

ARLING & CAMERON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the end of “Here We Go!”–one of many kitschy dance-pop ditties on All-In (Emperor Norton), the U.S. debut album by the Dutch duo Arling & Cameron–either Gerry Arling or Richard Cameron praises the amateurish Japanese singers Tomoko and Chika for their performance of the tune: “You’re really good, you’re really talented. You have good feeling....

Bord Failte, Ireland’s tourism agency, works hard to project a romantic image to potential visitors. It’s been so successful that tourism has surpassed agriculture as the country’s leading industry. The comforts of Guinness stout, the bouncy charm of the folk music, and the hundred shades of green that make up the unspoiled landscape combine to form an imaginary place that shares very little with the everyday experience of the contemporary Irish....

Friday 10/20 – thursday 10/26 Playwright John Susman spent several years researching the on-again, off-again romance of Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren. His new play, Nelson and Simone, draws on their correspondence and other writings, as well as interviews with people who knew them. Preview performances start tonight at 8; the play opens on Monday and runs through December 17 at the Live Bait Theater, 3914 N. Clark. Tickets are $15 Thursdays and Sundays, $20 Fridays and Saturdays....

CARL COX/JIM MASTERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A rep like Carl Cox’s is a motherfucker to live up to: he’s been voted best DJ in the world by more European dance magazines and award committees than most Americans would even guess exist, but he’s never made an album to warrant the hype. F.A.C.T., a React import from 1995, is two discs of mostly nondescript underground techno; F....

Chicago Alt.film Fest Betty Four felons, contracted by an anonymous client through the Internet, journey to a secluded island to retrieve a mysterious package. Dan Clark wrote and directed this suspense film. On the same program: Dillinger in Paradise, a short by John Henry Richardson. (3:45) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A serial killer is terrorizing Los Angeles; Fred Derf, who may or may not be capable of murder, has just moved there, hot on the heels of his estranged girlfriend....