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The Ceremony With Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Virginie Ledoyen, and Valentin Merlet. The plot of The Ceremony is fairly simple, but it’s also full of ambiguity–something that corresponds at times to the elegant mise en scene. The very first shot, for example, follows Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire) as she crosses the street toward the camera, turns to the left, enters a cafe, and is greeted by Catherine Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset), who calls her over....

Coming of the Hurricane This is the social subtext of Coming of the Hurricane, running in a gripping production at the Organic Touchstone Company. The second Glover script to play here this season–the author directed his own Thunder Knocking on the Door for Northlight last fall–was also only Glover’s second work as a playwright (it premiered in Denver in 1995). His inexperience shows a bit, in some self-consciously elegiac monologues and some heavy-handed dramaturgy at the climax....

Further Adventures of Animated Women Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the shorter films on this program, Elena Dubrovsky’s Wilar and the Woman Who Gave Birth to the Frog and Andrea Stoops’s Adam, are mildly amusing, and a third, Jodee Samuelson’s The Sandbox, is cloyingly cute in the way only animated films of roundheaded children can be. But three others are fascinating explorations of identity and doubt....

In response to Margasak’s Critic’s Choice for the Momus/Kahimi Karie/Toog show at the Double Door [November 19], let me ask this: What is the purpose of promoting a show if you’re just going to insult the performers? Do you get some sort of monetary kickback? Or is it about maintaining an exalted position of indie rock credibility? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Margasak the broken record, with your spiel about Kahimi being nothing more than “sexy karaoke....

Calling this show “A Retrospective in Our Living Room,” Jan Erkert offers a work in progress and selections from her greatest hits. Known for her mature, sometimes astringent treatments of progressive, sometimes touchy-feely subjects, Erkert addresses gender roles in the 1992 quartet Between Men (to be performed here in vintage clothing), romantic love in the 1994 blindfolded duet Without Sense (danced here a cappella, without its original trap-set accompaniment), and physical and emotional healing in the 1995 Whole Fragment (featuring dancers in their pj’s)....

JOHN WOLF BRENNAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » J.S. Bach opens The Well-Tempered Clavier by declaring that the enclosed compositions are “For the use and practice of young musicians who desire to learn, as well as by way of amusement, for those who are already skilled in this study.” The title of pianist John Wolf Brennan’s 1998 solo CD, The Well-Prepared Clavier (Creative Works), argues that prepared-piano techniques have outgrown their novelty status to become as vital to the instrument’s vocabulary as Bach’s music....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September Norway’s prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, took three weeks’ paid sick leave for depression, reportedly caused by imminent budget negotiations he had to conduct with the parliament. He pronounced himself well late in the month and returned to work. And in August Finland’s prime minister, Paavo Lipponen, took six days’ partly compensated paternity leave after his wife gave birth to a baby girl....

Srdjan Dragojevic’s 1996 antiwar film was a hit in its native Serbia, which is probably a good thing: as one critic has noted, Serbs were kept so ignorant of the war that most didn’t even know their militiamen were shelling Sarajevo. While not very inventive cinematically, the film is full of energy, and not merely of shootings and explosions: its anarchic narrative makes the characters seem wildly unhinged, and Dragojevic illuminates the absurdity of nationalist wars by depicting behavior that borders on the surreal–or the insane....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If he’s telling me the truth–that there’s nothing I should be doing differently–why can’t I make him come? In 14 years of fucking, I’ve never had this much trouble getting a guy off. Does a guy’s state of mind have much to do with whether or not he comes? I should mention that during foreplay his preejaculate streams out in what seems like an excessive amount....

I have been an avid reader of your column for about three years, and I need you to answer a question for me. I don’t feel that this is a question I can ask my doctor or anyone who might have an answer for me at work. I am a black man who enjoys drinking the piss of other black males. I haven’t found many like-minded individuals to discuss the subject with, let alone to indulge with, so my experience with this activity is pretty rare....

Seeded Ground: An Evening of Improvised Dances Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I like the idea of seeds in relation to improvisation: you can plant this little idea, word, image, or rule of the game and in a matter of minutes produce a big, flowering bush with its own eccentric symmetry. Selene Carter–the director of this evening of on-the-spot dance–has also been seeded: over the last year she’s studied with five master improvisers, among them Nancy Stark Smith, who helped found contact improv with Steve Paxton, and Simone Forti....

Metamorphosis Court Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Playwrights and theater groups must be drawn to Kafka for the same reason that high school teachers are–he looks simple and his prose, even in translation, is crisp and spare. For all the tragedy in his tales, the writer remains serene, almost comic. With their fantastic settings and beleaguered protagonists, Kafka’s stories would appear to be tailor-made for the theater....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, including a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. BRAAM Free in-store performance. Next Saturday, April 15, 5 PM, Record Emporium, 3346 N....

The child of a big-game biologist father and a gardener motherâ painter Olivia Petrides began learning about nature at an early age. By the time she was 22, her family had lived in such far-flung locales as Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. Her father researched guides on plant life and taught Petrides to identify trees, observe animal tracks, and match scat to its source. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

BETTY CARTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recently, while listening to Betty Carter’s latest album, a fellow writer sighed, “And some people still claim she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” The album in question, I’m Yours, You’re Mine (Verve), places more emphasis than usual on Carter’s elastic command of the world’s slowest tempi, with a balanced blend of recomposed standards and risk-taking originals and a couple talented young horn men joining her fluid and flexible trio....

Brazilian Bomb Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Settle began to realize the production had problems when she discovered the set construction was running a week behind schedule; the construction shop, located in a slum of Rio de Janeiro, wasn’t equipped to handle such a massive undertaking. “Brazil is a hammer-and-nails culture,” quips Eric Snodgrass, the show’s sound designer. “They don’t know from power tools....

Friday 12/3 – Thursday 12/9 A new downtown open-mike night was started just last month by poet Nina Corwin and Michael C. Watson of WLUW 88.7 FM’s Wordslingers. They call it Word Dealers, and it takes place tonight (and every Friday) at 7 at Gourmand Coffeehouse, 728 S. Dearborn. It’s free. Call 312-427-2610. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 4 SATURDAY Thirty years ago today Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot to death in their sleep when FBI agents and Chicago police officers broke into their house at 2337 W....

Still talk all day–but get tenure. Ira Glass of This American Life tells the on-line magazine Feed (July 2, www.feedmag.com/re/re232_master.html). “When I was doing all those stories about public schools, it was something I thought about all the time. ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ll do this radio thing for a little while more, and if I get tired of it I’m going to go teach school.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Though he’s mentioned nowhere in the press materials, the spirit of James Joyce hovers over Compagnie Philippe Genty’s latest production. He’s present not just in the show’s title, Dedale–the French name for the mythic hero Daedalus, with whom Joyce strongly identified–and in its description as “the story of a modern-day Ulysses” but in its search for the eternal in the temporal, the mysterious in the mundane, the graceful in the grotesque....

By Adam Langer “Don’t say that,” she said. “Where do you live?” “I work in a tire store,” he said, sounding vaguely sheepish. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Well, I still might see ya. Give me your number just so I’ve got it.” “You never know,” she said. “I even surprise myself sometimes. Sometimes I call people I never thought I’d be calling at all....