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In the Company of Men By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I could cite dozens of other examples, but I’ll focus on one that seems especially relevant to two of my other favorite films at Cannes, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter and Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men: a refusal or reluctance in reviews to mention or discuss capitalism itself. I suppose this self-censorship may be unconscious because of the omnipresence of capitalism–discussing it may be as superfluous as discussing the air while describing a landscape....

Venus and Mars are Bored Tonight Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gray has made a fortune playing up the differences between the sexes and passing himself off as a relationship expert. Now 45, he was a monk for nine years in the 1970s with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in “creative intelligence” from Maharishi European Research University. After that he studied est and earned a correspondence-school PhD in psychology from Columbia Pacific University....

Alien Nation With her chiseled features, dancer’s physique, and halting English, you might mistake her for an eastern European film star. Ten years ago she might have longed to be that star: after finishing high school in her native Krakow, she auditioned for the local drama school but was told that her overbite and poor diction made her ineligible. So she gave up acting and emigrated here. She now tends bar....

ALVIN LUCIER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the folks at the Whitney Museum decided to call the sound-art portion of their massive American Century retrospective “I Am Sitting in a Room,” they were both wryly acknowledging their own presentation of a hundred years of American sonic innovation (which was mostly people sitting in a gallery listening to recordings) and paying homage to New Hampshire-born sound arts pioneer Alvin Lucier, whose landmark 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room introduced into modern composition a new awareness of acoustics and language....

Murray Gilbert was born with an elbow that bent the wrong way. Edith Murrock, the wife of a successful 19th-century surgeon specializing in physical deformities, made Gilbert a jacket with a special sleeve to accommodate the errant arm–or so Jennifer Friedrich would have you believe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friedrich, an artist who manages Columbia College’s experimental photography and printmaking lab, has created an installation for the International Museum of Surgical Science that treads the fine line between fact and fiction....

You can always tell when improvisers are getting desperate because they start singing. Many of the songs we improvised back when I was performing were lame, with laughable lyrics and forgettable tunes, but they were fun–and the music never failed to pull us together and give us the courage to face the next improv challenge. A similar magic informs Baby Wants Candy, ImprovOlympic’s first official “resident company”: these guys sing at the drop of a hat....

Rx: instructional leadership. “A year ago in North Lawndale,” writes Elizabeth Duffrin in Catalyst (October), “one school saw nearly half its 3rd-, 6th- and 8th-graders fall short of the test scores required for promotion to the next grade. Around the corner, a similar school failed just one in seven students. In the Robert Taylor Homes area, two schools a block apart that draw students from the same towering, gang-infested high rises also were miles apart in student achievement: A child attending the school on the north end of the block was more than four times as likely to repeat a grade as a child attending the school on the south end....

JOHN SCOFIELD QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Scofield titled his last album Quiet, a word not often associated with the guitarist’s rollicking thunder, or even with his fuzz-toned romanticism. On it Scofield restricted himself to the acoustic guitar for a series of sloping, lyrical solos while spreading several of his most attractive themes across a small but polished brass section. He deserves credit for concocting this musical balm (and avoiding the New Age wooziness that attends many such projects), but Scofield’s heart rests with music far more rawboned and restless....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We do not sentence convicted killers to death unless their guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet we abort 1.5 million fetuses every year with their humanity clearly in dispute and with pro-abortion advocates unwilling or unable to define either when life begins or by what mysterious process merely passing through the birth canal bestows humanity and human rights upon us....

Plowed Under He brought in greenery from wherever he could. If he saw a plant sitting in the alley he’d put it on his land. Iglesias had no money. He lived in the barest of surroundings. But he gradually created his neighborhood’s most eccentric garden. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every day Iglesias would be out futzing with his hutch, hoeing some dirt, or babbling into the air....

Asian Traditions/Modern at ARC Gallery, through October 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ink drawings of Sabro Hasegawa are even clearer examples of “wandering” compositions. Though he lived most of his life in Japan–he was arrested there during World War II for refusing to make propaganda art–he gave lectures in the United States on the relationship of calligraphy to abstract painting that were attended by painters such as Kline and de Kooning....

Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cole was torn up, of course, but Sims says it was a turning point for Evans too. The Didjits toured Europe just three weeks after the accident, and when they returned the bassist failed to show up for a gig at Double Door. Sims closed the book on the band then and there, and didn’t speak with Evans again until last year in Texas, where he had discreetly relocated after the European tour....

Boz Scaggs But signs point to the latter, particularly the cover of Scaggs’s new album, Come On Home (Virgin). It depicts some underprivileged black kids hanging out on a littered city sidewalk in front of a dilapidated storefront displaying two posters for upcoming shows. The one on the right heralds old-time R & B legend Hank Ballard, best known for writing “The Twist.” The one on the left is for our man Boz, who, we’re to presume, is exploring his “roots....

By Neda Ulaby The presence of top stars was supposedly top secret, but I’d been at the rehearsal for all of five minutes before the big names were breathed into my ear. Kevin Spacey. Julia Stiles. Sam Mendes. The Cusack acting clan, for a special award. Bonnie Hunt. More stars would have come but for an Academy Awards luncheon on the coast. It was while this information was being imparted that a ruddy older gentleman in sunglasses strolled up to the gaggle of film critics I was gossiping with and introduced himself as Bill....

The black cloud hovering over Chicago sports actually deepened and darkened with the arrival of the baseball season, usually an optimistic time in these parts. It says something about the state of the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox that earlier in the year the Cubs looked like our best hope of actually winning something. But Kerry Wood’s career-threatening elbow injury ended all that cheap talk. His injury was as traumatic as Michael Jordan’s retirement or even Walter Payton’s health woes; in fact, its impact struck in a way that made it more upsetting....

Of Thee I Sing Of Thee I Sing can use all the topical spin it can get. The play enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success in the 30s, even winning the Pulitzer Prize, but it’s never risen to the top of our musical-comedy canon. George and Ira Gershwin’s score was masterfully integrated into the play’s action, and as a result it produced few hit songs. George S. Kaufman, who wrote the book with Morrie Ryskind, is better remembered for evergreens like Dinner at Eight, You Can’t Take It With You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner....

TRI-FACTOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Chicagoans have come to expect provocative, even bizarre overhauls of jazz instrumentation from AACM groups, this setup–Billy Bang plays the violin, Hamiet Bluiett the baritone sax, and Kahil El’Zabar percussion–will still probably raise a few eyebrows. I haven’t heard the rarely convened group’s only recording, last year’s The Power (on the German label CMP), but in fact it’s not the first experiment of its kind....

ATARI TEENAGE RIOT/ADD N TO (X)/DON CABALLERO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rarely has such sonic obnoxiousness, violence, and excess been collected on one bill. The calculatedly annoying Alec Empire, leader of Berlin’s Atari Teenage Riot, has spent the last few years spearheading the dead-in-the-water digital hardcore movement, using samplers and drum machines to approximate the intensity and velocity of hardcore punk. The band’s consistently entertaining new album, 60 Second Wipe Out (Elektra), features guest vocals from New York underground hip-hoppers the Arsonists and former Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna; its cartoonish music combines crushing and apocalyptically fast beats, punishing electronic squeals, and hooks that are little more than overdriven chants....

Condition Critical Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four years ago the company left the Athenaeum Theatre for DePaul’s Merle Reskin Theatre; the South Loop location was supposed to prepare audiences for the troupe’s eventual move downtown into the long-delayed Chicago Music and Dance Theatre. But last season the group returned to the Athenaeum because DePaul had consigned it to performing during the summer months, not the best time to sell opera tickets....

By Jeffrey Felshman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple weeks ago my older son asked if I’d take him, his brother, and two of their friends to the Woodfield Mall on the morning of April 1. They wanted to go to an event called Pokemon 2000 Stadium Tour. I said OK, but a few days later I thought: Pokemon 2000 Stadium Tour at Woodfield Mall?...