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Friday 1/22 – Thursday 1/28 23 SATURDAY M.W. Burns’s audio installations Qualifier and Sinker involved the sound of splashing water coming from above, while an insistent male voice in the midst of a diatribe emanated from two speakers on the floor. The sounds ebbed and flowed, so that incidental noise–like the murmuring of gallery patrons–could also be heard. Tonight Burns’s aural canvas will be installed in the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of a ravelike multimedia event called Trans23....

Wednesday, October 6 La maladie de Sachs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » French director Michel Deville, virtually unheard from since the release of his subtle La lectrice in 1988, has adapted a well-known French novel about a doctor overwhelmed by the moral and medical demands of his isolated village. The film is capably made, but it poaches on the themes, mood, and story of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1950) and even attempts Bresson’s brilliant conjunction of form and storytelling....

Peter Margasak’s Post No Bills article about Buena Vista Social Club [June 25] is sort of the kind of sweet, endearing story you would expect when writing about exotic octogenarians–it is also so full of distortions and misinformation that it could have come from a press release issued by the Cuban American Foundation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the contrary, after 1959 education was made free through the university level to even the most marginalized classes in Cuba....

East Meets Western Suburbs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Khan is one of the greatest practitioners of northern Indian (or Hindustani) classical music in the world, and is more than qualified to run his own academy. But his qualifications are both a blessing and a curse. He’s the son of famous sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, and his pedigree stretches all the way back to Mian Tansen, a musician in the court of the 16th-century Indian emperor Akbar....

This curious hybrid–a fusion of Broadway musical and ancient Chinese drama–is the second in a three-part series of free concert readings of plays reviewed by the late Claudia Cassidy, the feared and/or revered Chicago critic. Based on Pi-Pa-Ki (“The Story of the Lute”), a 14th-century court drama popular for six centuries, Lute Song was translated and adapted by Sidney Howard and Will Irwin and set to Raymond Scott and Bernard Hanighen’s score; it opened on Broadway in 1946, starring Mary Martin and Yul Brynner (in his first stage role) as the lovers reunited despite famine, floods, and a second wife....

Mendel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The realistic and the expressionistic are delicately balanced in this kid’s-eye view of a Jewish family from Germany who, having survived the concentration camps, relocate to Norway in 1954. Mendel (Thomas Jungling Sorensen), who was born after the war, knows his family is keeping something from him, a secret that seems connected to a mysterious photograph in his mother’s pocketbook....

Recently I wrote, in another publication, that there are two basic theories of evil in horror movies: either evil is an external force that can attack any unwary individual (epitomized by Michael Myers in the Halloween movies or by the more ethereal spirit of Bob in the TV series Twin Peaks) or evil comes from within (as in Psycho). As I watched the Cubs’ horrific April unfold, I began to wonder: is there some external force of Cubness that attaches itself to players when they join the Cubs, or are the players who play for the Cubs simply awful?...

By Ben Joravsky The preschool will remain open, at least for another year and probably much longer, because requests for applications have been pouring in since word of the impending closing hit the street. “There’s a lot of lessons you can learn from this, because we faced a situation lots of community groups face,” says Charlie McBarron, a parent active in the effort to keep the school open. “This was a classic case where a big institution dug in its heels on an idea even though it made no sense....

BRUNDIBAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Czech composer Hans Krasa wrote the children’s opera Brundibar in 1938 for a Jewish orphanage in Prague, but it didn’t have its premiere until 1943, in an attic theater at Theresienstadt–a concentration camp north of the city where inmates were encouraged to pursue the arts, and which the Nazis used as a showcase to placate international observers. (An excerpt from a filmed performance of the piece was included in a German newsreel as evidence of the camp’s success....

Pinochet: A Carnival Watching the news one can’t always tell which are the heroes and which are the monsters. Ethnic Albanians disappear into mass graves or are herded into refugee camps while we drop bombs on Kosovo. The United States mourns the victims and demonizes the murderers in Littleton, Colorado. And there are hints of hidden motivations and other undisclosed information behind the headlines. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“I think comedy is all that’s kept me from becoming a felon,” says Gail Stern. A professional stand-up comedian by night, by day she runs a program for victims of sexual and domestic violence at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After six years on the job, she’s come to understand just how indifferent the system can be to the women she counsels. “At this point, I’m creating a list of people I’d like to go out and shoot....

Course Evaluation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Winfrey’s celebrity and lack of academic experience have some Kellogg faculty wondering if her appointment will be a coup or a short-lived publicity stunt. “She’s an enormous name, but she doesn’t have a lot of experience teaching,” observes Kellogg professor Walter Scott, one of two instructors who already teach leadership courses. In magazine surveys rating graduate business schools, Kellogg has ranked at or near the top in recent years, but some professors speculate that a school’s buzz can boost its ranking....

DEANNA WITKOWSKI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tall, a little gangly, and almost childishly shy, 26-year-old pianist Deanna Witkowski doesn’t exactly exude the confidence of your typical young lion. But as she constructs sturdy solos from concrete riffs, juggles lessons learned from Chucho Valdes as well as Thelonious Monk, and manipulates musical space to give her solos their crisp grace, she sure sounds like one....

FAMOUDOU DON MOYE SUN PERCUSSION SUMMIT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Famoudou Don Moye joined the previously drummerless Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1970, and his fierce and multifaceted trap work did more than alter the group’s subtle interrelationships–it transformed the Art Ensemble into the flagship band of the AACM. He plays with a constant intensity–aggressive in fast and complex passages, sharply focused when the music calls for quiet colors–that reflects his studies of African music....

The Sentinel With Salinger, Thibault de Montalembert, Jean-Louis Richard, Valerie Dreville, Marianne Denicourt, Bruno Todeschini, and Laszlo Szabo. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “French yuppies” sounds condescending, but a lot more than the Atlantic Ocean separates Americans from the worldview of the French. It’s been a long time since we’ve lived through a foreign invasion or occupation, and the sheer size of our country, like the size of Russia or China, deprives us of the more international perspective Europeans have....

I Got the Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here’s a blast from the past. Peter Hobert, a recent DePaul graduate, was persistent–and lucky–enough to find Clifford Odets’s handwritten original draft of what became Awake and Sing!, the 1935 classic, in the New York Public Library. Written in 1932, I Got the Blues proved too depressing to produce even in the Depression: Group Theatre cofounder Harold Clurman called it “almost masochistically pessimistic....

MAN OR ASTRO-MAN? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s the same series of signals over and over again!” marvels a male British voice at the opening of Man or Astro-man?’s latest album, Eeviac: Operational Index and Reference Guide, Including Other Modern Computational Devices (Touch and Go). We’ve all heard this line before–the baffled scientist alerting his colleagues to a mysterious radio transmission from another planet–but the sound bite also pokes fun at the relatively narrow groove traveled by this southern quartet over the years....

To let visitors into his home, a 35-room remnant of Chicago’s Gilded Age, Ed Magnus has to undo two deadbolts, two padlocks, and a barrage of other safety measures. Before he bought the former Marshall Field Jr. mansion at 1919 S. Prairie, the house had been all but abandoned to vandals and pillagers. A carpenter and rehabber by trade, Magnus doubted he could restore the 1884 building to its former glory, but he was the first person in 20 years willing to give it a shot....

By Linda Lutton Stowe’s LSC finally selected a candidate with an impressive resume. Charles Kyle was an assistant schools superintendent in La Grange at the time; he had a doctorate in the sociology of education from Northwestern University, had served as a superintendent in the Berwyn-Cicero high school district, was a full faculty member at the graduate school of education of Loyola University, and had even worked a year as an administrator in the office of policy of the Chicago Public Schools....

Headline Should public policy be decided solely in the laboratory? Industry flacks (and Henderson) would like us to believe so. Why? Because the nature of the issues is so technical and layered with complexity that achieving conclusiveness is virtually impossible. In other words, the environmental health and safety issues at stake are so complex and vast that industry lobbyists will always find wiggle room to challenge scientific findings that don’t suit their purposes....