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The Harm in Candor Jill Elaine Hughes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Morgan seems aware of this dilemma and has devised a host of curious strategies to deal with it in her hour-long lecture-demonstration. For one thing she offers generous helpings of audience participation and poetic digression. She begins by handing each audience member a blank slip of paper, an envelope, and a pencil and requesting that we write a secret about ourselves, seal it in the envelope, and return it to her....

ROB BLAKESLEE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trumpeter Rob Blakeslee sometimes seems like the Chet Baker of postfreedom jazz. Though he mixes it up in everything from moody late-60s-style progressive jazz to rigorously avant-garde melees–often alongside Los Angeles free-jazz guru Vinny Golia, in one of the reedman’s several ensembles–he always stays an extra step behind the horn, the same cool stance Baker (and Miles Davis) struck in the 50s....

Kikujiro I’m finally starting to understand Takeshi Kitano’s movies, though given that his specialty seems to be a mixture of violence, slapstick, and sentimentality, I’m not sure I’ll ever be a convert. Still, I found Kikujiro (1999)–his eighth feature, showing this week at the Music Box–much more affecting than the other three features I’ve seen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A statement by the writer-director-editor-star suggests that it’s supposed to be and do all of the above: “After Fireworks, I couldn’t help feeling that my films were being stereotyped: ‘gangster, violence, life and death....

Michael York is best known for his more or less contemporary characters in such films as Cabaret, Logan’s Run, and the Austin Powers movies (he plays Mike Myers’s spymaster). But the lean, sharp-featured 57-year-old English actor, whose elegant voice blends seductive softness and sharp-minded steeliness, got his start in Shakespearean drama. He made his London stage debut in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1965 National Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing (the cast also included Albert Finney, Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, and Lynn Redgrave), and shortly thereafter Zeffirelli cast him in his film versions of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet (in which he was an unforgettably tempestuous Tybalt)....

By Michael Miner Writers used to be A-list celebrities, I remind him. Hemingway, the obvious example, was more than a critically acclaimed novelist the public read too. He was the man. He showed up in newsreels just for being Hemingway. He was something in America that these days no writer is. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He and his pal Mark Gleason, who lives in New Jersey, are coming at them with an idea so old it’s new....

Perhaps I’ve been living in Los Angeles too long, but the notion that movie adaptations of books should retain complete fidelity to the written word is an anachronism [November 19]. It doesn’t matter what the germ of the idea is. Once it is in the director’s hands, the subject becomes the director’s. So it seems futile to review a movie as though it were a book you can watch. The book already exists, and to get an experience of complete fidelity to the book it is easy enough to just read it....

We meet the main character of this drama, which builds to the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, on his first day of school, and the supportive relationship he develops with his teacher resonates outside the classroom–in the boy’s home and in the fields, where the teacher takes his students to learn about the natural world. The elegant story could have leaped ahead in time at any juncture–like so many personal-historical narratives that sacrifice persuasive character development for a sense of scope–but the boy is played by Manuel Lozano throughout the movie, which is set firmly in 1936....

Cirque Ingenieux Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The impulse to art up the circus is an old one. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey tried it in the early 40s, when they enlisted the services of a gaggle of certified New York City highbrows, including Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine, creating a show that was despised by kids of all ages. But only in the last decade, with the rise of the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, have impresarios figured out how to turn centuries-old circus acts–tumblers and contortionists, trapeze artists and clowns–into a kind of performance art....

Friday 5/30 – Thursday 6/5 31 SATURDAY Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the point man of New German Cinema, made 43 films in 15 years before his death at the age of 37. Tonight a colloquium promises to fill in some of the blanks in the artist’s short life and explain his influence; speakers include Lola and Berlin Alexanderplatz star Barbara Sukowa, University of California professor Eric Rentscheler, Facets director Milos Stehlik, and Film Center director Barbara Scharres....

Jan Erkert & Dancers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jan Erkert is the best kind of magician, conjuring up feeling without ever grabbing for heartstrings or resorting to throbbing violins. Instead the dry, hard, everyday facts of the dance accumulate until they’re like a mound of stones on the heart–and we’re forced to notice our own sorrow. Then, just as magically, noticing takes the sorrow away and leaves the heart free and open....

By Angela Bowman Hansen was surprised by her client’s reaction, “because she had said she was satisfied with the hospital birth.” Most of the country’s 125 freestanding birth centers operate on the east and west coasts, with an especially high concentration in the southwest and California. New York City has two. These state-licensed facilities–often set up in renovated houses, with about ten beds–follow guidelines developed by the 800-member National Association of Childbearing Centers....

I’m a 23-year-old single black female. I live alone with a cat. I have no “real” friends, just acquaintances. The last time I had a date was 1995, the last time I got laid was back in 1993. It’s 1999 and I’m beginning to think there’s something wrong with me. I don’t know if the “bliss” I feel right now from my complete isolation will become a deep depression in time....

Sixty years ago John Sheetz was doing some business in Milwaukee and wandered into the Red Room of the Plankington Hotel, where a pianist calling himself Walter Busterkeys was tickling the ivories. “My father talked to him,” recalls John’s son Jack, now 80. “Walter had a two-week engagement at the Red Room. My father asked if he’d like to come to La Crosse. Walter said, ‘Well, I’ll have to talk to my mother....

It’s a fairly well-kept secret that the author more or less in charge of the best baseball annual in the nation works here in Chicago. “We had put in the investment in time,” Kahrl says, “and we said, ‘Why don’t we go ahead and do a book?’” They published it themselves, “basically done at Kinko’s, and we sold 500 copies.” From that start, however, they found a publisher (now it’s Brassey’s) and developed a solid reputation....

JERRY JEFF WALKER 6/5, HOUSE OF BLUES My first thoughts of this veteran outlaw (that’s Nashvillese for “liberal”) troubadour are always of his biggest hit, “Mr. Bojangles,” which greatly traumatized me in sixth-grade chorus. The other 70s wrist slitters we sang were fine–the cynicism of “Suicide Is Painless” rolled off my back, as did the mass murder in “One Tin Soldier”–but jeez, that lonely old man and his dead dog just killed me....

Twelve Bars and Beyond Blues Innovator and All-Around Maniac Eddie C. Campbell Campbell, who’ll celebrate his 60th birthday at Buddy Guy’s Legends on Friday, came to Chicago from Mississippi with his family in 1945. As a young guitarist he paid the usual dues, playing around the west side with other aspirants like fellow guitarists Luther Allison and the late Willie James Lyons, later earning the chops and the reputation to work with such luminaries as Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf....

Fela Anikulapo Kuti In 1991, when Polygram released Star Time, its four-CD overview of James Brown’s career, it both climaxed a resurgence of interest in his work and signaled a new wave. After five years of constant plundering of “Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” by every hip-hop and dance producer in the business–and several rock and pop producers as well–the box was a revelation for those who only knew Brown’s work secondhand....

Barnum’s Kaleidoscape Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For years Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s three-ring spectacle was the North American circus. Then Cirque du Soleil changed everyone’s expectations–suddenly circuses were supposed to be hip and visually stunning. It was inevitable that the folks at Barnum & Bailey would match the competition. But no one could have predicted how sophisticated, well planned, nicely executed, and seductive their effort would be....

Despite a noticeable lack of religious fervor, Dan Savage bulldozes his partner into baptizing their child into a church that denies the sanctity of their relationship [September 3]. He is then shocked and indignant that the family priest does not welcome two agnostic gay men with open arms. What the hell did he expect? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dan, have you thought about how insulting your behavior is to Catholics and gays alike?...

Antistasia “The poor have only one advantage,” says Ingrid Bergman in the 1956 movie Anastasia. “They know when they are loved for themselves.” Smart but self-indulgent Theater Oobleck challenges audiences to love it for itself. The directorless ensemble’s shows, peppered with in-jokes and arcane allusions, sometimes resemble a onetime performance thrown together at a family reunion by the clan’s cleverest smart alecks. And where most theater companies rack their brains trying to figure out what will please viewers in an ever more competitive marketplace, the invariably witty and inventive Oobleck pulls full houses with its casually anarchic aesthetic....