Wisdom Bridge Bound for Skokie? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently this drastically revised plan for the performing arts center was hastily formulated over the last month; on April 20, Skokie rejected a standing proposal for a 1,200-seat theater and gave the Centre East Authority (the quasi-governmental body overseeing development of the performing arts center) until June 1 to come up with a different plan....

YEGOR BULICHOV & OTHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, you get the sense that the 64-year-old Gorky, however comfortable under Stalin, yearned for something else, perhaps for something the October Revolution had left unfulfilled. Yegor Bulichov & Others, written 15 years after the upheaval of 1917, is the work of a man who, if not at his creative end, certainly feels at an end of some sort....

A Voice for the Left-Behind If America is truly better for having won a war, a large part of the gain may turn out to be a new candor in public discourse. Early in his presidency, George Bush proclaimed this a nation with more will than wallet. Bush had it backwards, and now there’s no pretending that he didn’t. “Personal gestures. Profound actions,” said the president, “sometimes life-changing in their effect....

Every knock was a threat. It was 1940, and Lisa Fittko was staying in a little room in the French border town of Banyuls. She could have been arrested at any time, Still, when the knock came she answered it, and she opened the door to find the famous German philosopher Walter Benjamin standing there. “Your husband said you would take me over the mountains,” he said. Of course, she thought, Hans would say that–even though he, back in Marseilles, had no idea that she had found a safe path over the Pyrenees; he didn’t even know for sure that she was still alive....

Art World Worries Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A bad case of the jitters is running through the art market here as dealers prepare for the first round of fall openings. With the Middle East crisis far from settled and the economy a big question mark as well, no one knows whether Chicago’s art aficionados will be in a buying frame of mind when the gallery doors all over River North and beyond open next Friday....

Back in Action Last November, the Sun-Times stopped being such a do-gooder. The paper dropped its Action Time service, which was deemed expensive, anachronistic, and a bore–each letter seeking a long-lost Army buddy, or satisfaction from a mail-order house, sounded an awful lot like every other. To be fair, the Sun-Times might have been the last large paper in the country to abandon the “action” format, once a staple of American papers....

Friday 6 Funny how recent outrages sometimes make you forget some of the older ones–like the Chinese government’s overrunning of Tibet in 1949. You can protest China’s continuing occupation of Tibet with Chicago’s Tibetan Resettlement Project outside the Chinese consulate, 104 S. Michigan, from 10 to 3 today. It’s free. Call 664-8117 for details. The project–along with the American Refugee Committee–is also holding a forum on Tibet Thursday, March 12, at the Hyatt Regency, 151 E....

MISERY With James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, and Lauren Bacall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Misery, a psychological horror thriller adapted by William Goldman from a Stephen King novel and directed by Rob Reiner, lacks the scope, nuance, and self-awareness of The King of Comedy. But most of what makes it interesting, beyond its relative success as a pared-down genre exercise, is its exploitation of similar feelings about stars and fans....

In 1915, Michael Figliulo, who now lives in Streamwood, was hired to work as a motorcycle stuntman in Chicago for Mack Sennett, the legendary creator of the Keystone Kops movies. At that time Sennett’s studio was headquartered in Hollywood, but because the young western town could not duplicate Chicago’s urban backdrops, many of his action scenes were shot here. But Essanay Studios, which was located at 1345 W. Argyle, still claimed exclusive regional rights to Thomas Edison’s original movie camera patents....

When American music patriarch Chicagoan Paul Fromm passed away some 18 months ago, he left a provision in his will that the annual free spring concert bearing his name would continue. This year’s Fromm Concert is also the 25th anniversary of Ralph Shapey’s Contemporary Chamber Players, who, as always, will be the centerpiece performers for the concert; soprano Elsa Charlston and saxophonist Cynthia Sykes will be featured soloists. Included on the program is Varese’s early masterpiece, the colorful Octandre, which emphasizes continual shifting of combinations of instruments and extreme registers....

There are about half a hundred funny things about Guns n’ Roses’ superhyped pair of new albums, Use Your Illusion I and II, the band’s first real output since their 1987 debut. One funny thing is that the first record starts off with a song called “Right Next Door to Hell,” which takes its title from lead singer Axl Rose’s well-publicized disputes with a neighbor in his West Hollywood apartment complex....

Fogel’s Flub: CSO Tries Hardball, Players Call Strike Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fogel declined comment on the negotiations, but musicians say the three-year contract he put on the table asked the players to pay for a large portion of their health insurance, the cost of which has been increasing at about 20 percent a year. The musicians calculated that such a change would amount to a $2,000 give-back in the third year of the contract....

In 1983 Karen Thompson and Sharon Kowalski were four years into a relationship–they’d exchanged rings and vows and felt committed to each other as partners in life. The choice to stay in the closet ended for Thompson and Kowalski when Kowalski was involved in an automobile accident that left her partially paralyzed. Kowalski now requires round-the-clock medical care. She has only rudimentary communication skills, and she has a short-term-memory problem....

IT’S ABOUT TIME When a new dance company starts, one of its most difficult tasks is building a repertory. Talented dancers are only the ingredients; the master chef is that rare choreographer who finds the company’s personality and makes dances that fit it. The Hubbard Street Dance Company, for example, is actively building its repertory–commissioning works by Daniel Ezralow and reviving works by Twyla Tharp. New companies, without Hubbard Street’s financial resources, cannot afford to commission dances by experienced choreographers....

LAST SUPPER AT UNCLE TOM’S CABIN/THE PROMISED LAND Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land is a sprawling, ambitious dance about racism, repression, faith, and sexual freedom. But unlike the family-saga novels sold in supermarkets that are invariably described as “sprawling” and “ambitious,” Jones’s dance is a work of intelligence and commitment whose radical aesthetics confront the audience. Simply said, it is a masterpiece. In our alienated time Jones actually offers a vision of a promised land....

After a long and successful career in day care, Ruby L. Oliver made this, her first feature, originally known as Leola, in her late 40s. It’s a remarkable debut: assured, highly focused, surprisingly upbeat considering the number of problems it addresses without flinching–and the best low-budget Chicago independent feature that I’ve seen. Set in contemporary Chicago, it concerns a 17-year-old girl from the ghetto whose plans for the future are jeopardized when she finds herself pregnant....

Peter Kubelka hates recorded music. “I am not opposed to electronic music, to music created to be heard on records,” he explains. “But the performance of music written to be performed on wood or animal parts or the human voice on electronic equipment results only in an imitation–a ‘photograph’ of music. Recorded music is very much like reproductions of paintings in art books. The use of ‘electrophonics’ causes people to forget that music comes from a living being and has to be set against silence....

We inhabit a culture that has been variously described over the last 20 years or so as postindustrial, postideological, post-Holocaust, postfeminist, postpunk, and, naturally, postmodern. Never mind that in actuality we remain surrounded by the signs and structures of industry, ideology, nuclear war, racism, sexism, and modernity. (Punk rock is the only category in which we are truly “post,” despite the black, spiky remnants that display themselves on Belmont Avenue.) The notion that we come after something else (a social trend, an aesthetic, a theory, a bit of history) remains pervasive; it easily lends itself to a nostalgic and pessimistic reading of contemporary culture, and indeed, so numerous have such readings become of late, they seem to constitute a literary genre in themselves....

The Five-Month-Old News Story There are some things that television does better than anyone else. One of them is provide blanket coverage of a five-month-old crime that no one paid any attention to when it happened. Channel Five led off its ten o’clock news with the assault: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This report never does mention the date of the attack–“an oversight,” says executive producer Danece Kern....

Symphonist, philosopher, former chess hustler, and–not incidentally–the most rigorously individualistic improviser of the last quarter century, Anthony Braxton defies easy categorization. He considers the coolly logical Paul Desmond and the volcanic John Coltrane as equal influences, and compounds the heresy by bringing Arnold Schoenberg into the circle, too. Braxton’s output is too varied to accommodate simple, catchy descriptions: it ranges from an elastic view of parade music to lengthy solo works for soprano sax or contrabass clarinet, not to mention his plan for an antiphonal piece featuring symphony orchestras around the globe, linked by satellite....