National characters. From a recent Harper’s: “The U.S. frontier is in the West and its hero is an outlaw; the Canadian frontier is in the North and its hero is a policeman.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Why would anyone want to be mayor of Chicago?” writes Ann Seng, president of the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs, in One City (March/April 1989). “The problems and issues facing our city…should be enough to scare off all but the brightest, the best, the most articulate, the most dynamic, the most experienced, the most innovative and the most committed-to-our-city candidates....

Justin Dart, the megamillionaire plastics king, a financial backer of Ronald Reagan, once observed that “a dialogue with politicians is a fine thing, but with a little money, they hear you better.” With a lot of money. they may hear even if you whisper. Some big-money contributors truly believe that Daley can best achieve the goals that almost everyone shares: better schools, safer streets, a more vital economy. In addition, however, a great many have very special concerns for themselves, their firms, or their industries: more business, lower taxes, less demanding city bargaining over new development projects....

In the beginning, Richard Taub recalls, it was just an idea passed to him over the backyard fence by his next-door neighbor. South Shore’s bankers have successfully wedded the best aspects of business and not-for-profit groups to create a model for inner-city development. The bank draws and distributes investment dollars from a wide variety of sources. One of its holding companies, City Lands Corporation, wheels and deals with downtown banks and investors to arrange for-profit housing and business deals....

My brother came downtown last month, on a day I had to work, and he and a friend went off to the bleachers to watch the Cubs. Later that night, I asked how the day had gone–I believe the Cubs had lost, although I’ve forgotten–and after he recalled the highlights of the game my brother went on and said he had enjoyed nothing so much as watching Dave Martinez and Andre Dawson warm up between innings....

I PURITANI Bellini was and is famous as the composer of formulaic operas that are long on melody and short on drama. I Puritani is his last work and represents an extreme realization of this formula. Set in England, the story is a rather unlikely encounter between members of the royalist and parliamentary parties after the death of Charles I. Elvira, daughter of a Puritan official, and the Cavalier Arthur are in love....

FILMS BY HARUN FAROCKI No film which only translates into film what is known already (from the newspaper, a book, TV) is worth anything. A film has to find an expression in its own language. –Harun Farocki Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What this question seems to overlook is that European Marxism encompasses a lot more than what Americans understand as “politics.” The aesthetics of most American Marxists and communists, at least within my lifetime, tend toward socialist realism and–more recently–multiculturalism....

A WRINKLE IN TIME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a proverbial “dark and stormy night” Meg and Charles Wallace meet three enchanted ladies in a haunted house. Mrs. Whatsit is a literal former star who wears a rainbow-colored cape and can transform herself into a huge white flying creature. Mrs. Who, a time traveler, loves to offer pithy aphorisms in foreign languages. Mrs....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Maura Troester’s review of Haunted by God: The Life of Dorothy Day [August 7], she mentioned the Catholic Socialist newspaper Day and Peter Maurin founded in 1933, the Catholic Worker, and noted they sold it “for a penny a copy on the corner.” The Catholic Worker still costs one penny a copy, subscriptions for eight issues mailed in the U....

OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL Blind Parrot Productions Add to the pleasant shock of falling in love the additional surprise of some unlikely lovers, and you’ve got the agreeable setup for the Wednesday bill of the Off Off Loop Theater Festival. This year’s programs in the non-Equity theater showcase are conveniently arranged by theme, and these three stylistically diverse one-acts depict the varied ways three ill-suited couples come together: a contrived “meeting cute” pairing in Bailiwick Repertory’s inane offering, a surreal encounter in the one-act by Blind Parrot Productions, and a hilarious merger in the Griffin Theatre Company’s ingenious contribution....

MUNTU DANCE THEATRE OF CHICAGO Choreographed by New York dancer and dance historian Mickey Davidson, Juba Jig re-creates slaves’ clandestine nighttime gatherings to dance and make music. Slave owners feared African Americans’ drums as methods of communication and took them away, so slaves played their own bodies–ham-bone rhythms–or washboards and tubs. Juba Jig opens with dozens of performers in colorful “country” clothes slapping their bodies in unison in increasingly complex rhythms, adding different body parts to the mix like instruments entering an orchestral arrangement–slapping the butt produces a deep bass tone, the chest a hollow, flatter sound, the shin a sharp tenor note....

She Loves It When They Act Dirty Corruption is delicious and journalists in Chicago have been gorging themselves on it for generations. But there is always a new way to slice the shank, and in October of 1987 the Tribune served up what it would describe as something new: a City Council expose in the form of “a systematic investigation of the institution as a whole.” “And in the City Hall press room ....

Sly Dunbar (drums and percussion) and Robbie Shakespeare (bass) are generally recognized as the greatest professional rhythm section in reggae. As their reputation has grown, they’ve taken advantage of the opportunity to jump from backing big reggae acts, like Black Uhuru, to backing even bigger international rock acts, like the Rolling Stones. Though they’ve hardly abandoned reggae, this is nevertheless often known as “selling out.” Phooey, they say. To prove it, on their latest solo album, 1987’s Rhythm Killers, the duo put their genre-busting sellout to brilliant use....

“Green Chicago teaches people how to make gardens on rubble-filled vacant lots,” according to the Chicago Horticultural Society’s Garden Talk (July 1988). “Since the program began in 1982, Green Chicago coordinator Becky Severson has directly helped 19 groups start their own community gardens.” The groups are chosen “on the basis of need and ability.” GC provides topsoil, compost, fencing, and tools; the gardeners provide the labor, sometimes breaking the soil with pickaxes....

The championship game of the Public League basketball season is one of the city’s great squandered resources. If its location were fixed from year to year–say at the UIC Pavilion or even the Stadium–and if it were televised to accommodate the people who can’t attend and to draw in those who might, it would probably become a major annual event, a showcase for the city’s best young basketball players. Of course it would also lose some of its charm, some of those qualities that despite its size and importance evoke memories for anyone who ever attended high school anywhere: the partisan fans sitting on opposite sides of the court; the way one side disses the other’s cheerleaders; the unique manner in which high school students greet one another (“Yo, Fuckface....

Last night I inserted a new blade cartridge in my modern safety razor. This AM my true love used said instrument (unbeknownst to me) to remove unwanted hair from her lower extremities. Now, a half hour later, I am trying to figure out how to apply a tourniquet to my upper lip after using the same blade for my morning ablutions. My question is, how can delicate female down so completely ravage a blade that regularly stands up to my hard-bitten stubble?...

Damn. Another choice between two mediocrities whose records are, at best, modest and mixed. Bloom believes his difficulties had a lot to do with money and race. And his sortie suggests that flying solo is no way for good progressive candidates to overcome these hurdles. Harold Washington did it on the strength of a multiracial progressive movement. Bloom tried–and failed–to go it mostly alone. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

BREAKING WOOD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The program note on Whitney Empire, the author of Breaking Wood, reads: “Although sharing the same past, Whitney Empire no longer resides in Susan MacNeil’s body” (MacNeil is the actor in this one-woman show). MacNeil, according to the program, has a black belt in kyokushin karate, a Korean-based school of martial arts that emphasizes body contact and the breaking of objects....

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS–THE MUSICAL at Annoyance Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which is why the more I see of Sean Abley’s work, the more I think he (and his gang of coconspirators at the Factory Theater) are onto something. True, their first long-running late-night hit, Reefer Madness, was little more than a Soloway-style word-for-word stage adaptation. But ever since Attack of the Killer B’s opened last March, it’s been clear that Abley et al are trying to do something more ambitious than The Real Live Brady Bunch’s mild, ambivalent satire....

CHICAGO YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the sixth year Pegasus has held its competition for Chicago-area students, and of the 250 scripts submitted, 4 were awarded full professional productions. None presumes to worry about the future of theater. None caters to what’s popular. The young playwrights are rash; they haven’t learned yet that writing from the heart and striking straight at an issue doesn’t always draw audiences, though it should....

SPRING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bernard Sahlins, cofounder and longtime producer of Second City and a guiding light of the International Theatre Festival, decided to create a Chicago-style version of Els Comediants–a company that would blend European carnival and circus with urban improvisational comedy of the sort Second City (and its predecessors, the Compass Players and the Playwrights Theatre Club) pioneered and popularized....