“I can’t remember the last time I paid to go to a movie,” Jack says, feet propped up on his desk. “I just don’t think any movie is worth $6.50.” Despite an income close to six figures, Jack has a problem with the high rates charged at the multiplexes for smaller and smaller screens. This type of price gouging upsets Jack. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last spring’s basketball play-off games at the Stadium were a recent triumph....

There was a crucial juncture in American history about 150 years ago where if truth and justice had not prevailed, we would all have ended up cheeseheads. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some cheeseheads got so heated up over this that they became almost fonduelike (or, as they say in Wisconsin, Fond du Lac). Wisconsin legislator Moses Strong sounded in an 1843 speech like he wanted to declare war against Illinois: “Wisconsin will never submit to so gross a violation of her rights and after she has done all to obtain peaceable redress, will resort to every other means in her power to protect and preserve her rights ....

2 LEGS AND A CANE Not that you can’t hear the whistle blow every so often. There’s a Little Engine That Can hidden here somewhere in the mists that envelop this show. It might turn out to be worth seeing, if it can only find itself first. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Described as “a comic look at the most intense relationships that humans can possibly have,” 2 Legs and a Cane consists of 21 skits about parents, children, lovers, spouses, and a medieval potato farmer named Honorable Jones....

These three acts represent the flowering of post-De La Soul hip hop. While each are in a strict sense rap artists, their deliberate injection of such elements as pure pop, free jazz, found or acoustic instruments, psychedelia, and (at last) a sophisticated but stiff radical political sensibility into the groovy basics of the music promises something futuristic, almost utopian. Arrested Development boast the toughest beats and densest mix, and bruit about the hardest issues as well, from fierce essays on sexual politics to a blistering attack on politically passive black churches....

BALLET CHICAGO Strip away the elegance of a glamorous downtown theater, the distance and illusion created by a proscenium stage, and the power and resonance of a live orchestra, and you strip away much of the spectacle–and the entertainment value–of ballet. Yet the bare bones of classical theatrical dance–the character and caliber of the dancing, the qualities and structures of the choreography–stand out in especially sharp relief. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Chicago-based Bucket Number Six is a semiacoustic folk-rock trio with a special talent for catchy understatement. Front man Doug Hoekstra’s talky singing does take some getting used to, but he’s a first-rate songwriter who specializes in droll, rough-hewn evocations of a slightly sentimentalized America in which Mark Twain or Thomas Hart Benton might feel quite at home. Bucket Number Six songs are full of awkward teenagers, baseball heroes, and frogs croaking in the Mississippi moonlight–but just as you start to feel all comfy, here comes badass Steve Meisner with some tough ‘n’ twangy John Fogerty guitar....

Camper Van Beethoven you know about: the absurdist cowboy funksters from Santa Cruz, California, whose new record (and major-label debut) Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, fulfills the promises and more of every indie band of all time. Live, the Campers provide something akin to a heavy-metal hoedown–but you knew that. The act to see Friday night is Walter Salas-Humara. Salas-Humara’s once and possibly future band is the Silos, but he’s currently in the midst of a busman’s holiday as a solo act....

Among the art-history tenets Eleanor Guralnick dutifully absorbed as a college undergraduate in the 1950s was the notion that a stylistic relationship existed between Egyptian statues and Greek kouroi, statues that depicted young Greek men. It wasn’t until years later that she realized that art historians had no proof for that claim. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a University of Chicago graduate student in search of a dissertation, Guralnick set out to collect evidence of an artistic connection between the two geographically separate and culturally distinct societies....

The name is dumb, the heavy major-label promo for so recondite a band a little suspect; just the same, on their Trinity Sessions LP the Cowboy Junkies have discovered or invented (the unity of their groove is so seamless it doesn’t really make any difference which) a cold quiet place where the old mountain fatalism of country music and the bleak minimalism of the most alienated rock and roll feel like the same thing....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today’s anti-Utopian Zeitgeist certainly moves in mysterious ways. Thus the usually reliable J. Rosenbaum, from his April 5 notice for A. Zagdansky’s Interpretation of Dreams [Reader’s Guide to the Silver Screen]: “most of [Sigmund Freud’s] work was virtually banned in the Soviet Union between 1917 and glasnost.” One might assume from this that Czarist Russia was a thriving mecca of psychoanalytical discourse....

Carl Dreyer’s last film, one of the most controversial movies ever made, would be my own candidate for the most beautiful, affecting, and inexhaustible of all narrative films, but it is clearly not for every taste–not, alas, even remotely. Adapted from a long-forgotten play by Hjalmar Soderberg written during the early years of this century, it centers on a proud, stubborn woman (Nina Pens Rode) who demands total commitment in love and forsakes both her husband and a former lover for a young musician who is relatively indifferent to her....

An enjoyable if somewhat fanciful treatment of the events leading up to the romance between assertive George Sand (Judy Davis) and prudish Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant) set roughly from 1836 to 1838. The story also involves such artists as Alfred de Musset (Mandy Patinkin), Franz Liszt (Julian Sands), and Eugene Delacroix (Ralph Brown), as well as Liszt’s lover and Sand’s friend Marie d’Agoult (Bernadette Peters) and Sand’s former lover Felicien Mallefille (Georges Corraface), her children’s tutor....

Live From Ronny’s Steak Palace, It’s…Monday Night? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blatter particularly liked Ronny’s Steak Palace, he says, because it was “as tacky as humanly possible.” But the restaurant, which has baked potatoes and steaks piled high at the entrance, is not without a certain bizarre charm. The main dining area just beyond the open kitchen is flanked by huge murals of famous people eating meat....

EDGAR FRANCESCHI Perhaps that is why New York artist Edgar Franceschi’s acrylic and mixed-media canvases are disturbing. In these large works colors and patterns are juxtaposed in such an eclectic manner that they often seem to border on 60s flower-power kitschiness. But certain recurring motifs express a viewpoint that is extremely critical of recent modernist styles championed by the mainstream art world. The resulting work is so angry that it is difficult to like; but it is so confidently executed that it is hard to dismiss....

British expatriate Dale Goulding never intended to go into theater. “If I’d had a job,” he snickers, “I wouldn’t have gone into acting.” And he certainly never dreamed he would wind up cofounding a theater company with a Bulgarian director in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One day Goulding gave a friend a lift to an audition. “They asked me to improvise something....

Lead Story In an ongoing battle to give a popular name to the B-1 bomber, Representative Robert Dornan prefers “Excalibur,” but the Air Force objects to it because of potential trademark overlap with a car wax, a condom, and an X-rated film service. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In order to blunt the prodemocracy demonstrations in Moscow on February 25 by keeping people at home, the government scheduled a phone-in lottery and several feature films on television that day....

Lead Story Ronald S. Terry, 25, was arrested near Morristown, New Jersey, for robbery of a gas station in January because he forgot to check the cars in the driveway, one of which was a police car with an officer inside. When Terry emerged from the station clutching cash and saw the officer, he ran back inside and flung the cash at the attendant, but was arrested anyway. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Just a year shy of a quarter of a century ago, Sly Stone, the funk poet steeped in the stew of blues, race, and riot, produced the second and gentlest of his blithe singles. Wars rocked the cities and the consciousness of his listeners, Richard Nixon had just been elected president, and voices for change were regularly shot down. But Stone took a stand against hate: Makes no difference what group I’m in ....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Regarding February 28 City Scenes: superpoets vs. the money-go-round, I must ask Gabriele Strohschen to get off her high horse long enough to give a poet the “freedom of choice” to read about his “hard penis” if he so chooses. Gabriele said she was disappointed to find sex poems being read at the Borderline upon her return from East Germany....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Stoll characterizes the Jewish students at UIC as myopic, stalwart supporters of Israel. She supports this notion by continually referring to their arousing applause given to the speakers and that the Jewish students would “rather be up dancing a hora” than listening to Peter Yarrow talk about peace. Implicit in this absurd generalization is that these students thereby regret “peace” because they don’t wait in bated breath for Peter Yarrow’s songs....