COLORS ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Dennis Hopper Written by Michael Schiffer and Richard Dilello With Sean Penn, Robert Duvall, Maria Conchita Alonso, Randy Brooks, Grand Bush, Don Cheadle, Glenn Plummer, and Rudy Ramos. Which of these films is regarded as absolutely essential to this country, containing vital information that can’t be found elsewhere as well as artistic integrity, imagination, originality, intelligence, vitality, and serious social meaning? And which, on the other hand, is regarded as marginal and inconsequential, unworthy of extended treatment or even mention in most cases on TV and in glossy magazines–a trivial pursuit, in short, for trivial people?...

Frank Galati stands in the middle of what he aptly describes as “a sort of derelict loft.” Gray and bleak, it looks like a deserted artist’s studio. Strewn about the sprawling space are paintings and pieces of sculpture–some impressionism, some cubism, and a striking minimalist work, a square canvas painted nothing but yellow. Depressing and claustrophobic despite its expanse, the room is a far cry from the set for Galati’s last directing effort at the Goodman Theatre, She Always Said, Pablo....

Who gets the most pleasure out of sex–the man or the woman? According to Tiresias, a prophet in Greek mythology, the woman gets nine times more pleasure than the man. Please, say it ain’t so! –Sean Sherman, Montreal, Quebec Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve got some good news and some bad news, Sean buddy. But first one ground rule: we’re going to confine this discussion to the physiological experience of orgasm....

What can you tell us about vacuum cleaner wounds to the penis? This malady apparently afflicts an informational underclass who think that a vacuum cleaner can simulate fellatio. –Inquiring Mind, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Case 2–A 65-year-old railway signalman was in his signal box when he bent down to pick up his tools and ‘caught his penis in a Hoover Dustette, which happened to be switched on....

For years I’ve been hearing about fantastic carburetors that can give your car up to 200 mpg. But supposedly the automakers and Big Oil won’t allow them to come to market because they’d wreck the industry. The people who tell you this are usually conspiracy buffs who offer it as an example of how the masses are duped by the Illuminati, so you have to be skeptical. But still I wonder: is the 200-mpg carburetor a complete fantasy, or does something like it actually exist?...

When I walked into the living room, the new phone machine seemed to be suffering from epilepsy of the LED. The new machine is supposed to blink once for each message recorded, but I found it hard to believe that there could have been so many calls in just a few hours. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » D——? A meeting at a hotel? This morning?...

Taking its name from the Tower Building at the intersection of North, Damon, and Milwaukee–commonly called the “Coyote Building” because it once housed the Coyote Gallery–this multimedia arts event includes a sizable theater and performance component (coordinated this year by Wm. Bullion, director of Sliced Bread Productions) that lays claim to being Chicago’s only entirely free theatrical festival. Running September 17 through 20 at a variety of venues in the Bucktown/Wicker Park area, the third annual Around the Coyote fest features 22 companies offering 27 different plays and performance pieces....

For the past decade, the first Friday night in any month has meant art-gallery open houses in River North. But the first Friday night in September stands apart: the first Friday following Labor Day–when nearly every gallery in the gallery district holds a reception to herald a new exhibition–has evolved into the art world’s equivalent of New Year’s Eve. Like so many eagerly anticipated events (New Year’s Eve, for example), last week’s Big Friday was a bit of a letdown....

Friday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jacques Tati, one of the greatest comic filmmakers of recent times, released only five feature films; a recently discovered short will augment his career nicely. In each of Tati’s best-known works–Jour de fete, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Mon oncle, Playtime, and Traffic–an everymanish character battles the almost anthropomorphic characters of Progress, the Modern City, and Technology, as Tati’s visual and aural burlesques set off fireworks around him....

BROADWAY BILL *** (A must-see) Directed by Frank Capra Written by Robert Riskin and Sidney Buchman With Warner Baxter, Myrna Loy, Helen Vinson, Clarence Muse, Raymond Walburn, Walter Connolly, Margaret Hamilton, and Frankie Darro. I’ve never been one of Capra’s champions, though I admire the exquisite textures and feelings of his highly uncharacteristic and still neglected The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Like McBride, I agree with critic Elliott Stein that Capra’s most durable work comes in the 20s and 30s, before rather than after Mr....

ISADORA DUNCAN SLEEPS WITH THE RUSSIAN NAVY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Attitude is brought to bear on the life and loves of Isadora Duncan, the legendary free spirit, whose own loosely draped torso danced its way across stages and beds on two continents. Of course, Duncan had a head, too–in which she formulated nothing less than a revolutionary new aesthetic for the dance....

Together again. George Lewis (the trombonist, synthesizerist, and highly respected new-music composer) and Douglas Ewart (the woodwind virtuoso, bandleader, and wooden-flute maker) first worked together in Fred Anderson’s bands of the early 70s; they proceeded to create memorable duet and small-group concepts on a fairly regular basis until Lewis moved on to New York and Paris. But he’s back this year, teaching at the School of the Art Institute; Ewart returned last year from a sojourn in Japan; and this concert marks the duo’s first Chicago appearance in longer than I care to recall....

The first time you hear Green, you go nuts searching your record collection for the various Hollies, Faces, Kinks, Bowie, and Pretty Things songs they’ve covered–you’re positive they’re covers. But it turns out theyre just the obsessive pop-meistery musings of Green chief Jeff Lescher, a genuinely weird singer-songwriter-guitarist whose keening vocals and dizzy guitars dominate the sound. Elaine MacKenzie, the threesome’s last record, is a bizarre demi-masterpiece of romantic plaints cast amid Lescher’s tempestuous singing and the band’s tight arrangements....

Say what you will about the Kronos Quartet’s punk-chic posturing: few contemporary-music quartets rival them in adventurousness or vitality. Or in political correctness: a typical program of theirs is more often than not a paragon of multiculturalism. The crowded lineup for their latest Ravinia appearance includes works by composers with names like Maraire, El Din, Nishimura, Sallinen, and Schnitke, all written within the past decade or so. Alfred Schnitke, perhaps the Soviet Union’s most original musical thinker since Shostakovich, is represented by his Quartet no....

MELISSA, WHILE SHE SLEEPS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t remember when I’ve seen a production so at odds with its own intentions. A subscription-season brochure for the Bucktown-based Chicago Cooperative Stage claims of Donald Abramson’s verse play: “It gently reminds us that the precious lives entrusted to our care are ours to cherish, teach and protect but ultimately they belong to those tiny sleeping children....

Lead Story The Washington Post reported in August that there are 3,000 pet therapists in the U.S., including 50 fully certified as animal behaviorists, and that they charge fees ranging from $150 to $400 for three-hour sessions. Said one pet therapist, “There’s a reason for everything [animals] do.” Said a skeptical veterinarian, “The pets aren’t crazy. The humans are crazy.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June Stuart Bowyer, a University of California astronomer in charge of a year-old project that has monitored 30 trillion radio signals from outer space, said that so far, 164 of those signals are “unexplained....

Picture this: a man flaps his arms progressively higher and harder, then begins bouncing on the balls of his feet, too. Tragically, he never leaves the ground–and if you don’t laugh, you might cry. Montreal native Paul-Andre Fortier goes through this and similar taking-off routines several times in his hour-long solo, La tentation de la transparence (“The Temptation of Transparency”), a quirky, slow-paced, ultimately poetic piece about . . . human aspirations?...

ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES In the creation of art, the verb is there to authenticate the subject with the same name. The first two changes are to my mind unambiguous disasters that have effectively handed over the future of American cinema to stupid, tasteless merchandisers with none of the old studio heads’ savvy. The current moguls, without imagination or vision, have no compunction whatever about forcing their demographic conclusions on audiences, both developing and exploiting the spectator’s passivity in relation to the film industry and eliminating most options outside it....

SPEAKING PARTS I suspect that when the definitive social history of the last half of the 20th century is written, the chapter on influences and causes will revolve around a single word: video. From the cradle to the rest home, the tube blares its unceasing mixture of entertainment, comedy, alleged reportage–in the words of All That Heaven Allows, a 1955 Douglas Sirk film, “drama, comedy, life’s parade at your fingertips.”...

A Printer’s Prerogative Senior editor Allison Gamble tells us that three readers canceled their subscriptions over Honey. They complained that a magazine that crusades against censorship but lets itself be censored has lost its integrity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They were talking past each other. Former editor Jean Fulton recalls that soon after Johnson Press took over, the Examiner’s art director visited Pontiac....