Two fascinating relics of the French cinema in the mid-30s, both semimusicals starring the great black dancer Josephine Baker in all her glory, and both very interesting for the racial attitudes they reveal. In each feature Baker is paired with a white male star–Jean Gabin as a brother-by-adoption and sailor-turned-electrician in Marc Allegret’s Zou Zou (1934), and Albert Prejean as an aristocratic novelist in Edmond Greville’s Princess Tam Tam (1935)–who is set up as a potential lover, but who eventually passes her up for a white woman....

When does development become overdevelopment? Emily Coxhead and her neighbors think that their neighborhood–known variously as the “Fringe,” or “West DePaul,” or the “Clybourn Corridor”–has reached the saturation point. A proposal to build what Coxhead calls “seven very narrow town houses” on a skinny, block-long strip of land that also contains a working set of railroad tracks has them up in arms. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is only the latest example of what Coxhead and her neighbors consider “overbuilding to the nth degree, to the last inch....

Critics of the single-payer Canadian health care system insist that Canadians suffer intolerable waits for treatment and a shortage of technology that denies them the most advanced care. In educational materials created for Physicians for a National Health Program, doctors David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler respond: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the United States excessive investment in high technology equipment sometimes worsens the quality of care....

Friday 23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Virginia-born Paul Hoover happened to come to Chicago in 1968 during the week of the Democratic convention. He’d begun protesting long before our streets were on fire, and when he bowed out of the Vietnam war as a conscientious objector, he was sent here to work in a lowly hospital post. Since then he has married writer Maxine Chernoff and had three kids, earned a degree from the writers program at the University of Illinois, published five poetry books, and joined the faculty of Columbia College....

When Chamber Music Chicago executive director Susan Lipman took over its administrative helm in 1982, she knew she had a challenge on her hands. “The organization, quite frankly, was dying,” she says. Today the subscriber base is close to 1,000, and there are 11 concerts in the group’s 30th-anniversary series this year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But though Lipman had excellent organizational skills and had been involved with arts planning in one way or another for most of her life, she had little experience in the business end....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Wik is correct that there are “reasons for those tiny demons we wage war with in our minds,” but locating the causes of self-doubt, low self-esteem, and self-destructive behavior in an insufficient knowledge of oneself is only progressive if effectively linked to analyses of how we are socialized by racism, sexism and class oppression to believe ourselves unworthy of love and respect....

I met Richard at the Saint James hotel back when I was between apartments and jobs and, as Richard Burton described it, “not broke, only temporarily out of funds.” I decided to take a chance and move into the Saint James near downtown, where I could rent a room with a bath for $250 a month, and live there until I found an apartment or a job. The patrons included many people of modest means or no means, and some who were recovering from severe emotional problems had been placed there by social agencies....

The eighth annual edition of the Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film Festival runs October 7 through 13 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport; then continues October 14 through 16 at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont. Tickets for the ten-day event cost $4-$5.50 per show (except for the opening night reception and film, which costs $8), with series tickets available at $50 for the whole package or $25 for six screenings....

CASUALTIES OF WAR ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Brian De Palma Written by David Rabe With Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn, Don Harvey, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Thuy Thu Le, and Erik King. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To be perfectly honest, for all my skepticism about De Palma, I even found his Hitchcock rip-offs somewhat interesting in spite of their many irritations....

POWER LUNCH The menu at Cafe Voltaire features items like vegetarian sloppy joes, sesame noodles, and peach-apricot-strawberry milk shakes. But the main course in Alan Ball’s clever comedy Power Lunch, presented as an experience in “environmental urban dinner theater,” is fantasy. Make that fantasies–the immature, improbable, sometimes interchangeable secret notions of a man and woman trying to balance their urges to compete, copulate, and connect. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Equal rights now: Stop abortions.” Above the legend on the picket sign was a color photograph of an aborted 11-week-old fetus, small enough to hold in the palm of a human hand. The reds and blues matched the flag held in the other hand of the protester, a stylish woman in her 30s with a ruddy complexion and a train of small children behind her. They were with the nearly 200 other protesters who gathered in front of Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day, to demonstrate against the hospital’s abortion policy....

Surrounded by artworks in various states of ravage and disrepair, art conservator Rick Strilky surveys his latest project, propped upright on roller wheels in the corner. He shakes his head disgustedly as a smocked assistant delicately wipes at the painting’s disfigured faces with a solvent-soaked cotton swab. Even though this painting was already treated to weeks of water-and-aerosol “surfactant” cleaning, its blemishes cling stubbornly. City officials hope Harlem Station can be reinstalled this spring, but Strilky’s reluctant to promise to meet a deadline....

RAISE THE RED LANTERN With Gong Li, Ma Jingwu, and He Caifei. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A variation on this daring prototype was presented in Zhang’s Ju Dou two years later. (As far as I know, an interim work, an action thriller called Operation Cougar, hasn’t been shown outside Asia.) Gong once again portrayed a strong-willed woman married to a much older man she doesn’t love, a wealthy silk merchant....

Dept. of understatement. Illinois EPA water-pollution-control manager James Park, commenting on the $30,000 fine levied on a fertilizer plant that contaminated ten miles of the Apple River in northwestern Illinois: “The beauty of Apple Creek State Park was spoiled that summer with thousands of dead fish floating in the river.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is that a threat or a promise? Roosevelt University president Theodore L....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As an employee of Chicago Read Children’s Unit, I have not observed or been informed of abuse to patients. However, I do observe abuse placed on staff by patients on a regular basis; i.e., staff receives human bites, fractured bones, open wounds, etc. I remember the client, Scott, mentioned in the November 2 [article]. The staff all felt sympathy for him due to his tortured life and family problems....

Here’s the story. My wife just got back from Berkeley where she helped a friend give birth–and of course it all happened at home, in some kind of tub, underwater, with violins playing and midwives hovering about. Here’s what she says happened next. Out came the afterbirth, which was carefully collected in a pot and put in the fridge to keep cool. Through the day, various vegetarians who dropped by to pay their respects asked about the placenta....

THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE Strawdog Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Voice of the Turtle is a simple enough story: an actress resists falling in love with a soldier on leave. Sally Middleton (Lia Mortensen) and Bill Page (Si Osborne) are brought together when Olive Lashbrooke (Mary Ernster), Sally’s best friend and Bill’s original date, gets a better offer for the evening and leaves Sally to take care of Bill....

WENDY PERRON DANCE COMPANY Still, the four dancers–Lisa Bush, Donald Fleming, Kumiko Kimoto, and Vicky Shick–managed, for the most part, to beat the avian competition and keep the audience concentrated on the dance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The entire performing area was separated from the audience by sheets of black net–to protect us from unwanted souvenirs from the pigeons or to protect the pigeons from us?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article focuses on the abusers’ pain and portrays them as victims. There is no discussion about the gains that abusers receive through abuse. Are we to understand that men abuse because they enjoy pain? An abuser uses the same techniques as those used on POWs to terrorize his partner and keep her attention focused on him....

Even if there were more of them, Bela Fleck would still be the world’s best jazz banjo player; the fact that he’s apparently alone in his field just makes him an innovator to boot. (The banjo, for a number of reasons, is especially unsuited to the expressive demands of jazz even though the instrument and the genre share African roots; Fleck has simply created his own stylistic cove to shelter his hybrid interests....