PRINCES IN EXILE THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS Let’s get down to hard cases by starting off with a question: Which would you rather see–an intelligent movie about teenage cancer victims, or an intelligent movie about serial killers? Theoretically, it’s hard to imagine many people opting for the first over the second; I certainly wouldn’t, in spite of an almost built-in aversion to slasher movies of all kinds. A low-budget, partly state-financed Canadian production–with no famous actors, written and directed by people I’ve never heard of, and based on a novel (by Mark Schreiber) that is also unknown to me–Princes in Exile has absolutely no fashionable calling cards....

What is the purpose of a hymen in a woman? Ever since the painfulness of my own being broken during my first sexual intercourse, I’ve tried to find this out. Several gynecologists I asked simply shrugged–they never even wondered about such a thing. (Needless to say, they were men!) I once had a teacher at college who postulated that the hymen was some sort of genetic aberration that had been reinforced once men discovered it....

AMERICA IS IN THE HEART Treachery marks much of the history of Filipino-American relations–from the initial betrayal of the 1898 revolution against Spain, launched by Jose Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo and turned by the U.S. into an empire grab, to the recent unholy alliance with the predatory Marcoses. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this country the ugliness continued in racist anger at the former colonial subjects who dared come here to pursue ideals we long ago abandoned....

It was supposed to be a relatively routine gathering of the local school council, an eye-glazing recitation of the year’s budget. But more than 100 area residents, parents, and students–a much larger group than usual–had come, and within a few minutes many of them were on their feet, voices filled with venom, hurling accusations at one another. Welcome to the world of participatory democracy as it’s being practiced at the Walt Disney magnet school, 4140 N....

Friday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Headlining Chicago Authors Read for Rights: Words on the Struggle for Freedom are Margaret Burroughs, cofounder of the DuSable Museum; Leon Forrest, chair of Northwestern’s African American studies department; Larry Heinemann, National Book Award winner; and S.L. Wisenberg, a local writer. They will read from their own writings on human rights as well as works by prisoners of conscience, and will be joined by Amnesty International’s midwest director, Marjory Byler, and Linda Valerian, a Minnesota activist....

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS This act is at its noblest in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the tragedy of a heroine who discovers she owes the state her death. What Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac was for Israel, Agamemnon’s ritual killing of his daughter Iphigenia was for the Greeks, a paradigm of pitiless duty transcending love or mercy. So pitiless must it have seemed that in Euripides’ other treatment of the same act, Iphigenia in Tauris, he gave it a happy ending, as did Racine, Corneille, and Gluck centuries later....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harold Henderson’s ignorant comment, “What country did you say you were from?” on the welcome fact that Illinois high school students will now receive foreign language credit for learning American Sign Language (City File, October 20), is sadly, typically, indicative of the lack of linguistic sophistication–that is, sophistication about linguistics–in the general population. American Sign Language, the language used by deaf people in this country, most certainly is a foreign language; it is in no measure a gestural translation of English....

When he was 32 years old John Lennon said that if he had it to do all over again, he’d rather have been a fisherman. At 26, Lewie Faustino would like to have been John Lennon. He tried to get in touch with Paul McCartney once, the last time the tour came to Chicago; he wasn’t shy, he didn’t get discouraged, but it didn’t work out. He’s had some luck as a fisherman, though....

There’s a surprising amount to be learned about the state of the world from most international film festivals, and the Chicago International Film Festival, now in its 27th year, is no exception. A film festival can impart information that’s seldom available in the kind of print and TV journalism we’ve been getting in this country in recent years: the texture of everyday life in other countries and the fantasies of other cultures; the kinds of thought, emotion, and reflection that can’t necessarily be captured in sound bites, ancillary markets, and weekend grosses; aesthetic, political, intellectual, and erotic alternatives to the overhyped fare that Entertainment Tonight, At the Movies, Entertainment Weekly, et al are force-feeding us the rest of the year....

Despite an occasional weak album (like Lovesexy, the one this tour is named after) and significant personal shortcomings (like his bullshit apocalyptic worldview), Prince has grown so much both as a musician and as a pop persona since his debut album ten years ago that he is now easily the most dynamic pop star of the day–perhaps even the greatest pop star of the entire decade. From all early reports, the Lovesexy tour does what the Lovesexy album doesn’t do by following up the Sign “O” the Times multimedia project....

Roscoe Mitchell is an iconoclast woodwind improviser-composer who creates melodies that have a cruel bite–but increasingly in recent years, he’s also been the sweetest of lyric artists, a singer of gentle, innocent songs. He breaks music down to its most basic elements–a mere fragment of melody, a rhythm, a sound (perhaps no more than air breathing through a horn)–and develops them into self-contained, often complex structures. He plays solos low down in the biggest, deepest contrabass instruments or way up in the highest of treble horns, at the limits of the human ear’s capacity....

Weeds, 1555 N. Dayton: Aaron was sitting at the bar, which was covered with itchy wool serape blankets, explaining how he entertains himself for an evening. He goes to a night spot and tells cute girls old Jewish stories, the long kind that start off with a rabbi who goes to a strange town and gets bitten by a small animal or a baker who throws his wife out of the house with only a piece of pita bread....

The Blue Note, 1901 W. Armitage: It was an amazing coincidence! We had just come from a dinner party where we ate sweet-potato empanadas and fortune cookies served by an artist who is packing up all the Italian lights, votive candles, and tulle petticoats she can fit into her 1960 Buick Electra and moving to Memphis to live with a country-western singer because, only weeks before, she fell in love. Her friends are shocked by her sudden action....

Sleepy LaBeef–barrel-chested rockabilly legend, veteran of honky-tonks and roadhouses ranging from Texas juke joints to funky New England truck stops, bull-voiced master of a repertoire of over 6,000 songs–has had a nearly fanatical following among country and roots-rock fans since his earliest recordings for such obscure Texas labels as Gulf, Finn, and Crescent, made in the 50s and early 60s. Sleepy combines his tough-twanging guitar style and roughshod piano (imagine Jerry Lee Lewis even more out of control than usual) with a majestic voice that caused at least one observer to wonder whether Howlin’ Wolf had been reincarnated....

BELMONT AVENUE SOCIAL CLUB at Puszh Studios Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But as the play opens, this world is coming to an end. Women are suing to gain entrance to this exclusive club, and black politicians are beginning to form a voting bloc that can no longer be shrugged off. The ward alderman has just died, and the bosses must find someone to replace him, someone who will shoot pool with the boys, in all the senses that phrase suggests....

Tribune’s Contempt of Court When kids get into trouble, their names are suppressed in juvenile court proceedings; often there are other ways to find out who they are, but generally the media allow a minor his anonymity. Out at York High, each paper made its own decision. The Sun-Times, for example, didn’t print the boy’s name. The Tribune did. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The boy’s name appeared in the next morning’s editions....

Los Angeles’s unlikely answer to the ska revival of the late 70s was the Untouchables, one of those multiracial, multicultural roots-rock-ska-rap-reggae ensembles that turn your average dance club into a seething mass of bodies. For a while the group flirted with serious stardom–videos on MTV and whatnot–but never quite put themselves over in the U.S., though England, ironically, has been quite receptive. The Untouchables’ new record is Agent 00 Soul, which must be pronounced “double-O soul....

The weather must cool before salmon leave Lake Michigan to die. In the lingering warmth of late September they lie in wait off Ludington State Park, and fishermen in chest-high waders have to walk out to meet them. Here’s a scene you might see along the Atlantic coast when the bluefish are running–the long, graceful rods, the two-handed casts into the surf, the slow walk back to dry sand where the rod is set into a holder to wait, arched, taut, for a strike hundreds of feet away....

DER ROSENKAVALIER Octavian and the field marshal’s wife (the Marschallin) are having a passionate affair, although he is 17, she in her early 30s. He’s utterly infatuated with her, but she predicts that she will be replaced in his affections by a younger woman. By the final curtain, not only has the Marschallin’s prophecy come true all too soon; but she has come that much closer to realizing the unavoidable reality she most fears–that of her own mortality....

The paint on the trim outside Jackson Park Hospital, located at the corner of Stony Island and 75th Street, is peeling, and its brick exterior badly needs tuck-pointing. The front lobby is a little dingy, certainly in need of renovation. But the shabby building is the least of the problems this 75-year-old south-side hospital has. The neighborhoods closest to Jackson Park Hospital–Chatham, South Shore–are flourishing middle- and working-class communities. But there are pockets of poverty nearby, and many patients come from the poorer communities to the south and west....