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HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE A little over a decade ago in an English film magazine I made a rather foolish prediction: “Perhaps by the 90s a sufficient time gap will have elapsed to allow [American] filmmakers to approach the subject of Vietnam in a more detached, balanced, and analytical manner.” Cockeyed optimist that I was, I reasoned that some historical distance would allow certain blank spots in our knowledge and understanding of Vietnam to be filled–not doused in amber and framed in gold while remaining blank spots....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Evans is quoted as saying that the Army’s shortages of supplies “are so severe that the Army may not be able to sustain an operation into Kuwait for more than two weeks.” Yet in the same paragraph, Mr. Miner writes that Mr. Evans has not written about the “sustainability” problem because “too much of his evidence is impressionistic....

Hotshot hairdresser Dixon Tabla holds a brown nude female figurine made of Indonesian hibiscus wood and turns it in every direction. He is demonstrating that because the arms and legs are spread wide apart–and just at the right angles–the sculpture can be put down on a table in any position and still stand securely. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tabla and Law and scores of other people are standing in the Carey South hair salon on East Oak Street, which has been transformed temporarily from a trendy salon–chic black glass counters, stark white walls, bare wooden-plank floors, and floor-to-ceiling picture windows overlooking the street’s cool boutiques–to a trendy art gallery....

CHICAGO REPERTORY DANCE ENSEMBLE Lar Lubovitch’s Big Shoulders, created for CRDE in 1984, was the only piece not choreographed by a member. It remains a vibrant, athletic, friendly celebration of Chicago’s architecture and of the men and women who struggled to build the city. Lubovitch gives this struggle wit and whimsicality: his cast of 12 speedily and entertainingly alternates between stints as construction workers, crawling in and out of tight spots, as steel girders being put into place, and as the bricks and mortar that go into arches and basements and around windows....

I don’t often get worked up about a CSO program, but then it’s a rare thing for the orchestra to be performing something as adventurous and deliciously ludicrous as the Ives Fourth Symphony. It requires no less than two conductors, a full-scale symphony orchestra, a chorus, a brass band, three pianos (including one that’s been detuned a quarter tone), a celesta, an organ, timpani, Indian drums, gongs, a glockenspiel, a Theremin (an early synthesizer), and a separate celestial choir of five violins and two harps....

You have to look harder than you did in the 40s–or the 60s, or the 80s, for that matter–but you can still find some pretty good big bands in this country. So why look overseas, in particular to France, one of the few European nations that doesn’t have a star-studded, state-supported radio jazz orchestra? Well, mainly because that’s where Claude Bolling is. The popular pianist, composer, and arranger has had a string of successes with his best-selling classical-jazz works (Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, for Cello and Jazz Piano Trio, etc) that has earned him the chance to indulge his weakness for the American jazz orchestras of the 40s and 50s....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I want to thank the Reader and writer John Conroy for bringing the work of the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Victims of Torture to the attention of the public [August 5]. It is much too easy for Americans, relatively safe from state-sponsored terrorism, to avoid thinking about the horrors inflicted on other human beings by their governments....

Lucky Peterson, the multi-instrumentalist prodigy who appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show before he was six, has stirred up quite a storm in recent years. He combines a fiery enfant terrible urgency with audacious technical flash, sometimes overwhelming the material with the force of his personality. But Peterson’s crowd-pleasing antics, as much as they grate on the nerves of curmudgeons like myself, have roots as old as the music: even Charlie Patton, one of the progenitors of the Delta style, was criticized for clowning by contemporaries who claimed it was at the expense of his art....

We’ve got lite beer and lite frozen dinners. Now the nuclear power industry wants to give us lite nukes to chill and microwave it all. Opponents say if you step in a ditch once, why step in it again. Robert Pollard, of the Union of Concerned Scientists and coauthor of the book Safety Second, says, “With the discussions of the new nuclear designs, we’re having almost an instant replay of the promises that were made by reactor manufacturers and the federal government in the late 60s and early 70s....

It’s not hard to lose track of someone who’s been sent to prison for 30 years. But we’re back in touch with Frank Teague. Any week now, the highest court in the land will rule, and if things go his way Frank Teague will be back on the streets for the first time since 1977. For the second time in his life he will have litigated his way out from behind bars....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a 1948 graduate of Von Steuben High School, I read with interest and some sentiment your February 7 article on our contemporary rival, Roosevelt High School. However, I must question the references to Von Steuben in the article. As a perhaps naive WASP who grew up in Albany Park (on Monticello, a block and a half north of Lawrence), I would like to know where all those “big houses north of Lawrence” were....

Ingredients of broadcast journalism. WBBM AM’s Donn Pearlman tells his story to the Naperville City Star (July 27): “In 1965, when he worked for $1.25 an hour at a 500-watt station in Lawrence, Kansas…the boss required that he tend a herd of cattle in a field right outside the control room. Right on the program log, next to his broadcast duties, were notes to ‘water cattle.’ ‘Now I’m at a 50,000-watt station,’ Pearlman says....

THE JUNGLE BOOK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like Never-Never Land, the island created by Kipling contemporary James Barrie for his hero Peter Pan, the jungle world Mowgli must leave behind is a magic place–beautiful and terrible, filled with love and friendship and excitement and awful violence, governed by elaborate codes of honor, and populated by scary-wonderful friends and enemies. It is the eventual separation from these companions–animals all (and what child wouldn’t prefer talking panthers and wolves and bears and monkeys to mere people for playmates?...

When he was sentenced to death for the murder of an Uptown boy prostitute, police and prosecutors thought they had brought an end to a long series of gruesome homosexual murders. But the killing hasn’t stopped, and now Eyler is returning to court with a s In a Rogers Park alley on August 21, 1984, Joe Balla, a building janitor, made a horrible discovery. Balla, a native of Hungary, arrived at his building at 6 AM intending to take the garbage out to the alley in time for the usual Tuesday morning pickup....

Spring is a time of healing and rejuvenation, and for many of us baseball is its most soothing balm. Walking past Wrigley Field in the dead of winter can remind us that summer is inevitable, but too often the thought is lost because we’re hustling past the park looking at our feet; for the moment, Wrigley becomes nothing but a giant wind shield. Spring training, arriving just as a few days are giving us a glimpse of the warming to come, involves us not only as a symbol of spring, but also as a prod to reawaken long-dormant thought processes we fear we might have lost....

Two years ago, during his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Paul Simon repeatedly needled his conservative party mates with the quip “I’m glad there’s a Republican Party, but one Republican Party is enough.” Meanwhile Edgar, the Republican, wants to extend the temporary 1989 income tax surcharge in order to fund education adequately, especially in the state’s poorer school districts. There is one race in which the Democrat and Republican are running true to form: the Senate contest between incumbent Paul Simon and Rockford-area congresswoman Lynn Martin....

Who’s Responsible for Illinois Magazine? The other day we uncovered a specialist in a kind of journalism we’d never heard of. The whole project took about a year. Reynolds prepped for it by taking a crash reading course in the state, which ranged all the way to The Truly Disadvantaged by sociologist William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago. “Although I grew up in Moline, I wasn’t necessarily familiar with the rest of the state,” she said....

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE If these two choreographers were just formalists, we wouldn’t care so much about them. But both work from a personal vision that gives their dances an emotional charge. Ballet Imperial is informed not only by Balanchine’s nostalgia for a particular time and place–Saint Petersburg in the era of Petipa–but also by a general longing for a safe and ordered world. This dance rests firmly on its solid 19th-century score, Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, even as it exploits the music’s occasional sparse, anxious, and modern-sounding piano solos....

Friday 18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tensions in the Middle East continue to dominate the late night newscasts (not to mention our letters page), but better debate than silence. The current crisis will get another airing when Amira Dotan, the first female general in the Israeli armed forces, and Dr. Mariam Mar’i, a leading Palestinian Israeli scholar, take a look at problems in their homeland....

Friday 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Essex Hemphill, the editor of Brother to Brother, and Alison Bechdel, creator of Dykes to Watch Out For, are the special guests at a reception and auction for the Gerber/Hart Gay and Lesbian Library and Archives tonight at 1800 N. Clybourn. The library recently moved to new digs at 3352 N. Paulina, where it’s home to more than 4,000 titles and lots more periodicals, videos, and other reference materials....