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This slash-and-burn documentary is a Sunbelt grotesque: it’s the unrelievedly saddening story of James Vance, a teen in Reno, Nevada, who shot himself in the face with a shotgun shortly after his best friend did the same. Vance’s fundamentalist family later argued in court that his attempted suicide (his friend’s was successful) was inspired by subliminal messages in the music of British heavy-metal band Judas Priest. Director David Van Taylor pulls off a neat hat trick, gaining the confidence of Vance and his family, the rock band, and a trio of local losers to create, scene by scene, a despairing mosaic of alcoholism, drug use, and violence–and that’s just Vance’s God-fearing parents....

The man driving the red Honda Accord was near McHenry when he saw a police officer directing him off the road. Some cars were waiting in front of him–something clearly was going on–but nothing immediately told the man what. One of these is Dell-Mar. The outfit is owned by Delmar Davis, a slender dark-haired man who represents the fifth generation of his family to make house moving a profession. Dell is only 27 years old, yet he’s been soaking up the trade since he was a boy–and he demonstrates skills, both with people and with machinery, that far exceed his years....

Apart from offering what is likely the best stretch of the late, great Charles Ludlam (of New York’s Ridiculous Theater) on film, Mark Rappaport’s dense and fascinating 1980 independent feature–a tragicomic melodrama designed to stick in the throat (and brain)–surely qualifies as one of the wildest and wittiest American movies of the decade. The structure is basically confrontational: gay and/or straight couples, twins and/or lovers, crooks and/or romantic heroes, doppelgangers all, try to ridicule one another out of existence, with enough deadpan bitchy dialogue to choke a horse, and a plot derived equally from The Maltese Falcon and Proust’s Albertine disparue....

INFUSORIA Whole sections could have been slashed from this play with no damage to the story. Why, for example, do we have to sit through a whole scene in which a couple of construction workers (played rather well by Gregg Mierow and Gordon Gillespie) do nothing but try to gross each other out with increasingly graphic stories about accidents? The fact that they are working on the site where Stockmann claims to have discovered “superconcentrated mutagens and carcinogens” is a poor excuse for such an aimless, time-consuming scene....

Thankfully, the first commercial feature about AIDS doesn’t follow the obscene Reagan-Bush approach–saving all its tears for children, with the unmistakable implication that other AIDS victims don’t count. It follows a group of adult friends and acquaintances, including a few who work for television, who spend their vacations on Fire Island and who are all struck directly or indirectly by AIDS. Though it contains some useful information, this is not really a preachy film–it is simply a very human and compassionate one about a tragedy that affects us all....

It’s hard enough being one of the hundreds of bands trying to reach the record-buying public these days. More and more, battling for music-television exposure, a slot on corporate rock radio’s playlists, and a slice of a label’s recession-squeezed promotional budget amounts to a musical Darwinism in which “fittest” too often means “easy to market.” So the capacity crowd that greeted Pere Ubu at their recent Cabaret Metro appearance represented a small victory for one band that attempted to change the rules of the music promotion game, just as the impassioned performance the band gave that night proved the worth of their rule-breaking music....

For the last two years I’ve indulged every other week in a shoeshine at the barbershop in the lobby of the skyscraper where I work downtown. Walking in I say hello to Rio, the shoeshine man. “Need a shine?” he asks softly, his form thin and bent, face drowsy-looking, smoking a cigarette. The shine is thoroughly relaxing. It’s an inexpensive luxury of sorts, handily justified as prudent shoe maintenance. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE JOFFREY BALLET Robert Joffrey’s death from renal and respiratory failure in New York during his company’s Chicago season saddened many. Only 58, he trained many fine dancers, created a strong and entirely unique ballet company, maintained the Joffrey Ballet for more than 30 years, actively encouraged many young choreographers and dance scholars, and entertained countless Americans in regular seasons in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D....

Is there some rumor about George Bush’s alleged marital infidelities that I’m supposed to know about but don’t? I keep seeing these veiled references in places like Newsweek’s Conventional Wisdom Watch, but no details. Please, help me get hip. Half the time I don’t even get Doonesbury these days. –Elizabeth A. Clarke, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know the feeling. If you’re not wired into the media gossipnet (and even I take a week or two off occasionally just to detox), getting through the trendier magazines is like trying to read code....

I like Karl Wallinger for a couple of reasons. One is that he can begin a song with the line “I got an extra glimpse of the truth today” and still rescue it from almost certain doom. Another is that he seems to think “Ain’t Gonna Come Till I’m Ready” is a protest song. But most of all I like him because I play the new World Party album all the time....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Sheehan’s article regarding certain beliefs about Christ’s message, knowledge of the Trinity and plans for his church are very interesting [April 21]. It is a wonder indeed that such a veritable scholar such as Mr. Sheehan thinks himself to be that he completed (in his own words) ten years of Catholic seminary training without ever reading some of the very earliest writers of the Christian era....

Last October I took a tour of the Hanford Site with a busload of graduate students. Our guide was Steve Buckingham, a retiree who had worked for about 40 years at Hanford–where the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Department of Energy, produced plutonium for use in nuclear weapons until 1988. He’d read War and Peace on the long company bus rides to and from work. Now he worked as a part-time tour guide, supplementing his income and, as he saw it, spreading the gospel that nuclear energy is a good thing....

Friday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The disabled community has seen three big political victories recently: the passage of the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, the approval of Chicago’s human-rights ordinance, and the recent appointment of Larry Gorsky as a special assistant for disability issues to Mayor Daley. Tonight the mayor, Senators Paul Simon and Bob Dole, U.S. Representative Cardiss Collins, and Governor Jim Thompson will be thanked for their work on disabled issues–and also hear what still needs to be done–at the 10th-anniversary benefit dinner for Access Living, a resource and advocacy center for the disabled....

CLOUD 9 The first act sketches an archetypal English family of 1880 living in Africa. Clive, the head of the house, represents the worst of the Victorian paterfamilias: pompous, abusive, and chauvinistic, even while harboring a hypocritical lust for the forthright and independent Widow Saunders, who represents the best of the Victorian “New Woman.” Clive’s wife, Betty, represents (none of these characters can be said to “portray” anything resembling an individualized human being) the worst of the Victorian matron: sheltered, dependent, and supplicating, though secretly enamored of her husband’s best friend, Harry....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The overbearing cheekiness of such questions as those makes one wonder if they aren’t intended as satire. Jarrett writes for a newspaper in a city of 1 1/4 million or more African Americans (a majority over whites). It is estimated that more than half of the Sun-Times bought are by Blacks. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans read it (and Jarrett)....

Halsted is just visible from my bicycle westbound on Adams. Three gray polyps–heads?–rise from the backboard of a bus-stop bench. Seen up close, they belong to three unshaven guys, lost in their work. They plunge dirty hands deep inside an open cardboard box, the size of two milk crates, that rests on slats between them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Following each examination, the inspector unself-consciously chucks the chicken onto Halsted Street....

IN CHEAP SHOES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Cheap Shoes begins normally enough. Detective Ray enters wearing the standard-issue hat, trench coat, and dangling cigarette of a gumshoe. He walks like Bogart into Timmy’s butcher shop and then, turning to the audience, begins to narrate the story, in the tradition of all detective-movie parodies. He’s obsessed with a woman named Mindy, and he doesn’t mind telling us so....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upon occasion I do take exception to one of your in-depth cover stories written either about a current topic or a chosen individual. That is the American way, that I can disagree. Such was the case in the short article in Section Two of the April 19, 1991, issue under the Culture Club title “Life in the Laney Lane” written by Lewis Lazare....

MASTER CLASS Set in a Kremlin anteroom in January of 1948, Master Class hypothesizes a confrontation between the mass murderer Stalin and the Soviet Union’s most illustrious composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. In Patrick O’Gara’s absorbing staging, a Chicago premiere by Wild Life Theatre Company, Master Class offers a nightmare look at a megalomaniac and the geniuses he endangers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The occasion is the notorious 1948 conference of the Soviet Musicians’ Union (a guild made up of court composers fearful for their lives and freedom)....

Jim Jarmusch’s fourth feature gives us three separate stories occurring over the same day in a sleazy section of Memphis: “Far From Yokohama,” about the visit of a young Japanese couple (Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase) to the shrines of their demigods, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins respectively; “A Ghost,” about an Italian woman (Nicoletta Braschi) whose husband has just died on their honeymoon, who shares a hotel room with an American woman (Elizabeth Bracco) who has just left her English boyfriend, and who glimpses the ghost of Elvis himself; and “Lost in Space,” about the grief of the English boyfriend (Joe Strummer) alluded to in part two, who hangs out with two buddies (Rick Aviles and Steve Buscemi) and shoots a clerk in a liquor store....